My 10-minute play “A Point of Honor” has officially been named one of 10 winners in the Lakeshore Players Theatre‘s 8th Annual contest! It and the other winners will be fully-staged at their festival in June at their theatre in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. I’ll even get a small royalty for each performance, which will just about pay for the coffee I drank writing it. 🙂
I know that it may induce cognitive dissonance in some readers to see me excited about a contest for 10-minute plays in Minnesota when I’m out here chasing (and occasionally grazing my fingertips upon) Hollywood success. But I think I’ve said before that one of the dangers of Hollywood is that you can starve yourself to death out here doing all the networking and self-salesmanship that it can take to get noticed. None of that stuff provides any direct satisfaction in answer to the actual act of WRITING something, and I live for getting work in front of a reader or an audience and feeling like I got something like the reaction for which I was aiming. That’s what will now happen with “A Point of Honor”.
And a little approbation from any corner isn’t a bad thing no matter how successful you are. My name means nothing to that theater in Minnesota. My script was just another in a pile of over 350, and when they winnowed that pile down to 10, mine was one of those still standing, purely on the strength of the work. I think part of the nature of the self-criticism I have found necessary to keep improving myself as a writer is that I never take it for granted that I could win a contest like this with any old script I could bang out. Luck is a huge factor. So is the possibility of being blind to a bad idea – no matter how well I write a bad idea, it probably won’t be achieving success like this.
It’s highly-unlikely I’ll be in Minnesota for the Festival, but they’ll send photos and programs and other evidence. I have a friend living nearby in the Twin Cities, and I’m hoping she’ll go and check it out.
And now I get to decide where to go next…