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 [...]
Pitch Up – and throw up?!
I still don’t quite believe I’m typing this, but you know that competition I entered on Sunday? The one where writers could win the chance to publicly humiliate themselves in front of BAFTA, the BBC, C4, Tiger Aspect and a room full of other writers? The one which I didn’t think my entry had been [...]
Pitch Up
I recently had a bad review on one of my books. It came from a friend, and I had been given reason to expect it was going to be bad about a month before it actually arrived, when I learned it was better described as terrible – but even this advanced warning didn’t prevent the [...]
Brit Writers Award: into the third round
I didn’t have the best start to yesterday. Woke up feeling somewhat worse for wear for 7am spin, bailed out of 9:30am spin to teach off the bike and by the end of Balance, felt like lightly defrosted death. When I went to bed in the afternoon for a little nanna nap, I didn’t expect [...]
Euroscript does my head in
For all that I like to think of myself as a right-brain dominant creative eccentric, I am also a closet fan of logic, even though I can be extremely poor at recognising it or putting it into play. Yet there’s something extremely uncomfortable about being forced to use logical reasoning to make your way to [...]
Distractions
I share my writing office (alright, otherwise known as Starbucks) with, amongst many others, a certain Jamie Smart. Although we chat regularly and he’s always inviting me over for his famous Chilli Tuesdays – conveniently located at his flat, right across the road from our office – it is only recently I discovered that he’s [...]
Brit Writers Update
Despite best of intentions et cetera, I did not enter the first chapters from Lien or Life in Me into the Brit Writers Awards. Despite this, the object of the exercise – writing the first 3 chapters to two of the books – worked extremely well, and I almost picked up a collaboration with Si [...]
The War Within
CHAPTER ONE EXCERPT: COINCIDENCES On an otherwise unremarkable day, in an otherwise unremarkable alehouse, on the wide-flung borders of the once-remarkable city-state of Avenel, a remarkable set of coincidences – so unusual in their nature that one might hardly call them coincidences at all – intersected like perfect pieces in a puzzle. Across Avenel and [...]
The Brit Writers Award
In theory, I’m entering the Brit Writers Award in February. To be specific, I’m allegedly entering 4 pieces – the first three chapters of Life in Me, The War Within and The Book of Beginnings and also the short childrens story The Silence of the Snow Dogs. Yeah, I know, I’m kind of laughing too. [...]
A shaky start to November
So far, on average, November and I do not get along. Tomorrow we are third of the way through, which means Christmas is close enough to be both terrifying and exciting at the same time. You know how it is – December is Game Over, the End of Days for 2009, but there are enough [...]