Got a soft pass from a major production company after six weeks of waiting. Here's what I'm doing instead of waiting for the next one.

I wrote a half-hour family sci-fi comedy pilot called Maiden USA. A teenage girl raised off-world as a warrior must reluctantly enter a beauty pageant and become a brand ambassador for aggressively patriotic Made in USA products to stop an alien invasion. Think Miss Congeniality meets War of the Worlds.

My cousin had a connection that got it to a very established production company, the kind that's worked with Spielberg and has produced movies most people have seen. They asked for character profiles and additional world info before doing a formal read with their team. Putting that material together is actually what got me started writing it all up properly, which became the seed for what's now a small Substack archive.

It took about six weeks to hear back. The feedback itself was thoughtful, some of it I'm taking seriously, but honestly, this might just be too big a shop for a project like this. And six weeks of not knowing was its own answer. I'm not built to sit around waiting on someone else's calendar.

So instead of waiting for the next maybe, I submitted to Script Pipeline (copyright's been filed for a year now) and kept building the world out on Substack: character profiles, lore, the origin story, written for people who haven't read the script and might never need to.

The pitch has also shifted. Instead of just selling a pilot, I'm leaning into the whole IP package: the show, a book series, a product line that's part of the joke itself (the show's villains run a company that makes patriotic kitchen gadgets, one of which is real enough that I actually looked into manufacturing it before I gave up). Amazon/MGM is the new target, partly because that's the kind of universe they've shown they're willing to build.

A pass didn't kill the project. It just meant the project needed to exist somewhere I controlled while I waited for the next answer, instead of after.

Substack link in comments if anyone wants to see what that looks like.