sore fingers

There's a surprisingly okay photo of me (for once) in this month's Locus, the one with Robert Heinlein on the cover. I have a vague memory of a Locus photographer taking a couple of shots of me (and Hal, and lots of other people) at the Glasgow Worldcon a couple of years ago. Lots of other photos of lots of other people in that magazine too, but it's nice nonetheless.

I spent most of this evening signing about six hundred bookplates for the approaching hardback publication. Sore fingers. Ouch. Prior to that, I spent part of the afternoon in the new BBC building by the Clyde, courtesy of a script editor - Lizzie Gray - who occasionally attends the screenwriting workshop that meets at a local arthouse cinema. Lizzie had asked people there and elsewhere for contributions towards a series of one-minute films which are intended less for actual broadcast, and more as a means to train staff and keep them busy when they're not filming anything else (or so I gather).

The inside of the new BBC is huge (picture above). From the ground at the entrance, it looks like somebody trapped a ziggurat inside a concrete box. Cool enough, in a vaguely Neo-Stalinist Brutalist Concrete sense. In fact, it looks more than anything else like a set from a Terry Gilliam movie inside; vast and stentorian, with unintentionally humorous posters hanging from the ceiling telling you to 'utilise your space for creative mixing through meeting, discussing and sharing ideas', and the kind of slightly cheesy bollocks you can imagine coming out of some brainstorming session where everyone is encouraged to 'think out of the box'. All that was missing, really, was a statue of Lenin, gripping one lapel and gesturing into the future.

Anyhoo, the script is called 'Dave, Unbound' and is a grand total of maybe two hundred and fifty words. Still, if it does get made, a very nice addition to the writing CV. We talked over some ideas in the (vast, stentorian) canteen for where to take the story, given the precise time limit of sixty seconds, and played around with some of Lizzie's own ideas. All in all a fun way to spend an hour, and a chance to check out a building I've been cycling past for a couple of years now.