When I say "Oh dear"...

I realise my empty last posting needs some explanation. I mean I could delete it but where would the fun be in that?

Fun? Not feeling very fun-ny today I must admit. This is not because anything bad is happening in my life, it isn't. Just had a bad night a combination of the weather suddenly turning hot and humid (just for a couple of hours), people just down the way having friends round and making just enough noise to prevent sleep, cats deciding to take objection to other cats, and our dog taking exception to the cats taking exception to each other.

Very sad. So I'm tired, hence the unfunny feeling.

The "Oh dear" was because I was going to make a comment about how I had completely failed to make any further posting about the London Screenwriters Festival. But the inter-tubes in the place I'm staying decided to behave badly and that was as far as I got. Except I managed to post it.

Not very exciting at all.

London Screenwriters Festival

I went to others of the sessions of course, nothing truly major stuck in my mind. Ellin Stein's session on editing down scripts was interesting enough; and the one on a new way of analysing scripts was passingly interesting, though the speaker was primarily selling his products - and his clientele is directors rather than writers.

I can sum up what he said: The key moments of a script are when a character perceives something different in their environment.

I think, on the whole, it's a valid tool for directors, is it a valid tool for writers? No idea. I'll have to try it out.

I had a go at the Pitch Factor on Saturday evening. It was fun and I was rubbish - but considering I wrote the pitch on the back a cigarette packet half a  minute before speaking that comes as no surprise. (I'm lying professionally here. It was a note pad, and I wrote it half an hour before.)

I also had a Speed Pitch session booked, which was also a bit poo. But I was similarly unprepared. No surprise there then.

I went to the Writing Fantastical TV session which had a good panel and the overwhelming advice was - smuggle it in. Of course, as I read elsewhere, it's ludicrous if TV commissioners say "oh that last SF TV series really bombed we won't do any more of those". After all, do they, when a cop show bombs, say "We won't do any more cop shows?" No, they don't.

There was also the Writing for Comics, another good panel and something I knew nothing about, so I was suitably enlightened. Interesting.

And, of course, I met new people and generally had a good time. So I'll no doubt do it again.

Family Drama

So, the Boy has been doing exams (his school push them through early GCSEs) so it's been a bit a stressful time for him. But he has come out the other side safely.

For the drama exam (part of English Language) they had to write their own 5min script based on Saving Private Ryan. Scripts is something we know something about so he got the job in his groups. (Actually it makes no sense, this is a drama exam so he gets nothing for the writing - surely they should just give them a script?)

Anyway, without going into detail, there was much to-ing and fro-ing with this script. He wasn't sure what to do, so we discussed conflict in scenes. His first version barely made 90 seconds. Then he got something sorted that was long enough. Then he found that his part was too short so had to add a completely new sequence into the scene, but we discussed what could be done and came up with something he liked and he wrote it.

I'm currently working away from home during the week so the Teacher (okay, that's potentially confusing - when I say "the Teacher" I mean my wife, not his schoolteacher) helped him clean up the spelling and grammar. And then she wanted to put some additional instructions into the action lines and the Boy says "No, mum, you can't do that, that's director stuff."

There humour. (For the sake of completeness, yes, I know, in stage work the writer is god, so "director stuff" would be fine - but that wouldn't be funny.)

Anyway it all went off well and he got the equivalent of an A grade for the drama part - I'd have given him the same for the writing, but I'm a bit biased.

Winter Blog

I am also instigating yet another blog - just a sucker for punishment - this one is specifically about writing the web series Winter which is going very nicely and I have some observations to make (well, I think they're interesting - others may differ.)

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What's on the turntable? "The Third Hoorah" by Jethro Tull from "Warchild"

What's happening, you know, like socially?

It's been nearly a month since I last blogged, which is a rather long time for me, and writing did not form much of the reason why I've been quiet.

I've just been very very busy. And still am. But I thought I'd write a summary of what's happening in my universe. Just so you know I'm still alive. But where to start...

In the past few weeks I've started to use Twitter (@adaddinsane) I spent several weeks just researching it, reading everything I could about it - before I even created my account. I thought this would be wise, no point blundering in and making more of a fool of myself than I already do.

So that went off fairly smoothly, I don't tweet much and as suggested by the things I've read I certainly don't mention what I'm eating or bodily functions.

It's an interesting medium and the important thing to realise is: you will miss stuff. It doesn't matter. My main purpose in getting an account was to see how useful it would be as a promotional tool. I concluded it would be very useful indeed.

Then I got a Google+ account (you can only get one by being invited currently, it's still in beta, only has a few million users). And then I got a G+ plug-in (SGPlus) which allows me to read and post to both Facebook and Twitter just from G+. So I do.

G+ is different again from either Facebook or Twitter. It's more solid and its controls for privacy are far more intuitive than either FB or Twitter. Soon SGPlus will allow me to access my LinkedIn account as well. G+ also integrates with all your other Google products, like GMail, PicasaWeb and so on.

But again, I'm looking at these things from the viewpoint of promotional tools when we start to promote our steampunk Voidships project. Which is all very exciting.

On a personal note the Daughter has been to Bolivia and returned alive. You can see some of the pictures on her  Bolivia page on Facebook. She worked in two places, the first did not involve animals directly but they were building holding pens - hard manual labour, in high temperatures, in the jungle.

The second stage did involve animals, and she worked with an ocelot called Ob (oh-bee, ocelot b). The ocelot has to be walked every day, but will never be released back into the wild as she was rescued from being someone's (extremely inappropriate and dangerous) pet. A bit bigger than a domestic cat, behaves like a domestic cat until she decides to take a piece out of your arm.

It may have been said elsewhere, the Daughter would like to be a professional actor - and has done quite a bit of stage (and some TV) in the past. Well she has finally got an agent, a proper one (hurrah!). Plus, though 20, she looks 14 so can work without the legal restrictions imposed on under 16s.

We went to the Edinburgh Festival and saw many many performances, some good, some less so, and some completely off the wall.

Having an affinity for Japanese culture (our whole family) we had to see "Samurai Grandma" if you read the reviews on the referenced page you'll see there was audience participation. There were less than 10 people in the audience when we saw it. Guess who ended up on stage ... twice. Luckily I revel in playing the fool in public. Gave the family a good laugh.

All I can say is: Watch out for that devilish Kitchen Penguin!

The Boy is a musician, he plays the tenor horn in a brass band, saxophone (most recently in Bugsy Malone, where he was also on stage) and so we visited an educational show called "Blues!" covering the highlights of the history of blues music in one hour. We were blown away. So blown away that we went to see it again.

We also went to see comedy rock band Axis of Awesome who were excellent live - reminded me of Morecambe and Wise: so well rehearsed it looked improvised. It's the Boy's birthday and tomorrow we buy him an electric guitar. He'd like a drumkit too ... maybe next year, after we sound-proof the cellar.

The Teacher has been working with early years for the past few years, but she's moving to Year 2 which has meant a lot of work. But she's so sorted she sat down to do some work, and then realised she's already done it.

Today is the last day of my current contract, I start the next one on Tuesday, in Bristol for a week and then back home for the rest. I could get used to this working from home lark.

And that's about it. Now I have to do more paying work.

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What's on the turntable? "Drifting" by Clannad from "Atlantic Realm"