Incommunicado for a Fortnight

To meditate and ruminate and cogitate and percolate and basically have a good rest.

See you in a fortnight.

The name's the thing.

Discovering Axel Rose's real name was Bill Bailey made me wonder what I would have chosen as a Rock name. Wanting something that would make me cool I hunted around for inspiration and came up with...nothing. I can't do cool. Not even slightly tepid.

However the internet claimed it could do better. Just type in your first name here and whether you're male of female then away it goes. So details went in and it came up with...Ellyn Sixx. What? A rock star called Ellyn? I could believe the lack of spelling ability but purlease. Even the website reckons I am a chill free zone. It gives me the name of an android or a murder victim. Great.

But there was hope. Maybe I could be a street-wise, angst ridden rapper. Hold on. Do they do angst-ridden or is it just a revamp of "You think you've got it hard kid? In my day we had to use go-carts for driveby shootings." So I put my info in again and I got Femme Rose. Cheers. Now I'm a ribbon wrapped, glitter covered perfume bottle. More glam rock than rapper. Think I'll bin this internet search.

I do have a big problem with names. Tell me yours and guaranteed it will go in one ear and out the other. Not because I mean to be rude but my brain holds that kind of information like a herring net holds a midge.

I've stated vociferously (now there's a lovely word) to phonecallers at the office that Methuselah Bates* does not and has never worked here until Methuselah taps me on the shoulder. Is it my fault I've know him as boy* for past ten years?

The problem doesn't stop there. I have to think of names for my characters. I call them A, B and C for as long as I can but eventually it gets awkward. And names are important as Daniel Gritten guest posted on Danny Stack's site in his write up of the William Ackers talk.

It would be nice to say I can just pull names out of the air but every time I try I just get two syllable names that end in eeeee. Like a register being read out at a chav convention.

So instead I try to find names that mean who they are. I have a couple of baby name books and I hit the internet again. Once I've applied my rule that no two names should have the same first letter I end up with a very short list. Too short. So off I go again for another dig. I can send a few evenings doing this.

I wish I could put aside the suspicion that it is all just another form of procrastination. Maybe I should go down the Prisoner route and bin the names all together.

So how do you handle naming?

* Name changed so he won't thump me.

Enter Late - Leave Early

Err-Humm. Excuse me? Anybody there? No? Woo hoo. Party time.

So what am I going to talk about today? There seems to have been a lot of flux in the blogs recently. Some have died and will be sorely missed. Some have revamped and others are still considering what they are doing and why they are doing it. Hmmm.

So should I write something deep and meaningful? Something enlightening fellow readers and directing them to fame and fortune?

Problem is I'm no expert in writing so it would be blind leading the blind, everyone holding onto the one ahead, marching in circles to nowhere. And there are lots of people with oodles of knowledge to guide you already. See the list of blogs to the right for a start.

Should I write about my latest projects? Not much to say on that front because I've been in a bit of gloom and they haven't progressed. Need to get them sorted, I know.

So I was lying there last night, listening to the Tropical Rainforest. It's a recording sadly, not some exotic holiday. One day…Anyway I thought maybe I could write about this thing "Enter late - Leave early". Again Hmmmm.

I've worked hard on this one and have chopped off beginnings and ends until it feels my scripts race along so fast that the viewer will be gasping for breathe before Act 2. But I do wonder why we do it.

Yes it keeps the pace up. Yes it makes the writing concise. Yes it gives you those precious turning points fast…faster… fastest. But why the rush?

Is it a Hollywood thing? Race in, snatch the prize, race out. Rush here, rush there. No time to waste. I want it all and I want it now…now… now. Is this low attention span real or is it just that someone somewhere decided they couldn't sit still more than 5minutes and conned everyone else that it was normal?

At first I thought, definitely. It's an American thing. You won't see it in Europe. But looking along my DVD shelves I don't think that's really true. You can't call Nikita or les Visiteurs slow paced. Nor do Lost in Translation or Sideways go at a break neck gallop.

So is it genre? Action should be fast paced and drama maybe slower? I looked for a slow paced action, never scared of a challenge, and I found Three Days of the Condor. It has its fast bits but most of it is slow and steady. I then looked for a fast paced drama and found le Diner de Cons. I defy anyone to call that slow paced. I count it as drama but I know someone out there will be screaming "Thriller and Farce." My blog. I win.

Maybe it's tied to budget? A higher budget demands a faster pace or the audience won't turn up and they won't get their money back. Only if that was true then how could a low budget film slip in and swipe the audience?

I think it is all a big conspiracy. Probably by the twitter creators. Get them used to short, sharp shocks and they'll be easy prey to twit …. Ahh used up the character limit. For heaven's sake where does 140 come from? Too long for a putdown and too short for a decent conversation. I want a discussion, not a sentence. Am I becoming a luddite in my old age?

Is the art of conversation dead? Will a film get a decent budget without insisting we are too thick to concentrate longer than 3 minutes? Will Jessica ever persuade Benson to serve poptarts?

So where have all these ramblings taken us? Nowhere really. But here's the thing. Didn't you enjoy the stroll through thoughts and musings? Wasn't the journey more interesting than the destination? Didn't you find starting early and leaving late a refreshing change? Wasn't the distraction more entertaining than sharpening pencils?

No? Who said that? Well if you are frustrated at wasting a few seconds of time on scenery and wish you'd stuck with charging after the holy grail then as the caramel bunny would say "Just take it easy."

CBBC and Birdlife

I've spent the past week working on my CBBC entry. Not the episode itself but what I want the series to be. It has taken a while because I kept finding flaws and having to go back and rethink. I've found kids are very good at finding holes in plots and very vocal when a character does something clearly stupid.

Kids don't go into dark basements when there's a killer about. After all they know there is nothing a killer likes more than a dark basement. Or under the bed or in the wardrobe or anywhere but in the nice, bright warm parts of the house.

No I'm not writing a serial killer series. somehow I don't think that would go down too well with parents of 6-12yrs old even though I suspect the kids would love a nice bit of murderous mayhem. I once made a dinosaur birthday cake for a party. Asked the kids which bit I should cut off first and they gleefully screamed "The head".

Anyway I am writing a scary piece but I'm trying to be careful with the balance. Not so scary that they have nightmares. That's more a Saturday Teatime thing. However scary enough that they have to watch to see that all ends well.

I've also made sure the kids get themselves out of trouble rather than being the victims and that each major scare gets sorted at the end of the episode but there is still enough menace left that they want to tune in again to see how it develops.

I may have got the balance all wrong but I'm sure someone will enlighten me when they read it. I loved scary stuff as a kid, as do all the kids I know but it is adults that do the selecting.

On the summer front, we have hung up a load of feeders outside our living room window. It has been an eye opener. Anyone tells you collar doves are sweet should see what they've done to my heather. Flattened it. And wood pigeons can "deposit" more than chickens. Clearly these are the graffiti artists and vandals of the birdworld.

Starlings are complete psycho bullies that chase all the other birds away then swing on the feeders until the contents are sprayed all over the floor while blackbirds grab chunks of fat balls as they fly by, spit them out then dive down to eat them. Yuck. What slobs.

House sparrows have oversized kids that sit on the feeder, right next to the seeds but scream for the parents to pick them up and shove them in their great big gobs. The chavs of the birdworld? Then there are the great tits, coal tits and bluetits that swing upside down to eat, just cos they can. Big showoffs. OK. Little show offs. The rockers of the fraternity.

The poor robins hardly get a look in. Or rather they are too cool to get involved and sit on the wall until the brawling is over then glide in and and pick the choice pieces the others are too raucous to notice. And the finches dive in when all is quiet and then scoot off again when others turn up. The shy wallflowers.

Poor Henry, our cat, is failing to live with the shame. All these feathered tasties and the one time he caught one he got told off. He sits on the wall, glaring at passing dogs "You lookin' at me?". The result is a canine yelp and the screech of owners being dragged into the distance. He's hard, our cat.

I seem to have rambled on a bit today. Enjoy the sun.

A Good Tidy Up

I've been doing a sort out of my writing area over the past couple of days. In my fantasy that means gliding into a fancy office with twirly chair and rosewood desk. Calmly sorting out the neat folders and pigeon holes and updated my tidy corkboard. In reality it involves pulling my battered laptop out of the detritus down my side of the sofa and opening up my "writing" folder. Somehow not as glamorous.

Anyway I found this tidy up rather therapeutic. I'd been feeling recently that I'd been in butterfly mode. Flitting one project to another and not finishing anything off. Doing a good sort out and compiling a list of projects for my portfolio revealed I'd done much more than I thought. I even found a couple of things I'd finished a few years ago and forgotten about. What other wonders might lurk in the mountains of cardboard boxes in the spare room?

There are a few projects at 1st draft only and a few more with step outlines completed but not written yet. However the majority were in a decent state and it surprised me how much Radio and Stage stuff I had. If you'd asked me I would have thought I had more TV and Film.

So now my head and folder have had a good clearout I should be able to plan my workload a bit better. This currently means working on my idea for the CBBC shout. I don't remember the last time they did a call for any writers so don't let it pass if you can help it.

And I've spent some of today listening to Tom Lehrner. Bought a couple of his CDs yesterday and now getting flashbacks to my student days when my decrepid flat would ring with "Poisoning Pigeons..." and "...she did everyone of them in." I don't know what they neighbours thought.

Hope you still have some Sun lurking about. Ours is just squeezing through a gap in the clouds and hoping they don't notice.

Calling Cumbrian sCribes

I don't know how many Cumbrians read this. If you do then Hiya. Anyway there are a couple of competitions coming up that you might be a wee bit interested in. Sorry folks but they are Cumbrian only. Makes a change from "anyone can apply but you'll be expected to move down to London" things. Move to London? But it's flat and has this unhealthy sun stuff and...well...Southerners.

So for those in the Northern climes we have the Theatre of the Lake 10th anniversary this year. This coincides with the 10th anniversary of the writing group I recently joined, North Cumbria Scriptwriters. As a result there are a couple of comps you can go for.

10 Plays for 10 Years. This is being run by the writing group and you can follow the link for more details. A chance to get your work on Radio Cumbria. The deadline is 25th August 2009 so plenty of time to work on a 5min radio play.

And on a shorter timescale there is this. CAN YOU WRITE … AND ARE YOU FUNNY?
WRITERS WANTED FOR THEATRE BY THE LAKE

If you are a writer living in Cumbria, and have a well-developed sense of humour which you can translate into the written word, then here’s a great opportunity to get exposure for your work at the county’s only producing theatre – Theatre by the Lake in Keswick.

As part of the theatre’s 10th anniversary celebrations, Associate Director Stefan Escreet is planning a series of free lunchtime readings the Circle Bar at the end of August – of comic material. The intention is to have 2 different 30 minute shows, each of which will involve 3-4 actors from the resident professional company.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
Each reading/performance and very short: say, a maximum of 10 minutes but really best to aim at 5 minutes. It also of course needs to be family-friendly, as it’s well before the 9 o’clock watershed and undoubtedly there’ll be kids around!

There’s no theme - just let your imagination run riot – and the readings can be stories or poems (including extracts from longer pieces), but MUST be original work, new material and FUNNY! Think irony, satire, stand-up, farce or subtle … but not short plays.

All work will of course be credited.

Entries should be typed on single sided sheets of A4, double line spaced and either sent as a Word email attachment (preferred) or as hard copies by post, in the first instance to:

Sue Allan sue.allan@edenarts.co.uk
Eden Arts
1 Sandgate
Penrith
CA11 7TP
DEADLINE: 12 JUNE

Stefan Escreet will select pieces for use during July and successful writers will be notified and kept in touch with the date(s) of readings of their pieces.

Useful Links

I've been trawling through my bookmarks and thought I'd add some useful ones to the bar at the side. I may get organised enough to sort them into categories one day but at the moment they are just in alphabetical order.



Hope you find something useful there and please let me know if any of the links don't work.