The ‘E’ word (for writers) – part 1
Oh yes, today’s subject is… exercise. Yes, for writers. Though I’m a fitness professional, I hardly ever talk about the E word by choice – mostly because people seem to want to talk to me about it all the time, generally hoping for magic fixes. Go away, there are none. Unless you’re Steve Rogers. But [...]
Trashing Trailers
So I’m at Vue between teaching spin at GymBox and hitting the flicks, and where the ambient soundtrack is starting to freak me out. Since discovering trailer-specific artists like Two Steps From Hell, X-Ray Dog, Immediate Music, Globus and Epic Score, suddenly every single film trailer sounds like a track from my spin classes. I’ve [...]
Bagpipes: MIA
It’s Ed Fest 2010, I have 90 minutes invaluable work time in which the 3Ness article urgently requires revision and 40 pages of script even more urgently require being written. Which is probably why I’m uploading very silly photos of Cec’s farewell to Facebook and writing an entirely un-urgent blog instead. Yes, I am that [...]
Hay Fest: Karen Armstrong – Faith at Work
Interestingly, in 13 sessions at Hay, I have seen only one female speaker (excluding two women in the Saturday night Guardian Debate: Is Reason Always Right, in which all six panellists managed to both agree and disagree with not only one another but also the motion, to varying degrees, regardless of whether they were in [...]
Hay Fest: Michael Jacobs across the Andes
Saturday 30th May 2010 It’s the end of my second day of Hay Festival, I’ve seen 10 of my 13 sessions and have just emerged from a talk by Michael Jacobs (no, not actor MJ, but author of Andes, The Ghost Train through the Andes, The Factory of Light, Between Hopes and Memories), a travel [...]
Still in mourning
While I absolutely ADORED the first episode of the new Matt Smith series of Doctor Who, the second two episodes have left me rather cold, to my great distress. It seems I am not alone in this discomfort, for while it is expected that the people who comment on newspaper blogs are mostly ranting psychopaths, [...]
SWF: The Moff on the New Who
International Screenwriters Festival: 29th October 2009 There’s a very different relationship between new Doctor Who show runner (although is he really? Kate Harwood absolutely insisted that the BBC has no show runners, only ‘lead writers’, as they can’t afford to pay them enough to justify the title) Steven Moffat and the UK’s best-known DW journo, [...]
SWF: Doctor Who Day (hurrah!)
International Screenwriters Festival: 29th October 2009 On Day 4 of the Screenwriters Festival, you could have attended sessions on taste and offensiveness in humour, films with a social conscience, porn, getting sued (these three sessions not being linked in any way, shape or form), marketing yourself through social media… or Doctor Who, Doctor Who, and [...]
SWF: Doug Chamberlain – Hollywood or Bust
International Screenwriters Festival: 26th October 2009 The first thing you notice about Doug is that his profile picture is a couple of years, possibly decades, out of date. The second thing you notice, soon as he’s opened his mouth, is his complete affability. Like everyone who took to the stage over the four days of [...]
SWF: Spec Script Market (Part 2)
International Screenwriters Festival: 26th October 2009 Final Draft has a rather fun Reports function which can calculate for you the percentage of action directions to dialogue in your script. New writers, Simon explained, often have around 60% dialogue and 30% action description in their scripts, which is the exact inverse of the desirable 60% action [...]