No Rest for the Wicked is a Finalist for Stowe Story Labs 2023!

This one is really freaking cool, y’all! Stowe offers a 4-day Narrative Lab in Vermont with networking, legal advice, pitch practice, and more, and I’m in the running for a fellowship. Maven Screen Media supports one female TV writer who writes about female characters to attend. I’m in the top 10 contenders with some very talented company, and I’m so honored to have made it this far into the selection process.

So if you’ve got any spare good vibes this week, why not send them over to VT where they will be selecting the winner soon!

Have any of you attended any of Stowe’s offerings? The writing retreats also sound really cool!

I’ve Created My First Game Design Document: Gryphonmaker

Greetings! I’ve been an avid gamer for a long time, but at the beginning of this year I got really interested in how video games are created. And because I’m me and love to learn, I enrolled in online classes. First, I completed Will Wright’s Masterclass on game design, followed by the Game Design: Art and Concepts specialization through Cal Arts (hosted on Coursera).

Those classes covered a lot of topics, such as narrative design, character creation, world design, and how games invite people to actively participate in the story rather than being passive observers. The final capstone of the specialization culminated in creating an entire Game Design Document (GDD). A GDD is a bit like a cross between TV show bible and a pitch deck. There’s lots of text and visuals that tell people about the mood, comps, characters, world, and story. But a GDD also includes prototypes, such as user interfaces, descriptions of equipment, and schematic representations of the game’s world and structure.

Like many writers, I have a big, juicy list of story ideas that I haven’t gotten around to writing yet. The basic concept for Gryphonmaker came to me at least 5 years ago, and has been bubbling away on a backest of back burners ever since. But when it came to creating a video game concept, it immediately jumped to the front burner.

My technical skills are still far behind my imagination, but I hope you’ll enjoy a little stroll through what I’ve been able to create so far. For instance, I see this is a realistically rendered, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla style experience, but I’m nowhere near that level yet. Coursera also has classes in Unreal Engine and Unity, which are both powerful tools for game creation, so I’ll be moving on to them next.

Without further ado, I give you…

Whatcha think? Does this seem like a game you’d like to play? Got any tips? (And remember, be kind, I’m new at this!)

No Rest for the Wicked is a Semifinalist in the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival!

And just in the nick of time, too. I’ve been feeling a bit down and stalled lately, so this was a great time for some good news.

2023 is going to be a very weird year for me. Our time in Germany is technically over at the end of the month, but we have a grace period where we can stay here for a while and figure out our next steps. So both the Mister and I are applying to things all over the place, both in a new field and both eager to get the ball rolling on our next adventure.

Stay tuned for an exciting audio-drama announcement soon!

Lots Happening in the Past Couple of Months…

I just realized it’s been two months since my last blog post. Whoopsie! I’ve had my ups and downs, some exciting firsts, and competition/fellowship results, both good and bad. In addition to currently sitting in Italy as I write this, a recent highlight is that both Curio and No Rest for the Wicked were named semifinalists (top 55) in the first Stage 32 female-driven screenplay competition! This also bumped both scripts into the top 3% of scripts on Coverfly. Which took the sting out of being rejected from the Circle of Confusion Fellowship.

As for firsts, I wrote my first short. I use WriterDuet for screenwriting, and they did a 48-hour throwdown. Participants get a theme and an object, and then have 48 hours to write a three-page script. For this round, the theme was “now or never” and the object was sunglasses. I made it to the quarterfinals, which felt amazing considering it is the first time I’ve ever attempted to tell a story in so few pages. Unlike all the writing I do for HOOD, this is something I can actually share!

work-in-progress-1Download

I’ve also been trucking along on an as-yet-unnamed audio drama in the World of Hood as a writer, director, and producer. But I’ll go into all that in another post. For now, let me just say that being limited to only sound and no sight in a script is a whole other level of challenge.

And as we’ve hit June once again, it’ll be time soon for another “My Year in Screenwriting” round-up post. So stay tuned!

No Rest for the Wicked is a Semifinalist in the InRoads Fellowship!

Huzzah! My first pilot got itself another placement, Semifinalist in the InRoads Fellowship by Filmmatic. Though I’ve been submitting this one since I started this screenwriting journey in 2020, I’ve continued to tweak it. This included a revision at the end of 2021 where I trimmed out 5 pages and gave it a new ending. Looks like it paid off. I guess it goes to show how true it is that these things aren’t ever really “done” until they find themselves on screen.

And despite going 4 for 4 in its first outings, Curio did not place at all in this one. So that’s another good reminder of how things are all subjective and it really depends on the reader you get any time you submit. Congrats to the winners and I look forward to competing with you again someday.

No Rest for the Wicked is a Quarterfinalist in TSL’s Free Screenplay Competition!

My, it’s been a great week for my female-led pilots. First Curio went 4/4 on placing in competitions on Wednesday, and now my first pilot is also advancing in another competition. Because this TSL competition is free, they had nearly 10,000 submissions, and the quarterfinalist cut is about 1000 scripts, so I’m roughly in the top 10%.

Next week between Apr 14-15 I will get four more results for these two scripts as well as my other pilot Riftmaker. I’d better start getting those queries out…

Curio is a Quarterfinalist in the Screencraft Fellowship Competition!

I’ve got a cascade of competition results coming in during the next 9 days, and I’m off to a great start. This is Curio’s fourth time competing and fourth time reaching at least the quarterfinalist level, so as you can imagine I am walking on sunshine. Last year, No Rest for the Wicked also reached the QF stage of this competition, so fingers crossed I will be able to do even better with this script!

And speaking of No Rest for the Wicked, tomorrow I’ll find out if it advances in The Script Lab’s free screenwriting contest. Wish me luck 🙂

Curio is a Quarterfinalist in the Emerging Screenwriters Genre Competition!

As we head into the second quarter of 2022, I’m happy to announce that my supernatural procedural Curio is a quarterfinalist again. This is its third time competing and its third placement, so I must be doing something right 😉

This is also my third pilot, but the first one that started its life as a pilot rather than a novel that I wrote previously and then adapted. (I had planned to write it as a novel first but hadn’t gotten around to it before I discovered screenwriting.) I think this is probably working in its favor because it has a very recognizable structure, and acts as a more self-contained episode than the pilots for either No Rest for the Wicked or Riftmaker. It’s a lot easier to predict what you’d get from a whole episodic Curio series than the other two, which are decidedly serialized. Good info to file away for the future…

I’ll find out about the semifinals for this one on April 14, and the quarterfinals and top 100s for some other competitions around the same time. Here’s to hoping!

The HOOD Character Videos are now LIVE on YouTube!

OMG OMG OMG OMG!

This has been quite a journey. When I joined the Quivalon team back in May, these “character idents” were just a twinkle in the HOOD creator’s eye. Now, after a Kickstarter campaign, shooting during Covid, and post-production woes, we finally got to release our creations yesterday and launch our YouTube channel. Check them out!

During this part of the overall HOOD enterprise, I wasn’t able to be on set because the dates happened to fall during a long-awaited family vacation. But I was part of the pre- and post-production stages in a big way. I learned so much about casting, video editing, sound design, and music over the past months that I will be able to carry forward with me on this journey to the screen. In 2022, we are going to have another campaign so we can shoot some proof of concept scenes from the pilot and make a real sizzle reel to show possible production partners and investors. So I’ll get to continue my education on set next time!

Welcome to the World of HOOD

In May of 2021, I was fortunate enough to join the Quivalon team to work on a multimedia project called HOOD. It’s a reimagined Robin Hood story with a female lead in an alternate present where climate change has already changed the shape of the world. We’ve been hard at work getting several facets of the project ready to launch in the new year, including a brand new website built by your truly, WorldofHood.com.

In August, we shot a series of character introduction shorts and they will be dropping on January 7. I learned so much working behind-the-scenes on these doing casting, choosing music, and giving notes on the editing process. To get started, we released a trailer for the project to ring in the new year.

Coming up in 2022, I’ll be working in the writers room to write the complete season, be part of a table read recording of the pilot, lend my pen to an episode of a new podcast series, and continue learning so much more!

I hope 2022 has awesome things in store for you too 🙂