Back in January, I sent out a script to a place called The Scriptwriting Network.  They offer a thing called the Hollywood Outreach Program every couple of months which, for a fee, will evaluate a script.  The short of it is, the "winners"-- if there are any-- will be passed on to production companies for possible optioning.

I sent in a script called Charlatan which is based on my own not-published novel from about a decade ago.  I have written and re-written this script about five or six times, showed it to a dozen people for critiques, and trimmed it down by a good fifteen pages.  The author of the first professional "coverage" of the script liked it enough to give it a "consider" status, and had the second reader also given it a "consider" or "recommend" status it would have gone to the next round, and three more readers, and then it could have made it to the optioning process.  Possibly.  But the second reader "passed" on it, which wasn't unexpected.

More importantly, both of them absolutely savaged the script.  Again, this is something I worked on a lot and got a fair number of other people who know more about screenwriting than I do to help.  It was the best I could do.  And this is what's horrible about being a writer, whether very successful or moderately successful or not even a little bit successful: your best work is often not enough.  From an ego perspective, that's not something that's at all easy to deal with.

And I don't disagree with a single thing they said.  Reading the coverage was a bit like being a two-dimensional person taught to look "up" for the first time.  I understand everything they had to say, and I know what I need to do to fix the script, and that's good.  I got my money's worth.  And I can rewrite it and resubmit it at a discounted price, once I have made changes.  More, all of the critiques (a surprise third one turned up) urged me to do this.

So I'd love to say the reason I haven't updated this blog for the past two weeks is that I've been working on that rewrite.  Except I haven't.  No, I've been sitting around not writing anything whatsoever.  Because no matter how good those critiques were and how encouraging it was to see a Hollywood producer beg me (in writing) to take another swing at it, I still saw the things I took for granted-- that my dialogue is good, for instances-- take a real beating.  And that sent me reeling a little.  Anyway, I have started the rewrite, and I may be back to blogging semi-regularly again.

We'll see.