17th
It’s been manic at work recently, pulled two twelve hour days already this week and probably another today. With the commute that adds another four hours to each day. I’m existing on six hours sleep a night, coffee, cigarettes and whatever food I can find (picky eater rather than bin-diver).
I’m so tired I feel like I’ve been drinking.
I was stuffed with cold over the long Easter weekend so didn’t get around to writing any script which has but me way behind schedule, I should be at about fifty or so pages and I’ve currently managed twenty or so. The finish line seems a long way off and next week looks like another crazy work week, the only writing time I get is on the train to and from work at the moment.
Still, I love the script so far and hope it’s got some fresh takes on old fairy tale ideas. I might post some excerpts later.
03rd
I ripped out 5 pages of dialogue from my script this morning and lost a character in the process.
It reads very much more like a fairy tale now.
I’ll miss my brain-damaged toilet-monikered hero Doulton though.
02nd
So, I had a good day yesterday. Managed nine pages in total. Another two on the train this morning and wrote myself out of a cul-de-sac, invented a cool character and moved the story on to act two… Take that Ideas Toad!
01st
Well I fired up the netbook with its spangly new OS (the latest Ubuntu is gorgeous) and a fresh copy of Celtx (never used it before, already love it) and started tapping out the stuff thast’s been in my head for the last few days. So far so good. Two pages done on the way into work and a journey home and an empty house this evening hopefully means that I’ll get my way up to at least five before I forget everything.
I’m really glad I got the geeky stuff I needed done out of the way last night, I’m free to defecate poor movie scripts into the world at my own pace now.
Shock realisation that none of my major characters have names or in fact will get them.
I should really get more of it down on paper though. You know, with a pen and that.
31st
Well at least for a month anyway. I served the Ideas Toad his eviction notice this morning but he didn’t seem particularly bothered.
You should be able to keep tabs on my progress here at MKF and at my profile page on Script-Frenzy.
Somehow I’ve got to fit in my full time job, the #orgy meat in London this weekend and BangFace at the end of the month and still deliver 100 pages of script. It’s going to be a busy one.
I didn’t get around to finishing The Nomads so I guess I’ll have to wait until May to see that one off, sorry to those few who’ve seen the incomplete first draft and were looking for more.
30th
The Ideas Toad is squatting in my brainpan, like some ancient evil god in the primordial soup of creation. It’s a giant stale turd and it leers at me, stinking, resolutely refuses to capitulate and coalesce into a well formed thought.
All I’m getting is men in black longcoats and stovepipe hats and the texture of old paper and rotten lace.
This is no way to prepare for Wednesday.
I’ve had all day now and I can’t shift that damnable toad.
I know I want to do something gothic but as to what… Well I wish I knew.
No sci-fi though, just magic-light or mundane.
For some reason my mind keeps popping back to Peter and The Wolf but with a tense, sexy atmosphere to it.
But not that at all.
Everyone on the script frenzy message boards seems to be doing Demons or Buffy again, or CSI rewrites. Not for me.
I’m thinking more Neverwhere and Carnivale and Dark City.
But not that at all.
Heck, who am I kidding, no one’s going to read the damn thing, it’s just practice after all.
Perhaps an early night and a morning brainstorm will sort out the headmeats.
29th
Matt’s not doing the script frenzy with me. He’s got his physics degree last exams to battle through.
Guess it’s a one-man effort this time round then, I’ll grab him for NaNoWriMo.
I dug out my yellowing copy of Mirrorshades this morning, almost burning the facon in the pan when I got a bit too absorbed in one of the stories. It’s an amazing little compilation that I suggest any modern sci-fi fans get a hold of if you still can. It’s got stories from Rudy Rucker, Greg Bear and William Gibson in it. The latter is the first story he ever had published and it is absolutely amazing, called the Gernsback Continuum. The compilation was only printed when Gibson had released Neuromancer and Count Zero so although he was already firmly entrenched in the sci-fi genre pantheon as a new god he was still quite wet behind the ears and hadn’t gone on to finish the Sprawl series or even start the Bridge trilogy. The Gernsback Continuum is such a beautifully crafted little story about the 30s - 50s future America that didn’t happen, covering only twelve pages but doing so with such aplomb that I’m left jealously wishing that I could have even half the grace traversing the English language as he does. If you can’t find a copy of it, have a google for it, it’s really worth reading.
28th
I rather stupidly went out yesterday after taking a day off from work and bought a metric arse-load of new books. I really don’t need more books.
Script Frenzy begins on Wednesday so I suppose I was justified in getting one of the books. The other four though… I could have probably lived without the Judge Dredd Vol 1 and Nemesis Vol 3. It wouldn’t have been as much fun, mind.
The Brothers Grimm complete collection is a beast of a book, I hope there’s a couple of usable characters and scenarios to bugger about with in there somewhere. I’m sure there is, there must be.
25th
I’ve currently got some new things underway. First off is this blog which is hopefully going to become a place where I can store and publish things that I do and things that I find so that they can have a home whilst I flit form social.net to social.net.
Who would have thought that the blog platform would have been the ideal place for self-publishing and still retaining the rights to your own work.
Obviously I’ve got some short fiction on here too which you’re welcome to stay and enjoy with hopefully plenty more on the way and some longer pieces which won’t be ready for a good while yet.
An Alternate History/Golden Era/Trench War story with political leanings in the shape of The Inner System War and a story about the final hope for mankind in the shape of flinging generational ships out to the stars called Dandelion Clocks. The later actually is just notes and a name because I’m terrified of starting and ruining it.
Before all that begins though I have the challenge of Script-Frenzy. The whole of April (When I’m not at festivals or work of course) will be dedicated to attempting to write a script of 100 pages with my good mate Matt. The concept is good, whether we’ve got the stones to pull it off is another matter.
Anyway, stay tuned as there’ll be irregular updates throughout the process.
23rd
I think it was late in twenty thirteen or fourteen when the last of the Sperm Whales was found dying on a beach on Australia’s west coast. They said it had sang itself to death, beached itself from the madness of loneliness. Final miserable proof of intelligence if any where needed. Ironically it was the Japanese who shouted loudest about the horror of such a majestic creature being hurled over the precipice to extinction. It brought human awareness of what it was doing to the world’s ocean into sharp focus and mankind saw that it was on the brink of an extinction level event the likes of which had only occurred twice in the entire planets past. The difference was that this had been caused by mankind. By centuries of over-fishing we had culled the top-level predators for our own food, the marlin, the tuna, the cod, the hake, we had tipped the delicate aquatic balance. The fishing industry took an enormous hit as the memory of that last great beast of the sea moaned and baked in the hot antipodean sun, its peeling skin exposing first white blubber then red raw nerves to be pecked by gulls, it’s flukes pinched by crabs and rats alike. There was a televised twenty four seven candle-lit vigil for it. I remember watching it and crying sea-salt tears of my own.
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