Bragging Rights!

I’ve been quite busy since my last post, working on grants for several projects. It was a steep learning curve, a lot of brain gymnastics including Excel, which I’d never used before. And while all of this was happening, I was cheering on the screenplays I’d entered into various competitions. Great news - my feature Goodbye For Now - came in second in the Comox Valley International Film Festival! My very first short script is also a finalist “somewhere,” to be divulged at a later date. That means that in one year and one day, my screenplays have, in total, earned eight laurels, five of them as finalists. Not a bad year! All I need now are producers!

Goodbye For Now has a long, unique history to it, inspired by a trip to the old quarantine station on Grosse-Isle, Quebec. I first wrote it as a novel - a really bad one! Then I teased out the ghost story portion which was published in a Canadian anthology as "The Banshee of Cholera Bay." I cut a spoken word demo of it, thick Irish accent and all. I even wove in parts of a few poems I wrote over the years, one of them while helping with my mom's palliative care. This screenplay is a lesson in not giving up and the power of re-visioning and revisions. Twenty years of tweaking! With other projects in between, of course.

Don’t ever give up on story ideas that are asking you to write and rewrite them!

Ultreia! - Forward together.