Category: Personal Page 16 of 19

Well, it’s been a rather thin few days in terms of content, but I plead a sudden surge of activity in the paying job (leaving me several shades of knackered at the end of the day) combined with a lot of writing stuff to do. To summarise, then :

BBC Sharps
I didn’t hear back from Writersroom on Monday, and unless they sent me an e-mail headed something like ‘Free v1agr@’ and it got diverted to my Spam folder, I guess that means that I didn’t make it through to the next round. A pity, but doing the script was actually rather fun, and it was something of a learning experience, so I don’t feel it was wasted time on my part.

One change I might make to it, though, is to amend the name, as in an attempt to be clever and show it was purpose-written for the BBC Competition, I called it ‘Sharpes’ (after the pharmacy where the action took place), so I should probably re-name it for any future use. Then again, maybe that was part of the reason I didn’t make it through, I may have built the expectation that there’d be a number of characters for Sean Bean to play, and the first ten pages offer nothing of that nature.

Waterstones ‘What’s Your Story?’
My entry’s still on the gallery for this (page 13, last time I checked, or you can search by my surname), and given that over 4000 people have entered, the odds are rather against, but it was a fun thing to do (and my method was like something from ‘Take Hart’ or, for the younger amongst you, ‘Art Attack’), and who knows, I could be one of the two over-18 winners. I’ll probably post the jpeg of my story after the results are announced, so as not to dilute or jinx things, as it were.

Regardless of that, the book of all the authors’ postcards (plus the three winners) is for the dually worthwhile causes of Dyslexia Action and English PEN, and as it’s a mere fiver, I strongly urge you to go here and order a copy. Go on, it’s a good thing to do. You know you want to.

10 Word Crime Story
I didn’t have time to post about it here before the deadline of 5pm on Monday, but I managed to get a couple of entries in for this. It was a fun thing to do, and the small wordcount made it pleasantly restricted in terms of what you could write about – my usual logorrhoea was very much held at bay. I think the results are due in a couple of weeks, so I’ll share my entries after that, I suspect.

…So, as you can see, I haven’t just been doing nowt and making token gestures at posting here. But anyway, the hectic period seems to have passed, so we should be back to the usual frequency of posting (and probably the usual kind of content – sneering at adverts, book covers, and dodgy journalism; the very heights of sophistication) now.

Anyway, enough about me, how have you been?

It’s been a very busy week, what with the 9-5 job being hectic, and the run-up to the deadline for the BBC Sharps competition, but in a way, it’s kind of interesting to see just how far my brain can bend before it snaps.

I’m almost done with my Sharps entry now, with a final read-through and formatting sort-out tonight before it goes in the post tomorrow (along with Father’s Day stuff – consider this reminder a social service). I’ve rather enjoyed a lot of the work for the Sharps script, I have to say – I was slightly worried I might have left it a smidgin too late, and that I’d feel I was turning in something sub-par (which always allows for the line ‘ah, well, if I’m honest it wasn’t my best work’ in the face of rejection, though that’s a pretty limp consolation really), but I’ve actually been enjoying the process of writing it (barring a few format-related hassles); having let the ideas and characters stew in my head for a week or so, it’s really felt like a case of just typing it out.

And when the actual process of writing is as straightforward and enjoyable as that, it reminds me why I love to write; the the words just flow from noggin to page (or monitor), and I start to see connections between plotlines I had previously thought were unrelated, ideas for jokes seem to come out of nowhere, and it’s one of the finest, and funnest, feelings in the world. Granted, there are many times when it doesn’t go like that, but this week it’s been fun (apart from spending all day in front of a computer and then going home and spending the evening in fr – ah, you guessed it). That does mean, of course, that I’ve been slightly less mentally and physically able to post extensively here – the paradox of being fired up and excited about writing in all its forms, but a little bit too tired to actually sit and post much to m’blog in the last day or two (hence the title above).

Anyway, my Sharps item will go in the post tomorrow, and apparently those who’ve made it to the next stage should know within a week or so. Which is a pretty fast turnaround, and suggests that they might well be going by the standard practice of reading the first ten pages to assess whether or not to put the script through. If that is the case, maybe I should do a check and make sure that the first third is mind-grabbingly terrific… or perhaps I should affix some kind of irresistible bribe to one of the first ten pages? A fifty quid note, perhaps? A small chocolate bar? Maybe even a small, but saucy picture from my portfolio?

Actually, no, that last idea’s not appropriate, is it? After all, I want to advance on the basis of my writing abilities, not because of my appearance, people can be so catty if they think that’s how you’ve got where you are in life (see, no matter what you might have heard, I DID learn something from all that time at Law School).

I read about a new(ish) London-based Literary Agency recently, and so last week I sent off some sample chapters of my completed novel ‘Human Noises’ and other bits of ‘please think about representing me’ material to them. And so the waiting begins.

I’ve had… well, let’s say ‘mixed experiences’ with contacting Literary Agents before – to the extent that m’colleague and I used to have a running competition to see who could get the most disappointing response; he won, though whether you could consider that a victory in the strict sense is certainly open to debate.

When the novel’s being mulled over, I always tend to adhere to the idea that no news, as per the cliché, will be good news – within reason. For the first couple of months, I can delude myself that people are meeting in boardrooms and banging their fists on tables as they shout about the bidding war for TV and Film Rights, but after a while I have to accept that the chances are it’s a no – as the ex-Literary Agent Betsy Lerner put it, “No one reads a manuscript, loves it, and doesn’t call the author”. Very true.

Still, while I’m waiting to hear, I shall plug on with the current writing, can’t have all my chocolate eggs in one basket and all that.

In related news: over the course of the weekend, I had the pleasure of reading a short screenplay script by Dom, which was both fun to read and an interesting exercise, as one of the first – and very worst – things which people do when commenting on something someone else’s work is to automatically start thinking of how they would have written it. Which isn’t even close to useful – what I want from people who read my work is a genuine appraisal of which bits work, which bits don’t, what needs to be clarified or dropped, and things like that; not a wholesale rewrite (unless the grammar and structure is worse than I could possibly fear) to make it read like someone else’s work.

Whilst I’m not going to delude myself that I’m likely to challenge the likes of people like Lucy and Lianne, who will both read scripts for you and give you an analysis (tell them I sent ya), I have to say that I enjoyed reading and reviewing Dom’s script, as it meant trying to make sure I can use proper words and terms (though, I hope, not jargon) to explain my thoughts about something which can often seem quite nebulous and tricky to describe. Here’s hoping Dom finds my remarks (which I’ve e-mailed over, Dom) useful.

Of course, I may well be less willing to ‘take it’ if the agency gets back to me with a list of brutal but true reasons why ‘Human Noises’ is a pile of pants, but as I say, at the moment, I’m dreaming of the early-morning meetings where high-powered people argue over who gets me as a client.

Yes, yes, I know – but let me dream for a bit, eh ?