To mark my 50,000th tweet on my Twitter account, I have made this graph, detailing my time on Twitter and the major successes and failures therein. Think yourself lucky, I was considering writing that up as a blog post. (You may want to click on it to make it bigger, as it’s barely legible at this size.)
Tonight, I finished Script Frenzy. As I did with NaNoWriMo, I think it’s time for some kind of blog in which I look back on the experience, before I forget about it forever and move on to a new writing project, like the cheap no-attention-spanner that I probably am.
To keep this structured, I have once again broken my learnings down to three points, which I’m going to number…
I’ve done NaNo a few times now, and it has always been a huge, life-consuming experience. Every time I’ve missed doing my NaNo words for a given day, it’s with the knowledge that the next two or three days are going to be crap as a result.
Script Frenzy, I did 25% of the page count on the last two days, and it wasn’t particularly hard work. This isn’t because scripting is easier than prose, I stress, just that 100 pages of script in a month isn’t as hard a target as 50,000 words.
Not sure what we can learn from this going forward. I could try 200 pages next year?
I wrote a lot of comic scripts in my early twenties, and then kinda stopped, mostly because I didn’t have enough money to pay someone to draw them, and the networking and praying involved in getting someone half-decent to draw them for free was a bit much.
Of course, I now have savings, although I was perhaps going to save them for buying a house or something, rather than vanity comic publishing. But I did still enjoy doing it again, so I might look into whether it can be made to go somewhere.
In that NaNo post-game blog, I mentioned that it was time to pension off my huge elderly laptop, and I did indeed manage to upgrade it to a nice netbook, that was donated to me for free by someone from Twitter. Score.
So I’ll mention here that a reasonable chunk of my Script Frenzy was written on it, the battery runs for a good two hours, and I am quite happy with that. Hoorah.
Recently, I was talking to someone from the Philippines through the world wide internet, and they got very excited about the prospect of the Royal Wedding. Since they are not part of our Empire (present or former), or our white western monoculture, I asked them what that was all about.
Apparently it was because it was a “fairy tale”, and they wouldn’t expect me to understand because I’m male. I readied myself to deliver a sarcastic rebuttal, but it took more thought than I expected. After all, it is a Prince marrying his long-term sweetheart. As fairy tales go, that’s pretty textbook.
I can hear angry men rushing to the comments box to destroy me now, and you’d be right, there are a few things stopping the marriage of Wills & Kate joining Snow White and Sleeping Beauty in the children’s section of the library. But most of the reasons we all gripe about the Royal Wedding are the trappings surrounding it, rather than the thing itself, no?
Ironically, what makes us cynical and bitter are often attempts by others to make it more of a fairy tale than it really is. Would it be more like Cinderella if William was marrying a blue-collar commoner, instead of someone upper middle class at the lowest? Of course it would.
But unfortunately he isn’t. And that’s before we’ve even discussed souvenir tat, the Channel Five TV movie thing, attempts to tie utterly unrelated products into the event for a quick buck.
But the reason everyone is now desperately trying to pump up the fairy tale value of the day is because they’ve seen that the spark is there. And there are precious few events nowadays that even manage that much. If the Royal Family serve any purpose at all in the modern world (I said if), it’s this: providing larger than life events for people to feel okay about buying into.
Don’t get me wrong, I will probably spend the Magical Day either asleep or watching an unrelated DVD. But if other people who want to feel that small fairy tale tingle, leave them be. Avoid certain TV channels, skirt around central London, maybe stay off Twitter for a bit and you’ll be amazed how quickly it passes you by.
The hay fever is toying with me. Normally as soon as the sunny weather starts, so too does the runny nose, itchy throat and streaming eyes, and I find myself popping pills to keep it under control. And this, of course, has a knock-on effect on my alcohol tolerance, etc.
This year, it’s been holding back. Friends who suffer with me have fallen one by one, Twitter tells of snot explosions far and wide, so I’ve been fully expecting my own insides to burst outwards in sympathy.
My mum always used to tell me that she once had hay fever and “grew out of it”. Every year in my late teens, I hoped this would finally be the day that I outgrew the need for a mucous outlet pipe from my face. But it kept coming back and back, and eventually I resigned myself to perpetual pollination.
But this year, I find my childish hopes of a magic cure resurfacing. I’ve not done anything to treat it – I hear you can try controlled exposure to local honey, or have yourself “desensitised”, which sounds horrifying – but it’s mostly quiet nonetheless.
I said “mostly”. On Saturday I went to a picnic and lay down in the grass for a while, almost daring the fever to break. And for about fifteen minutes, I thought I felt it coming. A tingle in my throat, maybe a teasing drip of snot. So I reckon it’s in there somewhere waiting for the most inconvenient moment, probably during one of my attempts to talk to girls.
Anyone else find the hay fever being weirdly quiet this year? Has the pollution finally killed off a certain type of pollen? Or am I just having a contrary 2011?
Good morning. Another week, another Friday story. I’m a little annoyed I didn’t notice Friday was April Fools Day when I wrote it, as I’m sure I could’ve come up with something. Alas, it came to me too late to produce a new one. (It was about midnight last night.)
Anyway, as mentioned in yesterday’s Script Frenzy blog post, my frenzying may stop me from posting these stories in the next month or so, although I will still give it a go. But if not, you could always read the entire archives.
Or, if you are really desperate for more short stories in the near future, I might have something interesting to declare here next week. Maybe.
Well, my name is Peter. I am in my room, with the lights on, the heating turned up and a couple of cereal bar wrappers on the floor. I don’t have a girlfriend, a flatmate or even a pet. So there is really nothing else here, except for JS-90701.
I work somewhere anonymous. I don’t do anything interesting, but sometimes they carry exciting things past me. The security is amazing; you’d think it was the army. In fact, perhaps it is, I wouldn’t know. They are all in suits and shades, rather than khaki browns, but who knows what the military fashion is nowadays? Anyway, sorry, my point: they carry these containers past, flanked by machine guns.
Sometimes they’re big, and other times very small. And every so often, the security men stop for a breather and a dump quite near my cubicle. There are often seconds when the stuff is unguarded, and I don’t think it’s in the arc of any security cameras. A foolish mistake, really.
You sound like a bright girl, so you might be able to guess where is headed. I managed to swipe the box, and I really did expect a gun barrel pressing into the back of my head at any moment. Or perhaps they’d forego the formalities and shoot me there and then, I don’t know. It depends how valuable this is.
It’s not as heavy as I expected, which is handy. I was back at my desk, sitting calmly, before they noticed anything. Of course, I was a pretty obvious suspect, but this is the one part I had planned. My computer opened easily. Most people, especially ones who didn’t have to use them much, tend to see them as a single solid box.
Of course, it was always possible that the grunt who searched my desk would have been the one who understood there’s enough empty space inside a computer to hide the box. But he was exactly as I’d hoped. I was frisked, charmingly, my desk was turned upside down, but my computer was not opened up. Lifted up, but kept closed.
I had to throw it out of the window to get it out of the building, of course, as we were being searched on the way out, but retrieving it and running home was painless. And here we are.
It says “JS-90701” in stencilled type on the side. It is metal, barely bigger than my clenched fist and with a blinking light on the side I half-expected it to contain some futuristic homing device, bringing helicopters over my house within minutes, but there is no chopping yet.
Now, I know we’re meant to ask for advice when we call your helpline, so I guess my question is this: What do I do with it now? I mean, I did it partly for the thrill, partly because I hoped it might be profitable, but I can’t open it. How am I meant to list it on eBay? “Stolen military box, serial number JS-90701, mint condition UNOPENED!!!”?
Surely no-one would bid, and even if they did, I’d be arrested before they could collect their winnings. I’ve heard about the black market, maybe this is the sort of thing I am meant to sell to terrorists, but where does one find those people?
I’ve studied it in some detail, but can’t see an obvious catch or switch to flick. I suppose it’s meant to be secure. I’ve got a few tools, a hammer, crowbar, y’know, but what if it explodes? What if it’s booby trapped? What if it’s radioactive and all my sperm have already died?
Do you really think I should give it back? You’re not just saying that because you think you should? I mean, you really mustn’t worry, you can’t be implicated and I’ve made sure you don’t know enough to involve yourself. “Peter” isn’t my real name, and you won’t find anything if you google “JS-90701”. Trust me, I’ve been trying for hours.
But you really mean it? Well, I guess I could. Not walk up to them, obviously, that’s fucking suicide, but maybe leave it in reception or something? Try and wash my fingerprints off it first.
Still, it seems like such an anti-climax, doesn’t it? I mean, I wanted my life to have meaning and I’ve stolen an mysterious blinking metal box from a bunch of genuine Men In Black. If I can’t make any money, I owe itself to at least find out what’s in there, don’t I?
Yeah, thanks. I think I’m going to do,it, y’know? I’ve got my tools, there’s no-one else around, so it’s safe unless it’s a nuclear bomb. And let’s face it, it’ll probably be a rock sample anway.
Thanks very much for talking this through with me, young lady. If they listen back to this call in the future, and perhaps they will, I hope they take my advice and give you a pay rise. After all, you’ve definitely helped me, even if it wasn’t in a conventional way.
I’ll have to hang up now, I’m about to wedge JS-90701 under my bed so I can get a solid swing at it with the hammer. Take care of yourself, though.
You’re totally welcome to steal these stories and definitely shouldn’t bother emailing me if you want to use them elsewhere. April fool! (Was that funny? No?)
Yes, it’s time for a non-story blog post. I am (probably) going to be doing Script Frenzy in April, so I thought I would do a nice intro to it. After all, Script Frenzy is the scripting equivalent of NaNoWriMo, and I did a preamble blog for them.
Script Frenzy requires I produce 100 pages of script in a month, which doesn’t sound too hard. After all, I wrote a sitcom script a couple of months back, and ended up producing 35 pages in less than three days, so I’m going into this primarily with the attitude that it’ll be a fun aside that won’t dominate my life.
If it does take over my writing time completely, I will probably ditch it and focus on the novel, but I have found a scripting project I actually want to do, so hopefully this won’t be too futile. I have a novel I wrote for NaNo a few years back which I thought might make a decent comic book. (Or “graphic novel” if you’re unwilling to admit you read comics.)
Thus I’ll be attempting the adaptation process. This carries the added bonus of not requiring a new idea, only a bit of re-planning.
Fans of this website will be sad to hear it may stop me producing Friday stories during the month of April, sorry about that. I may attempt some blog posts about Script Frenzy; if not, there will definitely be updates on my Twitter. Oh, and if you too are doing Script Frenzy, feel free to add me as a “Writing Buddy” or whatever people do.