Stress bunny

It's been over a week since my last confession ... oh, no, sorry, I'm not Catholic.

I've been busy both with writing and day job.

How can I describe my day job? Easy, programming, I'm part of a team that's on a Government project that's probably worth a few million pounds (not Defence, I don't think I'd do defence work unless I had no other choice ... and then I'd just starve instead). And on said project there is one part of it which is utterly fundamental to the proper functioning of the entire website.

Guess who's doing the bit that absolutely must work first time? That would be me. Millions of pounds, the jobs of a hundred people or more, the future of every schoolchild in the country (sort of). And me.

Hence a bit of stress. I have been rather under the weather for the last two weeks but I'm feeling better now so I thought I'd bring you up to speed on the writing.

The Blockbuster project is dead. I decide to kill it. I may come back to it if I start making something of this screenwriting career.

The Bohemian project is due on Saturday. I spent some time plotting out, as I partially covered a couple of blogs ago. I'm not doing the Jeff Kitchen follow-up yet because I really need to have his book beside me to get it right.

However I used his technique called "Sequence Proposition Plot" to ensure that my story had a solid spine, and so wrote a treatment for it. Then I used the same technique (which is totally scalable from an entire TV series [or bigger] down to an individual scene) to ensure that the scene that I have to write as a sample is also solid with a good beginning, middle and end.

I'm pretty pleased with both.

Living here in Reading, apart from giving me TV-free evenings in which I can write a lot, gives me half an hour each morning and evening as I walk to and from work, in which I can plot and plan.

Which means that the next thing on the agenda, the BBC's Sharps competition, is at the "thinking about while walking" stage. So far I have nailed the setting which has to be based on "The Nation's Health" in some way (not necessarily a doctor thing -- mine isn't), and I've got some characters but I haven't got a plot.

Sharps is only 30 minutes, and it's not comedy. So we have that weird thing: a half hour drama. I have trouble thinking that short, my ideas tend to be very big. I've got 2 weeks and it has to be sent as hardcopy.

So that's where I stand at the moment. Next time I might tell you about my involvement in the movie Hotel Caledonia, looks like it's finally going to happen. Development hell is aptly named.

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What's on the turntable? "All Neon Like" by Bjork from "Homogenic" (a little while ago it was 'Joga' which is an utterly beautiful track, I could play it repeatedly, forever)