Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Contest

So at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference in 2023, I sat down at a table with a group of strangers and made up a ridiculous story idea about the Headless Horseman’s son going to kindergarten for a book blurb workshop. We were all in stiches coming up with this idea. It was pun-laden, a sort of horror-comedy-children’s book concept that none of us initially intended to mean anything.

But it stuck with us.

We happened to meet up again at PNWA in 2024, and none of us had been able to stop thinking about the idea. So we decided to get to work. Some things changed. We decided to go for an animated TV show instead of a picture book. Shifted the target audience from kindergarten to middle-grade. Layered in characters and heart, softening some of the comedy as our headless hero became more real to us.

We’ve been working hard on this concept for the last 9 months. And we just submitted out pilot episode script to the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Contest. This is an opportunity to generate buzz about the idea. Even if we don’t win, just making it through the first round is an accomplishment that could put more eyes on our project or sway a producer to take a closer look at our pitch deck.

We won’t know how we fared until around September, which means I’ve got a summer of torturous waiting ahead of me, but we’ll still be busy working on this project. We still need to create our pitch deck (a tool for marketing the concept to potential producers that outlines various components of the plot, characters, and how the story will be told) and work on outlining episodes for the first season. We also plan to work on additional formats for this material, such as writing a series of early chapter books to go with the show.

Besides all of that, I’m still working on finding an agent, publishing my first novel, building and audience through my posts on this website and Substack, submitting short stories to publications, and working on my next novel. So I won’t be twiddling my thumbs while we wait, that’s for sure!