By Karen Y. Stevens

 

Our speaker this month at the Orange County Christian Writer’s Guild, was Penny Leleux, a screenplay writer.

Her story was fascinating because six months before the contest, she had never written a book or a screenplay.  She wanted to help her friend Sylvia Dickey Smith, who is a popular, well-published author.  Leleux’s intention was to take one of Smith’s novels and turn it into a screenplay.

She purchased screenplay-writing software and then came across NYC Midnight, which host contest for different writers.  She won that “heat” in N.Y. and then expanded her pages to submit them to the film festival out of Lake Charles and won!

So, from the day she started working on this and winning the award, was a six-month period which is amazing in this field, or any other field for that matter.

She said the best thing about submitting her work was that she got feedback from the judges and other writers, to find out what she was doing wrong.

She had no idea she would win; she just assumed she could use this as a platform to help her, in her main objective with Smith.  She also got to keep her work after the contest was over, which in a lot of these contest, your work becomes theirs to use as they please.

The Writers Guild was excited to hear about her venture since we are writing a short story to submit in a contest.  It encouraged us and gave us a new outlet, which host contests.

We are off to a very good start in our short story mystery.  We meet the first Tuesday of every month from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., and we hope to see you next month at our new location, which is the City of Orange Neighborhood Facility Community Room, located at 303 N. 8^th Street in Orange.

Please call 409 988-2588 for any questions, or you can email kstevens@gt.rr.com.