What’s Buried Beneath the Pines just landed in the Top 50 Quarterfinalists for Roadmap Writers’ 2025 JumpStart Writing Competition—and that’s no small thing.
JumpStart is one of the industry’s most respected contests for unrepresented writers looking to make that first major leap. Hundreds of scripts get submitted. A small handful makes it to this round. And WBBTP is now one of them.
If you’ve been following this project, you already know this one cuts deep. It’s a Southern Gothic pilot that doesn’t care about pretty edges or easy wins. It’s about family, land, legacy—and the sins we bury beneath all three. The story follows Gray Harris, a reluctant heir who returns home to bury his estranged father and finds himself unraveling a web of secrets, grudges, and violence that’s been festering for generations.
This script was never meant to be a comfortable read. It leans into quiet dread, into grief, into the sharp tension of a small town where everyone knows your name and your business. There are no clean heroes. No easy villains. Just people trying to survive the ghosts they inherited.
Being named a Quarterfinalist in JumpStart means this story is hitting. That it stood out not just for voice, but for execution. For weight. For atmosphere. That it got read by people who understood what I was doing and said, “Yes. This deserves to go further.”
Roadmap Writers has built a reputation for pairing strong writers with real industry opportunities—managers, agents, execs who are actually looking for fresh voices. Getting on their radar is a massive step forward. Because let’s be honest: the writing is one thing. The access? That’s a whole other game. And it’s one most of us are locked out of until someone opens a door. JumpStart cracks that door open.
What’s Buried Beneath the Pines is also the opening chapter in a larger anthology series called Revenance, where each season unearths the generational trauma and buried secrets of a different rural American family. It’s deeply rooted in place. Visceral. Unforgiving. But real. The kind of show that takes its time, lets the silence speak, and makes you feel the weight of every decision.
There’s a reason this script keeps showing up. With recent quarterfinalist nods from Script Pipeline and the Nashville Film Festival—plus a Coverfly Top 10% badge—WBBTP is building a track record. Not hype. Just heat. Quiet and steady. And that matters. Because while one placement is exciting, multiple placements start to signal something bigger. Something undeniable.
This script has been a long time coming. The first draft was rough—angry, unsure of itself, messy in all the wrong places. But the bones were there. And over time, with each rewrite, it sharpened. The world got clearer. The ghosts got louder. And the story found its rhythm. If you’re a writer, you know that feeling—that shift when a script stops being something you’re working on and starts being something that works on you.
This placement in JumpStart? It’s another log on the fire. Another signal that this project isn’t just mine anymore—it belongs to the people who read it, feel it, and want more of it. That’s the goal. Always has been.
I’m incredibly grateful to Roadmap Writers for recognizing the work, for building platforms like this that elevate stories that might otherwise get overlooked. And I’m grateful to every person who’s shared feedback, encouragement, or even just asked how it’s going. It means more than you know.
So what’s next? The same thing as always: we keep going. One page, one submission, one breakthrough at a time.