DEADLINE APPROACHING! MIDNIGHT SUNDAY 7/27!

Stormies! Oh, my God, big news. Okay, yes, our final deadline IS indeed 7/27. That’s SUNDAY at midnight. After that, we pull the plug on the website and will not allow any more submissions. (If you’re sending hard copy, it would need to be postmarked by Saturday 7/26.) BUT... No, we’re not announcing some tricky last-minute final extension. That would be really weak, especially since we promised we wouldn’t do that to y’all. Except… we sort of are. Let me explain.

See, this year we partnered with Without a Box. About a third of our submissions so far have come in through Without a Box (which is great for any of you who hate Paypal and wish to pay directly via credit card.) Thing is, Without a Box recently asked us to extend the contest an extra week exclusively for Without a Box entries. In fact this was a condition of our buying additional e-mail advertising blasts through them last week. So we agreed to ONE FINAL WEEK only for WAB submissions. The WAB-only extension runs from this Sunday through midnight the following Sunday (8/3/08).

So... as far as the Writers on the Storm and Coverage Ink sites are concerned, we still have to pull the plug on contest entries 7/27, and that’s it. However, if you’re a WAB member (or sign up this week,) you can still enter through 8/3. Now my apologies if that irritates any of y’all, ‘cause maybe you were scrambling to make the 7/27 deadline, and I understand. However please note that WAB is jacking up the price an additional ten bucks during the WAB extension week! In a nutshell: enter late through WAB, pay more dough.

Okay. That out of the way, It is, as always, my pleasure to announce the Writers on the Storm quarterfinalists to date! Now please everyone read this next sentence, because I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail about this. ***These quarterfinalists represent people who’ve entered Writers on the Storm via submitting their script to Coverage, Ink for coverage. *** They are the ONLY ones who find out before everyone else if they’ve made the quarterfinals or not, because the CI readers rate the scripts and forward the results to us. These represent everyone whose scripts got a ‘consider with reservations’ or better for script, or about the top 10% Jim tells me. If you entered Writers on the Storm via writerstorm.com or Without a Box, you will not find out if you’ve made the quarterfinals until we’ve had read and processed all the submissions, which is going to take a bit. Everyone clear on that?

Okay! Without further ado, here are our Writers on the Storm 2008 Quarterfinalists **so far**:

Heather Upton, Belfast Boys
CA Bennett, Death Valley Dig
Kelly Murry, La Matadora
A.C. Yacobian, Rasta Pasta
Aaron Marshall, The Last Adventure of Martin Finch
Alan Sproles, Lizanne Southgate, Eden Lost
Rich Sheehy, Sliding into Home
Paul Sargia, The Man Who Could Stop Time
Steven Zawacki, Orcadia
Suzanne Darling, Brush With Fame
Dennis Bailey, Pound for Pound
Chris Jopling, Blacklights
Andrew Zeoli & Christian Wagner, Blueballers
Attila Nagy, Gilbert Inboden, Garen Inboden, Enlighten Up
Russ Meyer, Organic Svengali
Vito LaBruno, Last American Guido
Adam Nur, Jetpack
Nisso Cohen, The Source
Mark Eaten & Stacy Dymalski, Center of Fortitude
Art Blum, Back from the Dead
Patrick Nicholas, Edgewater
Michael Coleman Jr., Clone
Dan Williams, Forest Fire!
Lisa Cordova, Remote Stryker
Alexander Valhouli, Louis
CV Herst, The Bardo Realm
Marnie Collins, Silver River
Jerry White, Link
Sam Neil Kesler, Fatal Ambition
Jason Kent, Colossus
Jarran Davis, Newton’s Cradle
Krista Zumbrink, Virgin Marie
James Schannep, A Poem for Silvertown
Odin Shafer, Bury Me in Fire

Whew, that’s 31! And there will be plenty more. I hear there are some awesome scripts in here. But who will win the ten grand? I have no idea! But I can tell you it’s going to be a crazy next couple of weeks. Oh, and one more thing. Most of the scripts listed above are not going to make the top ten. Pause for a moment to let that sink in. Yep, we all want to win. Of course. But as Connor MacLeod might say, there can only be one. So, yeh, there’s going to be a little bit of disappointment out there. There already is from some of the folks on the CI side who got a pass and did not advance (about 300!) The thing is, can you use the feedback we give you, so the NEXT time, you get that consider? Can you do everything you can to give yourself the tools you need to make your script bulletproof, to succeed in Hollywood? Whether it’s taking a class or working with a mentor or going to Screenwriters Network events or joining a writing group or doing the coverage thing? Remember, guys, it’s a journey! One spec sale blows our puny10 grand prize out of the water, and that’s what counts. So give us what you got, Stormies! Off to get a very large coffee and strap myself in for the ride ;)

Portia Jefferson
Writers on the Storm Contest Coordinator
writerstorm@gmail.com

(Uh, Portia... “puny”? –Jim ;)