Why am I interested in this fellowship and what do you hope to gain from it? (1 page maximum)

When I was was young I got in trouble a lot. In kindergarten I was sent to the principles office for telling tall tales and climbing filing cabinets. My grades were slipping, especially in reading and writing. At age seven, my parents took me to me to see a psychologist for an evaluation. Why couldn't I just focus and complete my work like every other kid? According to the report, I simply couldn't focus on work until I finished telling my stories. Still, school and parents, as always, applied pressures to normalize, wanting me to fit into a nice neat box. I never received a lot of encouragement in pursuit of my passion and it can be hard for me to believe in myself. I never had examples or mentors close by of how to succeed on this path, and so I've worked a lot of regular jobs, and I get by... but, I won't be happy until I tell my story and I want to tell it well, via film and science fiction, the best medium for empathetic connection and inspiration of our day.

I love history, science fiction, adventure, and entrepreneurship and I want to tell genre-fusing stories that wrap these passions together to awe and inspire. I want to transport audiences to other worlds, alternate realities, social constructs, and different conceptions of consciousness. I want to build a beautiful history, based on real histories, woven with riotous adventure and mind boggling invention. I want to draw you in, make you care, and take you on a rollercoaster of intrigue and emotion. More than anything else, however, I want to express myself, and to do it skillfully and diligently. To do this, I need to develop my skillset.

Storytelling is my greatest ambition. Over the past few years, as I jumped from school to school and job to job, I developed a science fiction timeline in which I seek to set my stories: historical stories, present day tales, and far future epics. This spring I began to devote time to writing the script I now submit. During this writing push it became clear to me how much I have to learn about screenwriting and storytelling in order to achieve the level of quality I yearn to produce, and to feel proud of my work. In submitting to the Scriptapalooza Fellowship, I hope to gain valuable feedback, and the chance for invaluable mentorship, networking, and a world class seminar. If I am selected as a recipient, I will work hard to maximize on the opportunity and develop the skills I need to express myself.