Hooray it’s 2015. The future! The actual future. That’s where we live now. We’re here.
That’s the Back to the Future future anyway. Other futures include 1999 (as in Space), 2001 (as in a Space Odyssey) and 2010 (as in … another Space Odyssey). We’ve smashed through all those future and they were all fucking wrong … but this time, this time I’ve got a feeling we’re actually here.
Hoverboards and flying cars by October!
So this is my yearly end-of-year round up which I completely failed to do at the end of the year and am instead doing now.
2014 was a funny old year. I didn’t have a film produced for a start – which is odd for me, I’ve had one (more or less) produced every year for almost a decade so it feels a bit lacking.
There was the usual flurry of celebrity deaths and accompanying public grief. I find it all weirdly self-serving and tend not to get involved … but last year was the first year someone I’d actually met died. I didn’t like him much … but now he’s dead (assuming he is and it’s not all some sort of sick stunt for his next book) … well, no I still don’t like him. The fact he caused so much misery on his way out doesn’t help much either. He can ride his fucking pogo stick in hell.
On the other hand, it was a year of new stuff and exciting things. A year of regrouping and changing direction. Twice.
It was a year of earning more money by not getting films produced – a strange phenomena whereby people seem to be paying me to keep quiet. I earnt more last year than in the few previous years combined by writing things I actually enjoy with and for people who are actually interested in that specific film as opposed to just banging out any old tosh.
I’ve been doing uncredited re-writes on things and polishes and itty bitty bits and bobs like that.
I’ve written a couple of features for new clients which have come out well and been thoroughly enjoyable experiences.
I even got to work a bit more on one of my favourite scripts which has since gone out to actors (including a popstar whose jeans I once wore after his ex-girlfriend stole them and an actor so ridiculously A-list and cool that I’m not even allowed to think his name let alone tell anyone).
At the beginning of the year I was thinking all telly with some really cool meetings … but halfway through the year I accidentally got myself some US management and switched gears to US-focused studio movies. Well, sort of switched gears – it’s taken me six months to politely disengage myself from all previous UK commitments.
But I’m disengaged now and re-engaged with US stuff for 2015.
As for 2014 in blogs … well, it was a bit sparse. These things take up a lot of time and I don’t have much of it to spare. Still, for anyone who was or wasn’t paying attention, the blogging year went something like this:
A witter about Christmas and a moan about Sherlock, followed by bigging up Danny and Tim and then slating myself for being sexist.
First up was The Spec Chain … which we all agreed was a waste of everyone’s time. Particularly mine. Next up was a rumination on cliffhangers and page three (not the booby kind, the normal kind between pages two and four). In an amazing splurge of blogging I managed to write another post about minor character names which is at least vaguely interesting and then in an even more amazing splurge I actually wrote yet another post where I decided I’m the font of all factual knowledge.
So there.
Wow! Four posts in one month! I’m awesome at this blogging lark!
Ah, right … so March wasn’t so good. All I managed in March was that Blog Tour meme (which doesn’t count as a proper post) and a bit of a ramble about using bold in a script.
I think I’d decided to post every Monday at this point … and was already failing. Still, it’s good to fail fast.
Isn’t it?
Another 50 percenter – two out of four, not too bad. Unless there were five Mondays in April? In which case it’s piss poor. All I did that month was tell people not to get upset about not getting through the first round of the Red Planet Prize and burble on about synopses and why my first draft ones are always terrible.
Ooh, I also transformed a TARDIS into a War TARDIS – the first of many extra-writing projects I undertook in 2014.
The Need to Know List – ooh, that sounds exciting.
Oh. No. No it isn’t.
June brought the first installment of my Conversations to Quit Over series – a pointless grumbling of fucking moronic things I’ve been asked to do by people who should know better. I wonder how many installments of this thrilling series there will be?????!!!?!?!?!?!???!!!?!? ! ?
The rest of the month was me bemoaning my own inability to hold my enthusiasm back and a second shout out to Tim and Danny or, rather, to Nelson Nutmeg – pffft, bet they’ll never get that off the page.
Repointing the Pyramid – I like that analogy far more than I like that post which largely seems to be covertly apologising for not having finished a script.
Sorry.
Two posts this month! Hooray!
Or not, depending on your taste.
One about how script readers aren’t as stupid* as we think they are. And even when they are, just pretend they’re not. The other was about how one extra word on page one added a complete page to the end of the script – incredibly frustrating when you have to keep the page count under a certain (arbitrary) number. This is when the one page = one minute rule falls apart: one extra word = one extra page =/= one extra minute.
* Incidentally, a director who read the title as opposed to the post itself helpfully pointed out I’d written a script for him which was incredibly well received by script readers as proof they’re not all stupid. He then sent me all the super-positive comments to remind me how universally loved that script is. That was a lovely little ego-boost that was.
Hooray! Part two of Conversations to Quit Over – thank god for that, I was beginning to think there wasn’t a part two … or maybe that was just wishful thinking? Clearly I was a bit bored or busy in September since I rambled on about Tales of the Gold Monkey for ages in the first installment of a new series I’ll probably instantly forget about, posted photos of sexy TV stars …
… and then compared writing to cooking. I quite like that post. Here’s a musical interlude.
In October, shit got serious – I decided to be brave and attempt to do two projects live on-blog for all the world to see. No more fucking around, this would be a warts and all insight into the creation of a script and a Ghostbusters Proton Pack. Every Monday, without fail, an update. Here goes …
Yeah … well that didn’t happen.
The updates, I mean.
Or the script – other projects got in the way.
The proton pack, on the other hand …
Yeah … that was okay.
I also fessed up to being a Needy Writer in a post I quite like.
Which brings us to …
When all I did was re-plug this ebook:
Which is enough for one month, don’t you think?
December was a mad scramble to get everything done before Christmas and to finish off my last extra-writing project of the year for a New Year’s Eve party:
I made that costume. All of it. From scratch. Well, from material at any rate. Do you know how difficult it is to starch an Elizabethan ruff?
I do.
I made bits of Mandy’s too – the cool bits like the cape (actually made for a Robin costume) and the voice changer sewn into the hankie/mask.
Come to think of it, I made the background too.
But not the sofa.
Or the throne.
My favourite part of the costume was the codpiece – complete with squeaker. That’s the mark II codpiece there, the mark I codpiece went a bit wrong …
Not really suitable for a child-infested party. Still, all in all, I’m pleased with that.
And that was my year – a good year all round with codpieces and writing and new management and a proton pack. And a War TARDIS.
Who knows what 2015 will bring?
I do.
Happy (almost) New Year!
The Jobbing Scriptwriter 