Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A Walk in the Park

The Screenwriter's Festival has got a new-look website and they've told the whole world who I am. I order you not to go and find out - assuming you don't already know.

And then they have the audacity to suggest that writing this blog (as they put it "significantly more regular than many others", of course I haven't actually posted in - what? Two days? That's bad for me) ... they have the audacity to suggest that this might actually interfere with my screenwriting.

How little they know me.

I'm up to 88 pages on Running which means that I have 12 pages to do in the next 3 evenings - a walk in the park. I have just completed a car chase which was almost embarrassing for a script to do with Parkour. However the characters had to get somewhere fast, and the main character was, at that point, not even capable of walking unaided.

But she's better now, thanks to the miracle of nano-technology.

Speaking of walks in the park - I have now done two days in my new job. As previously mentioned I am now working at the Open University in Milton Keynes. It's a very special kind of University, it has all the trappings of academia but (blessing from heaven) no students - at least none on campus.

I'm staying at a B&B - sorry, 4-star Guest House - a little over a mile from where I'm working so once again I can walk to work. Through leafy lanes, fields and parkland surrounded by English rural countryside. I could get used to this. Yesterday I got soaked from the rain as I walked back - and I really didn't care. It's worth checking out the Wikipedia entry to see how Milton Keynes was designed to work for both cars and people.

It's true that there is the constant sound of cars in the background but that's the price you pay for being both rural and urban simultaneously.

In case you're interested the contract is going well so far, except that all the work I did yesterday was deleted by someone else at the end of the day. Thanks. It took me less time to get back to the same position, of course, and I have powered onwards.

I was brought in because they are on deadline and their programmers were taken ill (not Swine Flu as far as I know). I'm not sure I can hit their deadline (particularly not losing a day and a half - the day's work plus re-doing it) but I shall try.

I'm not a fan of the news, I am a fan of Charlie Brooker and his Newswipe prog - it explains exactly why I have ignored the news as much as possible for the last 20 years. Except he explains it more succinctly and with more humour than me.

But the Swine Flu thing did scare the life out of me - it sounded exactly like the backstory in my TV script Monsters. I had to go and do some research just to confirm that it wasn't killing too many people. That's one future I'd rather not be the prophet of.

So let's see how many pages I can knock out, at least 4, tonight.

EDIT: 6 pages. Oh yes.



What's on the turntable? "An Architect's Dream" by Kate Bush from "Aerial CD2: A Sea of Honey"

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