Love Fail: Fantasy v Reality
In which I fall in love with a jacket, or possibly a man, and then certainly a fantasy of the man, which despite his being a pretty decent prospect, usurps any possible reality. In short, why I am fast approaching my 10 year anniversary of undisturbed spinsterhood. I’m in the tube station leaving Oxford Circus [...]
Notes to self for LSF
So it’s here, the London Screenwriters Festival has arrived and let’s be fair, based on the experiences of the pre-pitching day, there are a few things that I need to remember: 1. leave the cloppy heels at home if I’m going to continue to be unable to sit for more than 40 mins at a [...]
Business Card Aaaargh
The London Screenwriters Festival is almost upon us, which is an occasion on which forcing your business card upon people politely offering your business card to every moving body is deemed socially acceptable, if not mandatory. Packs of writers will rally one another to bouts networking courage through little competitions, like who can give out [...]
Exercise for Writers – part 2
Writer? Finding it hard to exercise? Check out Part 1 of Exercise for Writers, and then do continue… Number 3 Appreciating exercise as a way of exercising the imagination. So with No1 and 2, you’re multi-tasking to maximise efficiency of a passive exercise (watching/listening) with an active exercise. But there’s definitely a split in concentration [...]
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 [...]
Writing without a recipe
Amongst those many people I have lived with, my cooking habits approach the notorious. Alarmingly, these habits have changed very little; Poppy, my best friend through my early teens, once fell victim to my favourite culinary past-time of throwing everything to hand in a blender, a habit I still carry out to this day, the [...]
Way of the Warrior Writer
As part of my heightened awareness of the necessity for social media for writers, I finally crossed out an ancient, long-ignored point on my To Do List: JOIN TWITTER. I’ve barely used it, mostly because I follow a frightening number of writing-based accounts between which I could literally spend ALL DAY following their fascinating and [...]
CoLab: Words, Spoken
For a new writer, there’s something unsettling about first hearing your work read: it’s a moment of collision between intent and outcome. Which makes it frankly surreal to first see your work performed. By actors. People who have (in this case) voluntarily committed their time to take words you have written and birth them into [...]
Once more with feeling
Back in the day – a day in January of last year, to be exact – I said I’d write a book by the end of the year. On 29 November 2010, while sitting in a pub in Wincanton listening to folk band Lavington Bound and digesting a conversation I had just had with Terry [...]
Constellations
Applying family therapy to scripts: in reverse. Which turned into Applying Adele’s Script to Investigating her Psyche. All in another interesting afternoon at BAFTA… I have a script which can be accurately described as stuck. Hell, I have two scripts and a book in various states of stuckedness, but Life in Me is categorically in [...]