Back in the writing saddle, plus some upcoming writing competitions

I've spent the last month and a half clearing out my late Uncle's apartment and taking care of loose ends brought on by his death.  There's still a few things left to do (plus I'm still dealing with my Dad's estate), but after a period of feeling like my life had been taken over, I'm trying to get back into somewhat of a normal routine.  And that means getting back to writing.

It feels like forever that I've done any significant writing.  I did pull out the White Collar spec from last year and got an unexpected visit from the Reality Fairy.  The script starts out fine, then heads non-stop for the toilet as it goes on.  This actually makes sense, since I wrote it start to finish (usually I'm all over the place before tying everything together) which means that the beginning and middle of the script got a lot more rewriting than the latter part of it.  This happened because I was desperate to get it into the Screenwriting Expo competition last year and just made it by the skin of my teeth.  At the time I was just happy to get it done, but in looking it over with fresh eyes, I can see it clearly wasn't ready to go out.  So rewriting that baby is first up on my writing to-do list so it can be my entry for TV writing competitions this year.  Which reminds me, the next deadline for the semi-annual Scriptapalooza TV Competition is 4/16/12.  Get on it.

Some upcoming competitions from Writers Digest include their Self-Published Book Awards (deadline 4/20/12) and Annual Writing Competition (deadline 5/1/12), which includes categories for scripts, short stories and magazine articles.

Also, it looks the Industry Insider Screenwriting Contest should be releasing their next logline any day now.

The folks at Scripped.com have come up with an interesting new contest:

Write a short (ten pages or less) one-person STAGE PLAY that tells the story of an artist.  It could be a day-in-the-life, a truncated history, or a particular event that gives us a window into the artist's world, anything.  The artist character could be based on a real-life artist or could be completely original …or even auto-biographical if you think you are interesting enough. This play can be classically styled or it could be utterly abstract and stream-of-consciousness -- style is entirely up to you.

More details here.  Deadline is 2/29/12 and winner scores $250.  Get on it.