friday night is all right for writing

One of the problems with working full time is it kind of kills the writing. Not only that, but after spending a very substantial chunk of last year stuck indoors and completely incapable of so much as walking out my front door without suffering agonizing pain, I now find it almost impossible to stay indoors once I do get home from the new job. Combine that with a variety of social engagements and excuses not to be in, and actually sitting in front of the computer and finishing the synopsis for the follow-up to Stealing Light starts to look like a remote possibility indeed.

If I'm not hanging out at a friend's house, almost certainly somewhere in the West End, I'm off to some gig or other, or out in the pub with other people, or at a party, or at a screenwriting group or ... you get the picture. Stay in? Write? Excuse me, I did that last year. Twenty-four hours a day, in fact, for the better part of six months. And it's sunny out there. Nonetheless, I've forced myself to finally, finally get somewhere near finishing the synopsis for Stealing Fire, as it's probably/maybe going to be called.

I had occasion recently to meet several people who worked in the Glasgow branch of Borders about the same time as me, some years ago. Many of them I hadn't seen since then; an annoying number of them are now also published novelists, annoying because I don't feel special any more, dammit. So it goes, I guess. In particular there's Simon Biggam and David Cunningham. The former is edited (so I gather) by Gillian, who used to be the events manager at Borders before heading south for a couple of years to work in publishing. That's not to mention the actors and artists who also made up a substantial part of the Borders staff.

I got a request from a chap at the screenwriting workshop, Kolin Ferguson (who was involved in the production and shooting of a Scottish Bafta award-winning short called Scene) to forward the script of Personal Jesus to him - and now he's forwarded it to several directors he knows. Whether any of them like it or not is another matter, but I'm still immensely grateful for Kolin's support - he's working on producing and shooting a short of his own, a comedy crime thriller set in Glasgow. I've read the script, and I've got a feeling it's going to beat even Scene, which was very, very good.

At the same time, an enquiry came through from another source about the script. I'm sort of curious to see if this one works out, but it's still too early to be anything but annoyingly vague about it. Let's just say I always thought Personal Jesus could work really well as an animation and leave it at that, until I have more - if anything - to report.