vengeance is mine, saith the pen-monkey

To pursue a career as a writer is to walk again and again, face-first, into the swinging fist of rejection.

Like for example the North Carolina Arts Council grant-proposal rejection I got last week. Or the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab rejection I got yesterday. Or my GINSENG script that I just found out didn't advance past the quarterfinals of the Page International Screenwriting Competition (one of the larger contests). 

Let's not talk about all that, though.

Let's talk about how another script of mine, COITUS, did advance in that competition, and is now a semifinalist. Or no... let's talk about how a lot of my reason for wanting COITUS to go on and win the Page contest is mostly just for vengeance against my dear friend and nemesis, Austin-the-Director.

Although I love Austin dearly and am super-grateful for all he's done for me in filmmaking—he not only directed my first produced feature, PINK, but he's also given me great, detailed notes on nearly every screenplay I've ever written—there remains the fact that while on the set of PINK, he publicly derided my COITUS script as "a cheap, B-movie knockoff of ALIENS."*

It is illegal, of course, to kill him. 

So instead, I want my script to win this contest. Then I want to sell it for a million dollars. Then I want James Cameron (Austin's favorite director) to produce it, and I want it to go on to fame, glory, and a place on AFI's Top 100. 

None of this even close to possible, but I still want it to happen because I am a human, and humans are dirtballs. And the reason I am telling you about this now is that I believe that there are only two types of dirtballs: the ones who'll admit it and struggle against their dirtballness, and the ones who won't. 

So this is me... admitting it. 

We'll work on the struggling against it part, later. 

After I've won the Page Contest.

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*Pride demands that I addendum this post with the fact that Austin only read the first draft of COITUS. I doubt he'd be as snarky about the latest.