Blah blah blah

So, while I'm here, what have I been up to recently?

Well, writing productivity has been up and down. After putting the blog on hold at the end of August, I gave my feature-length Foot Soldiers script the attention it deserved. I've got to the end of a fourth draft which has gone just about as far as I can take it for now, so I'm going to pack that off to an interested agent as soon as I can print it out. 

I hit my deadline for that, leaving me free for the attempt I was hoping to make at NaNoWriMo. I changed my mind about the story I wanted to write; instead of a half-developed comic idea from a few years ago (which I still want to revisit), I returned to Bulletproof Faces - a feature-length crime script I wrote before doing my MA and had consequently written off as 'prentice work'. 

Anyway, I wasn't really expecting to rattle off the 50,000 words within the month, 'cos we were off to LA for a week in the middle of it to celebrate Jane's birthday. Plus, other things came up: I was asked to help judge a screenwriting contest, and I spent some time on a short story to meet a competition deadline. Then, the air quality on the flight home was so awful that we were both ill for over a week after we got back.

Still, I managed to get around 12,000 words down over 10 days or so, and I'm hoping to pick up momentum on the novel again over the next couple of weeks. Fortunately I've got about 2,000-3,000 words of draft to type up, so that'll get me back into the rhythm of it. 

I don't think I'll end up with anything that I want to send out as a sample of work, but hopefully it'll be a nice warm-up exercise for something fresher that I want to try and get into next year.  

I've got various plans for what to do next. Part of me wants to go back and do another pass on The Last of the Reality Police, my main MA script from a couple of years ago, but another part thinks that banging out an endless sucession of feaure scripts isn't the most strategic or practical way of getting noticed. Besides, I think Foot Soldiers is a much more accomplished bit of work, so I'll be giving that a good run out in the new year.

I've really enjoyed writing prose over the past few weeks, so I'll try and stick with that, but I've also been sitting on a couple of ideas for a while that I'd like to try and develop into radio plays. I've also got a vague notion for something very economical that could be constructed in a 6x5min webisode sort of format.  

I've also - Gawd 'elp me - got a bit of a compulsion to try and direct a couple of shorts. The first one I've got in mind would be a one-minute, one-location, two-character quickie. That would be more of a technical exercise than anything else, as a warm up for another fairly straightforward three-hander of around eight minutes. I'm going to start trying to find (experienced) collaborators in the near future.

In other news....

• Care and Control, the social work drama pilot I co-wrote, qualified for the murky later stages of the Red Planet Prize
  
  
• I deleted my Twitter account when it seemed to be becoming too much of a distraction, and then opened another with a very similar handle a few weeks later (@Tomeen_Murphy)
  
  
• We had a fab time in LA! Look! Here's me having a drink at the rooftop bar at The Standard!

So that's what I've been up to. I guess that should have been a year-end review post, but just putting it all down has helped me to get it all straight in my noddle. Let's meet here next year and see what's happened.