Oh, and here's some money for what you wrote...

So the big day arrived. Amy and I sat by the telephone, waiting for our conference call with Mimi and Doug at Front Row Media in Los Angeles. The phone rang... And we were off.

Just as we'd felt a connection with Mimi just in our e-mail exchanges, we quickly felt a similar comfortable sensibility while talking with them both on the phone. It was pretty clear that they "got" our script and appreciated its quirks.

We talked about our characters like they were real people. We talked about plots. We talked about possibilities.

What I remember most clearly was Doug saying, "Well, we take on only about five projects at a time. We had availability for one more, and there was a stack of about six scripts on Mimi's desk that we were considering. Tough luck for the other five--she read yours first, and said none of the others matched up in quality..."

The conversation lasted maybe thirty minutes. It concluded with the news that they'd be sending us a contract to sign, and once that happened, they'd begin taking our script around to meetings with producers, studios, networks, etc.

It was one of those scenarios where you understand all THE WORDS that somebody is saying, but you can't quite wrap your brain around the idea that these words relate to something that you have actually written. Surely, there must be a mistake. Surely these people aren't talking about taking OUR SCRIPT to meetings with network honchos and studio bigwigs..?

Even as that kind of "unreality" swirled around us, the contract pages arrived over the fax machine. Wow. It was true. We were about to sign a contract and receive a check from Front Row Media, granting them exclusive rights to market our script.

We were--and even now, I can't quite believe it--now professional screenwriters! Somebody had paid us for something we wrote!

NEXT: What do you do while you play the waiting game?