1/10 How I got my first staff gig.

I participated in the 2006 Disney Writing Fellowship. Halfway through the Fellowship Carton Cuse and Damon Lindelof came by to give a talk. Afterward, they said they’d give us Fellows a shot at a freelance episode of Lost. However..

2/10 ... they did not want to read a spec. They wanted an original pilot. Cut to every Disney Fellow hunkered down at their desk writing their asses off. I wrote a pilot called Bloodlines about an interspecies family of vampires hiding in plain sight in a small Christian town.

3/10 I printed that shizz, walked down to the Lost offices and hand-delivered that sucker. Then I waited…

They never called. Oh, well. I still had a pretty good spec pilot on my hands. The Fellowship ended and I was out of a job. This was January 2007.

4/10 But, by now I had a manager and an agent. I was naive and thought that was good enough to land me a staff job. I was optimistic. Cut to March. My wife is getting nervous because I had not worked in 3 months, but I assured her it would be fine.

5/10 I have an agent and a manager. Besides, staffing season had not really started yet. And so, I kept working on my next spec. It was a Criminal Minds about a serial killer who would stage his murders to look like Salvador Dali paintings.

6/10 As I was working on my spec, my flip-phone rings. It was someone from Shondaland. They had read my Bloodlines pilot and wanted to meet. I almost fell out of my chair. I then called my manager and agent. They got to work making calls. I got to work watching Grey’s Anatomy.

7/10 I was so nervous for the meeting. My head was crammed with Meredith, McDreamy, George, etc. But, we never talked about the show. We talked about writing and the process of writing. And how we deal with rejection.

8/10 The following week I was offered a staff writer position on the Grey’s spin-off, Private Practice. I later found out that someone at the Disney Fellowship had forwarded my Bloodlines script to Shondaland.

9/10 I don’t know why they thought the sample was appropriate or why anyone over there would like it. But they did.

10/10 I often wonder where I would be today if they had not sent over my pilot. Or if the Lost guys had not lit a fire under me. The only reason I wrote Bloodlines was to get that freelance.

If all it takes is that one script, that one was mine. You have yours. Believe it.