Continue reading »]]> Late last year I started tinkering with the new Mobile jQuery platform and realised that I could try out an idea for a web site that had been floating around in the back of my mind for a while. I spent most of last Christmas holidays messing about with it only to find that the development of the Mobile jQuery platform just wasn’t there yet. The project was promptly sidelined in favour of festive activities and soon forgotten.

Fast forward to last week, when I had a little tinker and realised that they’d managed to iron out all the irritating buglets that hampered my attempts before, so now I proudly present AtomFic!

It’s a fun little mobile web app that allows you to write stories of up to 1000 words on your mobile phone or tablet (and PC if you use Firefox or Chrome (and possibly Safari)). The thing that’s a bit fun about it is I wrote a little Story Wizard to help you if you’re a bit stuck on what to write about. I also built quite a bit of Twitter integration into it too (including using it to authorise log ins). All jolly good geek fun.

If you want check it out, I’d be most pleased. To be honest it’s somewhat lacking in actual stories at the moment (I’ve been too busy messing about with the site to actually write anything!), so any brave souls who’d be prepared to put their reputation on the line and publish something would be nothing less than heroes to me.

See you over there!

http://atomfic.com

Continue reading »]]> It was appraisal time at work recently, and whilst having my review it was quite rightly pointed out to me that I tend to hold back on launching a project if I don’t think it’s perfect which often times it can never be. Both at home and at work I’ve left too many projects/screenplays/web sites half finished where I’ve got so far and then run out of steam because I wanted it to be perfect first time. Apparently it’s an INTP trait, but that’s not really much of an excuse.

As it happened I’d been looking through the cool ‘cube grenades’ that Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) has done over the past few years. This one in particular really hit home in the light of that revelation:

So my new ‘rest of my life’ resolution is this: Get something done, be bloody amazing while you do it and don’t worry if it’s not perfect – nothing is perfect and it can always be improved later.

Amen to that!

Continue reading »]]> Just thought I’d better do a quick update as life seems to be passing far too speedily at the moment:

Things are falling into place with the planned shoot of The Man Who Wished short. I just need to nail some dates, which is proving tricky as the day job is threatening to get in the way. Hopefully I’ll have a clearer idea of my schedule for next month very soon and we can really get things rolling. Locations and props are almost all sorted now, as well as a very nice man with a 20 foot pole, which I’m assured is no bad thing.

The Man Who Wished TV series is developing nicely too, though it’s getting kinda massive, so I’ve had to crack the old Dramatica out to try to to knock it into some kind of shape. It’s slowly wielding.

All in all, what with real work as well, it’s all a bit manic.

Continue reading »]]>

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It’s that time of year again, where we all go nuts and try to write 50,000 words in 30 days.  I did it last year and loved it, so I’m having a go again this year.  

But this year, I’m doing it all a bit different.

In honour of two of my favourite authors, Robert Rankin and Neil Gaiman, I’ll be doing it with a pen and paper (it also gets me away from the computer and this darned distracting interweb).

I was a bit unsure of this approach at first – how would I cope without being able to check my tweets every five minutes?

As it turns out, it was great, but it still left me with a couple of unresolved issues.

Firstly; which type of pen to use?

I met Robert Rankin a few years ago when he was one of the speakers at a comedy writing workshop. Here he espoused the virtues of the Bic Biro.  For him, no other pen came close – he even complained when I asked him to sign my book with my fountain pen.  

No such complaints I feel would issue forth from Mr Gaiman, who takes writing with an ink pen to a whole new level.

So what to do? Easy – 25000 words with a Biro, followed by 25000 words with my trusty parker fountain pen (I think a straight ink pen is probably a bit ambitious for someone as clumsy as me). 

Sorted.

My second, and possibly more significant quandary, was what to write.  After much deliberation (more than was probably necessary) I’ve decided that, rather than go for a straight novel, I should try something a little different.  

I went up to London last week to the very cool Tuttle Club at the ICA (see me here at the bar getting a coffee) and met a very splendid man who goes by the moniker of Sizemore (he’s the one in the checked shirt, sat down).  He told me about a project he’s working on which inspired me (along with Adrian Mead’s very excellent Making It As a Screenwriter) to write something for television.

So what I shall do for NaNoWriMo is write out a six episode TV series in long hand prose, with the intention of then adapting it directly to screenplay format afterwards.  

I’ve done all the calculations to try to keep me on track both with NaNoWriMo itself, and the pacing of the screenplays.  It’ll be a six chapter book, with 8500-9000 words per chapter; each chapter = one episode. I’ve no idea if it will work, but I’m 1758 words in so far (roughly, manual counting is a pain) and all feels good.

See you on the other side… and good luck to @missread, @ricgalbraith, @warriorgrrl and @splinister and everyone else doing it.

(Yes I know, I’m halfway through Return to Earth draft 2 but I’m following Adrian Mead’s advice and trying to get a wider variety of work into my portfolio – and I have no TV scripts in the bank at the moment)