Hey! I’m that guy trying to sell my latest screenplay, publish it as a novel or die trying.

In DIE TRYING, you will get an unvarnished look at a bitterly honest writer struggling to make it. No name-dropping or Hollywood phoniness. Just the facts ma’am on what the media landscape really is like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we document the fresh-out-of-the-box marketing of my just-completed sci-fi action script Going Perm.

Writers aren’t supposed to lust for the instant gratification thing, right?

You’re a screenwriter and get blessed with an idea. Then you have to gestate that into story beats on note cards, distil it into an outline, and further distil it into a messy first draft.

From there, you have multiple drafts until you polish the gem into something that can go to market. You have to distill that work of between 90,000 and 125,000 words into a one-sentence logline or heat-seeking summary of your screenplay.

That’s a lengthy distillation process worthy of a fine single-malt Scotch. A lot of work, right? 

They tell you to put butt in chair and WORK. Toil word after word, day after day, rolling the boulder up the hill.

In the film The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg as cocky Mark Zuckerberg tells his CFO, Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, that things are moving quickly for the young start-up. The reluctant Harvard Man needs to join Zuck on the Dirty Left Coast. Half a million dollars in venture capital from Peter Thiel are within reach. One million Facebook users on the horizon.

Things are rolling…

Now that I’ve written my script, I foolishly expect a Facebook valuation and instant gratification. This contradicts the labor of love and time that the whole blessed arc rests on.

I paid Roadmap Writers to market the script.  The CEO had positive feedback. He sent emails to industry professionals. We got a request from an action movie producer.

This morning, I woke to an email that the producer had passed. I do have other marketing options for my sci-fi actioner Going Perm.

Here is the logline:

I also submitted the script to The Blacklist. My first score was a 6. The reader felt the story was “an intriguing sci-fi thriller” but could benefit from more exposition like “onscreen text at the beginning, such as in ‘Blade Runner.’”

Wrote another draft and resubmitted.

My second score was a 7. This reader felt the story “impresses with its original and unpredictable world-building,” but that the protagonist was not inscrutably mysterious in the noir tradition, but “simply underdeveloped” on the page.

If you get an 8, The Blacklist will host your screenplay on its site for free and let industry professionals know it has merit.

This past week, I did a rewrite with their notes in mind. I resubmitted for a third time.

I wait.

After nine months of pregnancy, do you deliver the baby?

Do you expect the next day to jump off the hospital bed and walk your daughter down the aisle on her wedding day?

Hell no.

You wait and live. Day by day. Stacking up 24-hour installments until…

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