Fighting your way to square one.

I'm sorry I've been away for so long. I have been very busy on all sorts of projects but everything has been in such a state of flux that, on the one hand, I didn't feel I had time to write a blog while on the other I wasn't sure I had anything worth saying.

But things are beginning to come together.

In my last post back in March, I ended by saying we had a new plan and that's what I've been working on. I will be going into detail about these things later but let's take an overview.

The big goal is to create a "platform" on which we could base another crowd-funding exercise to fund the making of The Lazarus Machine web-series. (That's actually not the biggest goal but it's the one we're concentrating on.)

To that end it became imperative to build interest in the Voidships universe. "Voidships" is the name of the steampunk universe that Chris Payne and I have created, and in which The Lazarus Machine takes place. Even before the crowd-funding I had written and planned other stories in this universe. And there's a website devoted to it here.

However getting those stories out into the real world - just getting to square one - has been something of a marathon. Well the first story has been published and there are more to come.

And, as I said, I'll be going into this in more detail over the next few weeks.

To be sure you don't miss anything, go to Voidships and add yourself to the mailing list so you stay up-to-date on everything and can take advantage of the free stuff that's coming (it's a proper mailing list and you can unsubscribe easily if you ever want to). Let me leave you with this:

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What's on the turntable? "Your Gold Teeth II" by Steely Dan from "Katy Lied"

That is why you fail

The explosive success  of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign was caused muttering in the depths.

If you want to read someone's opinion about the mutterings, read Chuck Wendig who covers it quite effectively, if crudely. (Chuck has a potty mouth pen so if you're offended by that sort of thing, best not read it.)

But I'm not going to talk about that.

I'm going to discuss success instead, which might seem like a strange thing to do when our Kickstarter campaign (with an £85K goal) failed so miserably. However that's fine because, in the crowdfunding world, when projects fail they fail badly. It's the nature of things.

So why do some big projects succeed so easily and others fail? It's the same reason that studio execs bet on sequels, prequels and adaptations: Pre-awareness. And if anything the crowdfunding experience reinforces the idea that their approach is the right one.

It has been evidenced again and again that big campaigns require pre-awareness: the market is already there. Veronica Mars, Elite:Dangerous, Amanda Palmer, and the rest. People knew what they were, wanted it and did not require educating.

The only apparent exception I know of is the Mary Shelley/Ada Lovelace detective agency "Wollstonecraft" book. The author (a screenwriter, as it happens) wanted $4K and got nearly $92K. But even here there was pre-awareness of the individual elements (Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, kid detectives, Victoriana [well Georgiana really since it's 1826]) and the beautiful image that tied it together perfectly here.

It doesn't matter how big or how small the campaign. What matters is whether enough people understand what you're doing - and want to help - to provide the funds. And if it seems like I'm stating the obvious, well, yes, but it's an obvious that we and many other people manage to miss.

We made the mistake of going too big before anyone knew who we were, and what we were trying to achieve was simply too much to take in and easily comprehend. You might ask why we went early if we knew all this - and that would be a fair question. Quite simply, despite all the research we did (and believe me we researched a lot) this simple fact did not come up. Until a week after we started and examples, and articles about it flooded in.

We could have stopped but decided to continue since there was always the chance we might find the right wind and sail to victory. We worked hard on spreading the word - even had someone dedicated to the task - constantly finding new places to talk about what we were doing. But you can't rely on luck.

So we have a new plan - build the pre-awareness and then do it again.

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What's on the turntable? "What goes up, must come down" by The Alan Parsons Project from "Pyramid"

That Comic Book Thing

This time last year I decided that instead of writing a screenplay during ScriptFrenzy I would write a comic book script. After all I'm good at script writing and I have a very visual imagination, how hard can it be?

Very.

For the first year I failed at ScriptFrenzy. It was a technical win, you have to write 100 pages and I wrote 100 pages. But they were appalling. The story was intended as a sequel to my Rebel steampunk script featuring the same protagonist and supporting cast but moving on in time.

It was the worst story I'd written in a long time. Now it's easy to say it was a first draft, and that's true, but I write decent first drafts usually. (Not that's brilliant send it out first drafts, but they are usually coherent with good sequences and scenes, good clay for reshaping.)

The story might have turned out alright if I had been in the familiar territory of a screenplay but instead I was in a medium I believed I understood (having read my Eisner and Scott McCloud books). But theory is not practice.

There was another barrier to me realising I didn't know what I was doing: I had worked in print media, magazine production specifically, for many years so, of course, I knew all about printing stuff, didn't I? The first barrier to learning anything is thinking you know it already.

By the end of April (the month ScriptFrenzy takes place in) I was forced to acknowledge that when it came to writing comic books, despite everything I thought I knew, I was clueless.

Fast forward a few months to the London Screenwriters Festival, and a talk by awesome writer of scripts in many mediums: Tony Lee. Who in one hour covered the practicalities of writing for print comics. It was a revelation. You see my knowledge of the print industry was not worthless - I discovered it did have application in the subject but I needed someone who was familiar with the problems to join the dots and show me how to re-apply what I already knew to this new medium.

Consider this: A reveal in a print comic must be the first thing on a left hand page (otherwise a reader will see it before he reads his way to it). And this: you will typically have 22 pages to work with in an issue. That means your cliffhanger must appear on page 22 (it will be a left-hand page). You have no choice. And when Tony said these things, it all clicked together my existing knowledge of print and made perfect sense.

Comic books apply absolute restrictions with no wiggle room which means that unlike a novel or even a screenplay, you cannot wing it. You have to plan every sequence and scene to the very page it will appear on and make sure your reveals appear as the first thing on a left-hand page and your cliffhanger hits on page 22.

I think that's brilliant.

And the consequence of all that is I am converting an existing script to comic form. I have a professional illustrator lined up who loves the script (and, from her comments, sees what I see) so I'm putting together a few sample pages that she'll do some roughs for, just to see whether we're happy with each other's styles. And if that works we'll put together an issue.

But for ScriptFrenzy 2013 I have another feature script to write for the Voidships universe, new time period, new characters and hopefully awesome will ensue.

(And I'm also working on a Voidships novel.)

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What's on the turntable? Hergist Ridge by Mike Oldfield (often considered the poor relation to Tubular Bells being the follow-up but I love it just as much - and Ommadawn which came next.)

Don't read this, read that

I don't want to repeat myself so read this:

Screaming Pitch

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What's on the turntable? John Michel Jarre "Equinoxe"

Into space

Have you see that Lynx Space Academy advert? The one that's clearly targeted at young men?

Well, my daughter wants to go to - and why not?

I know I'm biased but she's pretty awesome:

• She's trained in martial arts since she was 5;
• In the top 5% in school in all subjects;
• When she was 18 she took herself off to New Zealand to do environmental work;
• Spent weeks in the Bolivian jungle building animal enclosures and then working with big cats that couldn't be returned to the wild;
• Zoo Biology at University;
• Her own show on student radio;
• And a total SF/Fantasy geek;
• And an actress (trained with the RSC for a while);
• And was a volunteer (Games Maker) at the London Paralympics;

Plus she was always the kind of child that people said to us as parents "you're so lucky". (Not to say she's perfect, oh dearie me no, the tales... but never mind that, she may be awesome but she's still human.)

So she wants to go into space. And why not? Especially when Lynx are offering the chance to whoever can get through their competition.

The first stage of that involves voting: each person in the top 200 goes through to the next stage which involves both physical and mental challenges - well that's up to her but what's up to everyone else is getting her through this stage.

And she's doing pretty well but she needs your help, she needs you to vote for her, another 250 votes will do it. That's just a mere 250 people deciding that she can go. But you have to decide to help, so please make that decision and vote for her:

https://www.lynxapollo.com/en_GB/107065/deanna-turnbull?image=0

Do it now - it only takes 30 seconds.

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What's on the turntable? (It's quiet ... too quiet.)