Hmm...mixed feelings as I look down the barrel of another intensive writing month. April is a busier month on the whole than January, which will present a whole new range of challenges, let alone forcing my brain to think in a script-ward fashion. Particularly a radio play, which it strikes me now will make for a rather dialogue intensive experience. Obvious, really, but I never think of these things while surfing the wave of what seems like a great idea.
I know what I'm doing: an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's short story The Captain of the North Star. It's an idea I've had for a radio play for some time and is the only thing in that format that I've got any kind of real planning done for, which is not the same thing as having any extensive planning done. Still, it means when I sit down tomorrow I have a place to start. More importantly, I have a place to finish.
I must admit, an adaptation does feel like something of a cheat. Hell, I have a story structure in place (though not nearly enough to flesh out one hundred pages of script), characters (a few of whom will need beefing up) and even dialogue to shamelessly rip from the page (though it won't all translate handily to spoken word). Not too bad, really: a damn sight better than my novel writing month, where I hadn't the faintest idea what it was going to be until the morning I started.
But it presents its own challenges. For one thing, I need to beef it out a bit while remaining true to the original narrative voice. And given I'll be trying to mimic the Doyle-ster (as he liked to be known), that will probably mean bastardising the rest of it with my own, poorer grasp of language. Also, I'll be trying to fiddle the structure into six chapters of approximately ten minutes each, for the purposes of a student radio show that young master Tom Crowley has in mind. I would like to come out of this with something I can hammer into better shape for that particular outlet. So that will mean introducing a series of escalating cliffhangers and payoffs into a story that doesn't necessarily work that way. Yet.
Another challenge is losing the wonderful, block-busting freedom to just make shit up. I'm adapting something and therefore am sort of locked into a particular narrative flow. Oh sure, I can (and will have to) play around with it, but at the end of the day I have my start, I have my end and I've even got lots of bits in between. Which means I'm always working to a set purpose. On the novel I really was just making it up on a day to day basis. Anything could happen. If I hit a dead end with a character, well next chapter I introduced someone new to pass the time until the first character figured out something to do. It worked and it kept me moving forward. I worry that if I come up against a dead end here I may well lose a bit of time. Well, I guess I could jump ahead and figure out the connections later, but dammit, it just ain't as much fun!
Ahh, well. All this talk is just a load of old wank, really, isn't it? The proof is in the pudding and all that. So I'll shut my trap now and get to the job of it in the morning. See you tomorrow night for a progress report!
Oh, hey, a great piece of pre-production software pointed out to me by a post at Push Listing (which features nice, sharp comic reviews): Celtx. Amazing stuff.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Script Frenzy Update Day 0
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Script Frenzy!
Remember JaNoWriMo?
Well, this April I going to (kinda) do it all over again! Script Frenzy is the script-writing equivalent, organised by the same folks who do NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write 100 pages of script in a 30 day period. It can be any kind of script - film, stage, comics, anything you like - and can also consist of multiple scripts if you like.
I'm utterly unprepared for this, having only just been reminded of it, but I figure when it comes to writing I really do need to get myself a leap before you look mentality. So, same drill as before: daily updates right here outlining my progress or lack thereof. Additionally this time around I am doing it as part of the larger official event, so I'll be interested to see what the impact, if any, of that community (of sorts) will be.
Also, anyone else keen?
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Things I Did Yesterday 25/03/09
I didn't realise Dave Eggers was co-writing the Where the Wild Things Are script! Anyway, yesterday I:
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Something I've Been Meaning to Post
Unbelievably I've been meaning to put this up for about a year now, but I was waiting until I had uploaded them all to Flickr. Well, I'm still just uploading NZ, so I thought I'd just get this done now while I have a couple of minutes. My absolute favourite photo from Bangkok, if not our whole Antipodean trip from last January lies below the break here. The story is this:
We were on Khao Sahn Road on our last night in Bangkok, just having a couple of beers and watching the world go by. For those who've never been, Khao Sahn Road is backpacker central. It's quite tacky and tourist-geared, but definitely toward the younger, beer chugging set. So it's nice and cheap and there's a lot going on. Anyway, we were sat in the bar and I noticed a larger guy come in with a Thai girl.
Now, I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as it used to be, but you still see what I might charitably describe as a number of "unlikely" pairings when walking around Bangkok. I'm sure many of them are perfectly wonderful love stories, but I get the feeling many aren't.
So this guy came in and sat down with this girl and they proceeded to sit in an increasingly uncomfortable silence. No conversation, the guy fidgeting and looking a bit miserable really. The girl looked everywhere but at him. This wasn't the vibe of a couple who have had a fight, but rather two people who just aren't clicking. This was great, I thought, a wonderful opportunity for me to get a photo of something which I had so keenly noticed around town over the previous few days. I got the camera out, all casual-like, sitting it on the table, turning the flash off. All the while chatting to Alex, I glanced down occasionally to line up the shot from the table-top, resting my hand on the camera like some kind of master spy. Brilliant. Looking at Alex, I gently pressed the shot button.
Now, the shot that I was expecting, that in fact I got on a second try, was this:
But the shot I got upon initial inspection, the shot that had me do a quick double-take, was this:
Wedding Wishes
We received our wedding gift from Mr Jon Chandler the other day, which I'm thrilled to present below! It's a portrait which, to be honest, captures mine and Alex's day-to-day life pretty well...
