So my screenplay of "Simone's Ghosts," based upon my novel of the same name, made the Quarter Finals of the Los Angeles International Screenplay contest. I was overjoyed. Especially in view of the fact that there were over 2500 entries.  But a week later I learned that I did not make the Semi Finals.  Here is the notice I received:

​Dear Roberta, 
This contest season has been full of terrific writers with bright futures. You are among those promising stars of the Spring 2018 Competition. After closely reviewing all Quarter Finalists, however, your script didn't make the Semi Finals. Don't be discouraged; your script placed in the top 4-8% of all screenplays entered in the 2018 Spring Awards. That in itself is a tremendous accomplishment that speaks to your talent and hard work. Everyone on the Senior Judging Panel started where you are today.  For some of them, it took more than a decade before their efforts began to pay off. Of course, the industry is changing rapidly. There are now many more avenues to success and more platforms for you to see your work produced.  
As a Quarter Finalist, you should be encouraged. You clearly have skills to succeed, and we hope you'll continue learning, writing, and re-writing.  As you know, the only sure path to failure is to stop trying! Please stay in touch and let us know how your writing career is going. We hope to see much more of you in the future.
With every best wish for your screenwriting success!

Sincerely,
The Senior Judging Panel at The Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards


Not bad for a rejection letter, right?

First off, the author of this book can write anything. He's goooood! Since this is an epistolary novel, the reader experiences all kinds of writing  (stage play, screenplay, screenplay treatment, newspaper article, interview). The stage play written by the character Charlene is a tight little ten minute one-act that is great. Loved it. The treatment of "Blood Songs" is brilliant. I was impressed. But, for me, the middle of this novel got repetitive and tedious. I learned I probably won't read another epistolary novel. And I'm starting to question how much I love horror. I am not into blood and guts. The character I found myself caring about the most was Mark Tanner. The things that happened to him are sad, but are also what make for a good horror story. If I hadn't read a couple of non-fiction books about spirits before this, the idea that a demon could be conjured would have been nothing but a fairy tale in my mind. Now, I wonder. And the fact that the lights in my house have been acting up since reading this book isn't exactly freaking me out, but it's making me think I should just do some light reading for now. Yes. I think that is a very good idea.

This book was very difficult to read at first because it is like a textbook in many ways.  But it still held my interest and when it reached areas of history I was more familiar with, it got easier for me. Fascinating, even. Briefly, here is how the author summarizes his book: "spirit contact, for centuries, was widely taken at face value as communication with discarnate intelligences inhabiting a nonmaterial reality. With the advent of Victorian materialism, however, this view of the phenomenon began to be questioned and alternative ideas put forward. Although some apparent spirit manifestations were shown to be fraudulent, fraud clearly could not account for them all and, increasingly, psychological explanations began to be advanced. Initially these were confined to ideas like unconscious fabrication, self-deception, or pathological hallucination, but proved unsatisfactory in accounting for certain aspects of the phenomena..."

I thought this book would delve into how the spirit world affected world history. And it touched on that, but only a little it seemed to me. It was really more a history of mankind's view of spirits and how, at different times in history, mankind interacted with spirits according to belief at the time. On a personal level, I now know I'm not weird for my interest in spirits and ghosts. That interest is as old as mankind. And with all the experimentation by people a lot more patient than I am, I believe there is evidence that spirits do exist. Those who wish to ignore that evidence and write everything off as "fraud," well, they've just reached their Boggle Threshold.