Creative Writing News & Deadlines

Spring 2021 Cat’s desk
April 28, 2021

Happy to announce that I’ve won another (#6) Writers of the Future Honorable Mention! This is for my new story “Some Thing” which is a comic Prairie fantasy. WOTF is a wonderful competition and to get an HM means you’re in the top 5% of the entrants. They get entrants from all over the world and the numbers are in the thousands, so it does mean something to a creative writing career in science fiction and fantasy.

I sent the story “Rachel’s Vacation” to the March 31, 2021 deadline for Quarter 2. This is another comic story and involves religion, which may make it a hard sell. I’m still working on “Favrile” but it is turning out to be a novella, sigh.

March 28, 2021 – Just learned that I’ve sold another 2 poems to Polar Borealis Magazine! That’s terrific news and I look forward to seeing the cover of the magazine. Polar Borealis always has a really attractive and interesting cover featuring the work of an SFF artist.

lego space ship
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Also, I am working on my next sci-fi screenplay, called “Dealers” as a working title. My major deadline for this is the Banff Media Festival 2021 so I have to have a decent draft and a good pitch by mid June this year. I’m taking the festival days off work, in order to learn and pitch as much as I can.

The March 31 Second Quarter 2021 deadline for Writers of the Future is also coming up really fast. I have a short story I want to submit for this deadline. I thought it was ‘done’ but then the story was significantly changed after my first reader looked at it, so, I’m trying to finish the updates of the deadline. The story is called “Favrile” at the moment and is a crashed spaceship narrative.

Creative writing deadlines all have to be worked around my busy corporate day job in communications. This creates challenges but also means that I’ve learned a great deal about project management for creative work.

One of the first principles is: make a goal but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t achieve it. Goals are good and valuable as sign posts.

Jessica Fraser Short Films at Standalone Film Festival!

Jessica Fraser short films

Jessica Fraser has films selected for inclusion in the Standalone Film Festival 2021 Los Angeles. They are NOW streaming on uvtcineplex.com and you can vote for her films there! This online festival takes place from Feb 2021 to 31st March 2021. It offers different levels of ticket prices, from $2 to $12.99 USD. There are 500 films in this festival! Enjoy!

You can by your SFFA streaming ticket to watch all the films at this link: https://uvtcineplex.com/subscriptions/

NOTE: We are moving our filmmaker content for Jessica Fraser to a new website soon! More details as that develops. So much is going on in her professional life that she needs her own wordpress site to cover all the showings of Jessica Fraser short films!

Best Film Awards Win!

Jessica R.J. Fraser just won another Laurel for her short film Seashells! She is named as a semi-finalist in the Best Film Awards, Best Director competition out of London, England. We’re very pleased to have her work recognized internationally!

Best Film Awards Jessica Fraser

To view click here: Seashells

To find out about the Best Film Awards, follow @best_film_awards

Jessica’s Films “Still” + “Seashells” in Bright Ideas Film Festival Dec 2020

We’re so EXCITED here because Jessica Fraser’s films “Still” and “Seashells” were part of the Bright Ideas Film Festival! You can now view these two short films on Vimeo for a limited time. You can vote for your favorites of the festival!
They’re rerunning most of the festival this week! Runs from now to Dec 26th, 2020 8 p.m. Pacific.

still – by Jessica fraser

“Still” is Jessica’s stop-motion skateboarding film. She did all of this by herself including music, special effects, direction and writing. Personally, I love what she did with the titles.

“Still” is at 8 minutes & 13 seconds –>

Bright Ideas Film Festival 2020 – Screening 2, Part 2

seashells – by jessica fraser

“Seashells” is Jessica’s West Coast film about friendship. Again, she did it all except act one of the parts! This is a beautiful film.

“Seashells” is at 17 minutes & 30 seconds –>

Bright Ideas Film Festival 2020 – Screening 3, Part 1

voting

BIFF- Audience Choice Vote- Screening 2 – Post Festival

BIFF- Audience Choice Vote- Screening 3 – Post Festival  

Bright Ideas Film Festival was tremendous! Full of young eager filmmakers and their pieces! We watched it Saturday and were very impressed.

Dec 2020 Book Launch – Stellar Evolutions

There is an online book launch for Stellar Evolutions this Monday, December 1, 2020.

It’s available to SF Canada members and others via FaceBook.

I will not post the link here as I’ve seen at least two examples of ‘zoom bombers’ and I don’t want interruptions to the event.

So pleased to be in this book! I congratulate Rhea Rose on the creation of this ‘Best of” volume as well as R. Graeme Cameron for his hard work editing and producing Polar Borealis!

November 2020 Stellar Evolutions

Stellar Evolutions is published and available on Amazon.ca for kindle and is also available as a print book if you like on Amazon.ca. Stellar Evolutions contains two of my poems: A New Day and Law of Love. This anthology features poetry and stories in the areas of science fiction and fantasy.

About Stellar Evolutions

Stellar Evolutions cover

A particularly interesting collection because it features emerging Canadian writers, covers a broad swath of Canadian speculative fiction, and includes as much poetry as prose.” –Robert Runte–Author, editor, critic of Canadian speculative fiction.

Oh, Canada! Welcome to this world-bending collection of speculative writing Canadian style. Between these boreal covers, a compilation of must-read fantastic fiction by trending and diverse authors will take readers to the next level of story discovery.

This gathering showcases stories and poetry by many award-winning, award-nominated, yet diverse authors’ and their best works, selected exclusively from Polar Borealis Magazine, a Canadian speculative fiction publication dedicated to discovering the finest ideas in a large land of divergent narratives. folklore where sleepy felines are purrfectly unpredictable, if not damned.

Fungi Film Festival – Nurse Log

Nurse Log by Jessica Fraser

To be exhibited in the online Fungi Film Festival October 2020.

UPDATE:

#FFF screening: October 23 Jessica’s interview on #NurseLog is tonight!

FFF – More screenings: October 23, 24, 28, 30 2020.

Times vary #filmmakers #fantastic Get your tickets at http://fungifilmfest.com .

Times and dates vary due to worldwide #filmmakers.

I viewed two nights: #1 was plagued by streaming problems but #2 was #fantastic so get your tickets at http://fungifilmfest.com

Jessica’s #interview was moved to this time because it was cancelled due to night #1 streaming service errors.

#fungifilmfest#studentfilm

#fungifilmfest
See the trailer at: Fungi Film Festival

#film #shortfilm #filmmaking #fantastic

The Fungi Film Festival premieres during the peak of mushroom season in the Pacific North West and streams live:

  • Friday, October 16 – 7PM PST (this night provides the audience with the special chance to vote for the winner of the FFF’s Audience Choice Award)
  • Saturday, October 17 – 8PM PST
  • Friday, October 23 – 6PM PST
  • Saturday, October 24 – 10AM PST
  • Wednesday, October 28 – 10AM PST
  • Friday, October 30 – 6PM PST

All screenings contain the same 30+ films (3.5 hours), but each screening date will host a different filmmaker for a live audience Q&A session.

… Jessica’s is called: Nurse Log!

Buy Tickets to Fungi Film Festival 2020

Screenwriting August 2020

Lights, Camera, Paranormal Action! prep for Frontières

The script for “Lights, Camera, Paranormal Action” is available to interested producers now.

My first list consists of the producers I met in late July at Frontieres Film market.

I also added the list of local producers I met in March at the WIFT-V festival during their pitch sessions.

It was wonderful to realize that there are people actively looking for new scripts.

I’ve now sent it to producers who agreed to read it during our meeting.

I loved the experience of meeting the producers and was pleased with the level of interest the script garnered.

More Writer News

  • Two of my poems have been chosen to be in “Stellar Evolution” a ‘best of’ anthology coming out this Autumn/Winter in Canada. Really pleased about that!
  • Also, I won an Honorable Mention in the WOTF Quarter 2 results for my story “Tail Creek”. I’m still hoping to sell that one, now with the ‘win’, maybe I can.
Lights, Camera, paranormal Action image of Cat girczyc screenwriter card
My new card

Frontières Market Pitch

Lights, Camera, Paranormal Action! prep for Frontières

The week before Frontières and couple of great things happened to Lights, Camera, Paranormal Action!

  1. I got this wonderful banner via the tremendous and generous talents of Kelman Design and Glen Schroeder working on the “Movie Poster” for me. At Frontières, I’ll show a full page movie poster with cool backgrounds and more visual representation of the story in it. It’s thanks to the wonderful WIFT program that this is happening and I’m very pleased.
  2. The Dark Side winners, myself included, had a 2 hour pitch consultation from Jan Miller. It was a great experience and I heard wise advice, not just for my pitch and project but for all four of us. I must now complete my one-pager for the festival and submit that by Wednesday next week. There are so many ways to pitch and it just isn’t something I’ve done a lot. All of my sales were done to people I already knew, who asked for written story ideas. But that was in television, and I was working on shows that were looking for stories. This is my movie and it is looking for a producer.
  3. At Frontières my pitch is in the Created by Women Pitch Session, presented by Telefilm Canada with Women in Film + Television Vancouver. I’m so pleased to be able to showcase my first feature project along with the other 3 up-and-coming female screenwriters from across Canada. This year we are doing it via Zoom. Previously, the festival was in person and it would have been daunting to go up on a big stage to present my story. However, I also have some trepidation about delivering on Zoom. We have many questions yet and next week will be important for our preparations. The pitch itself can only be five minutes, then they give us a Question & Answer period with the panel of experts. Plus, while the Market is going on, we can have meetings with producers, distributors, sales agents, and other interesting people, with a view to pursuing the project.
  4. I feel very lucky this week! I also won an Honorable Mention in a short story contest. See my Bibliography for more info.