Things are quiet. At the moment, I spend a lot of time fighting fairly intense cabin-fever, and still looking for some kind of regular day work. There's the writing, but when it comes down to it I'm one of those people who needs fairly constant external stimulation in order to keep from running down - and that external stimulation usually comes in the form of part-time work. It gets me out of the house, talking to people, and making some extra money. I've applied for a couple of dozen jobs in the past month alone, but no success so far.

But, at the very least, I can get out in the evenings. This is a relatively quiet week, however, the first since the start of the year. Prior to this I've been out pretty constantly since post-Christmas with friends, and that's helped me at least retain my sanity a little bit. To this end I'm thinking about doing a little voluntary work of some kind, simply to get me out of the freaking house for a day or two a week.

In terms of actual writing, things are at least going pretty well. I'm halfway through my editor's edits on Stealing Light, and Tor/Pan MacMillan are generally making exceptionally positive noises concerning the book. This bodes well.

Then there's the ten-minute movie script, currently still caught in its own special form of development hell. It's been through another three drafts since it was first submitted to GMAC, and I think it's improved. The real problem facing myself, Shona (director) and to a certain extent Emily (development), is the cost of the project.

The script is set in a remote Scottish religious community. I've described it as a farmhouse surrounded by caravans, and beyond that a wire fence with surveillance cameras. There are other considerations, but as far as outside shooting goes, that's about it. It's only a ten minute movie, but in that space we have to show a lot.

Until now, it's only been a question of developing the script. But once that part has been done, myself, the director and a producer (assuming we can find one) are going to have to pitch this whole thing - again - to the people with the money, and if we can't prove we can make this movie for the available funds, then our chances of getting any funds at all are pretty much screwed.

Part of the problem is my own unfamiliarity with what it takes to make a movie. Because the idea is science fiction, this of course brings its own wealth of problems in terms of costs of shooting, and if anything trips us up, it's almost certainly going to be this. Other people will be filming scripts set in living rooms, suburban streets, or whatever. But we need ... an isolated community, robots, surveillance gear, you name it.

Next time, I write a story set in someone's living room.

So This Is Development Hell

The script ('Personal Jesus') continues to be redrafted, closer and closer to something that can be pitched in order to get the necessary finances. Between now and the initial meeting at the CCA, I've had several meetings with the director, with the development officer, with both of them, going over the story and refining it and getting it closer and closer to something like a shooting script (as opposed to something which merely describes the story with added dialogue).

It's a lot of work for something that might not happen, but it's better not to think that way. It might well happen, it might well not. Part of me wonders if it's better not to detail all the to-ing and fro-ing in case it does all fall flat on its face, but, eh.

A new review, this time from a German online site. Not too shabby, though given the aforementioned link is run through a translation engine, perhaps also unintentionally amusing.

A week or so ago, I made it along to a spoken-word performance night put together by one or two of the GSFWC-ers, under the name 'Word Dogs'. Some of the performances were excellent. Gavin Inglis was great, having come all the way over from Edinburgh to perform 'Fall of the House of Fraser'. I wish the guy would hurry up and get a video of one of his performances up on YouTube or similar so you could see how good he is, although perhaps some of the more 'Scottish' humour might be lost on our overseas brethren.

I'm Ready For My Close Up, Mr DeMille

Saturday before last I went up to Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in the centre of town and sat in a room with about forty other people who had also gained entry to something called the GMAC Talent Pool. GMAC is the Glasgow Media Access Centre, whose purpose is to 'bridge the gap between the local community and screen industry'.

So there I was with about forty people I've never met before, all of whom are involved in or interested in film making on some level. And let me tell you, the range was impressive: producers and directors who'd worked for the BBC, or the Discovery Channel, or had worked on a range of movies including the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films, along with several other writers in a position not unlike my own. The idea is by getting all these people together into a room - people who might otherwise never get to meet - Things Could Happen. Open, brazen networking might even take place.

Out of these forty or so people, about a dozen projects will be put together consisting of, I think, a director, a writer, possibly a producer, with a development officer negotiating between them all. Out of these dozen projects, five or six short movies will end up being commissioned, to be eventually transferred to 35mm for showing at film festivals as well as receiving some level of potential, perhaps limited syndication in the national cinema chains (or so I understand it). In other words, it's a kind of shortlist. I've got a short script in the running called 'Personal Jesus'.

Towards all this, we get various workshops on stuff like scriptwriting, direction, etc etc, thrown in - free. The whole process should take a couple of months. First there's getting a project together, then there's the commissioning, and then, if you're lucky enough to get far enough as getting the moolah to direct the damn thing, there's directing the film.

I talked about my script until I was hoarse. Same for the rest of them. I got maybe half a dozen email addresses, and a rapid enquiry of interest from a local director who's previously worked in documentary.

The one thing that really frightens me is figuring out how to visually create some of the ideas I've come up with on the script without actually hiring Industrial Light and Magic. The money available for each commissioned film is somewhere between five and fifteen grand, which is terrific if you're filming in someone's living room or street, but ... well, put it this way: there are robots in my script. Little knee high robots that look like soft toys. And a remote religious community, somewhere up in the North of Scotland, all with a vaguely 'Children of Men' atmosphere. And all kinds of stuff I'm (er, we're) going to have to think of a way to do really, really cheaply.

I spent part of Sunday afternoon wandering around Toys R'Us wondering if there was a way to rip the plastic carapace off one of those RoboSapiens toys and stuffing it inside something that looks like a two foot tall cuddly mannequin.

One of the things that interests me about all this, is that the script that got me this far is only about two and a half thousand words long. That's nothing, if you've written a novel. That's like some writers shopping lists. But those few pages of script have taken me to some interesting places.

Early days yet: but we'll see.

If, by any chance, you have emailed me anytime over the past few months and failed to receive an answer, feel free to resend: until yesterday, my domain was set up to redirect all messages to a single hotmail account which, I have come to suspect, may have been bouncing a lot of mail. I've now set up my main email address (the one on the left hand bar of this blog) to redirect to both a hotmail and a gmail account as well; so if your message doesn't get through to one, it should definitely get through to the other. Cheers.

I got a letter through several days ago telling me the short script I'd submitted to the Glasgow Media Access Centre's Cineworks project got to the next stage. I'm still not sure what it entirely entails, but as I understand it GMAC can fund short films, presumably on a government development grant of some nature. I've been told to expect a letter in the next few days, and then to be at a meeting taking place at Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts shortly thereafter. Again, I'm not sure what this will exactly entail, or even if the initial letter means I might (hopefully) see a short film of Personal Jesus being made.

Since I'm still new to a lot of this kind of thing, I make no assumptions; as far as I understand it, GMAC's primary focus is as a kind of networking facility for local film-makers, both professional and amateur, a way for budding or actual directors, actors, writers and so forth to meet and share ideas. In the meantime, I decided to bite the bullet and submit the script to the monthly screenwriting workshop I've been attending since the beginning of the summer.

While browsing the screenwriting workshop's website, I tripped across details of what very much appears to be an ongoing production of a science fiction movie set in Glasgow. There are some filmed sequences which appear well acted and at the very least to offer great potential; the story outline is perhaps deliberately sketchy. You can find it at www.thesimulation.co.uk, along with a great deal by the way of production notes and blogs. They also maintain a presence on MySpace.

I have found the light at the end of the tunnel, and its name is Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. I don't know how or why I never heard of this, but I just about had seizures laughing after I tripped over it on YouTube by semi-accident. Enjoy.

One other thing about Perfect Circle/Firecracker: it's short, which came up in a conversation between myself and Hal Duncan in the pub that despite the lengths of the books we both write, there's a lot of appeal in writing something much shorter. Firecracker is maybe three hundred pages - a rough estimate gave me a word count of between seventy and seventy-five thousand words. That's a little over half the length of the three books I've written so far for Tor UK. One of those can take me anywhere from three to six months to write, once I've got the intricate details of the plot worked out. I figure a book the length of Firecracker might be closer to six weeks, eight maximum. There's a lot of appeal in that because it means I could write a book outside of a contract 'between' contract books.

I did start writing a radio play a couple of weeks ago, but it stalled rapidly, partly because of outside stuff, and partly, maybe, because I was still tired after competing Stealing Light. I dug out the outline for A Hundred Houses - sort of a gothic horror-thriller - having forgotten how thoroughly I'd worked out the details of the story. It's all there. I can't help wondering if it might not be a good idea for the New Year to sit down and write the damn thing before I get lost in terminal procrastination.

I finally got around to reading Sean Stewart's 'Firecracker' (known as 'Perfect Circle' in the States) and found myself more than pleasantly surprised to find it entirely matched the hype it got on publication a couple of years ago. On the surface, it's about a guy called Bill 'Dead' Kennedy, so-called because of his love for punk and his ability to see and interact with dead people. There's some really nice touches in here, such as the ghost roads that materialise out of thin air and he's never quite had the nerve to go all the way down; or the fact he doesn't drive because he can't tell if the person he just had to swerve around in the middle of the road is really there, or dead and invisible to the rest of mankind.

Here's a snippet from an old review on SFSite.com by Donna McMahon:

Perfect Circle is about lots of things. It's about gender roles and class in a vividly drawn modern Texas. It's about ownership -- of people, money and guns -- and about pride, guilt and rage. It's a searing snapshot of "normal" life in a working class suburb of America where the dead people seem a lot more functional than the living ones.

It's also a good story, with a funny, likeable protagonist who we find ourselves rooting for despite his blatant flaws. Finally, pop culture mavens will get a kick out of the contemporary music references (all of which were lost on me, but what the heck).

This is a real rarity -- an intelligent, sensitive and entertaining novel about what it means to be male. I think it will speak most strongly to men, but it should appeal to many readers, mainstream as well as genre.

What Donna nails is that the book stretches out far beyond the default genre considerations, mainly thanks to the depth and quality of Stewart's characterisation. If you've got a bunch of book tokens by New Year, you could really do a lot worse than get your hands on this book.

I finally made it along to the refurbished Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow the other day - it's right around the corner from where I used to live on the edge of the West End. I particularly enjoyed the display of traditional African weaponry - shields, spears, and a very prominent AK47 in the centre of the case. Nice one.

Something occurred to me as I toured the exhibits and paintings with a friend: that it's easy to spot Scottish art, particularly traditional Scottish art, because everybody looks utterly miserable. There's the painting of a young child's funeral, outside a bleak cottage on a bleak hillside while bleak clouds sail overhead. Or the bleak last stand of a clan defending some miserable looking crag, or waiting bleakly for a ship to take them to the New World and away from the old, etc, etc. I can't remember too many of the details beyond that because it was all getting a bit bleak. Picture some corny chocolate box illustration of a Victorian street scene except everyone looks suicidal and you've pretty much got the picture.

I have a habit of missing the boat where particular online memes are concerned, but this is partly because writing deadlines are just about the only deadlines I meet in this or any other life. There was a recent blog-a-thon thing over Carl Sagan, and memories thereof, the idea being to commemmorate him. Two things I can say about Carl: when I think about his tv series Cosmos, the thing that always cracked me and friends at school up wasn't the way he said 'billions and billions', it was the way he said 'organic soup'.

Second memory: I'd almost forgotten about this one, shockingly enough. Sagan gave a public lecture at Glasgow University in the mid-Eighties.

I was there. Weirdly enough, the above link appears to imply he did quite a few lectures here, but I only recall one. Perhaps it was a paid thing and I couldn't afford any more than one, although I could have sworn (and of course memory fails me) it was free.

I remember it rapidly turned into a war between the Enlightenment and that Old Time Religion. Some bloke behind me and my then-girlfriend were arguing over exactly how many wings different types of Angel had, according to their Heavenly ranking system. Sagan batted through their arguments and shouted promises of salvation in the next life like Arnie in Terminator 1 drilling his way through a police station full of surprised cops. Now there's a memory.

After speaking to Bill King a couple of weekends ago (Bill's the author of several novels for Games Workshop) he gave me an old Palm handheld computer that was getting a bit old and that had been gathering dust. I've never managed to get my hands on one of these things or even get much of an opportunity to use one, so naturally, I wanted one really badly. Partly because I was aware some people - like Bill - have done a lot of writing and editing on these machines with the use of a portable keyboard.

By the way, if you have one of these things because of your work so you hate it, don't blame me, when I play with the thing it still feels like it dropped from out of twenty minutes into the future and straight into my hands.

I've got a roll-up keyboard I've never had a chance to use; however it's usb, so won't plug into the palm. So either I need another keyboard, or some kind of adapter. The idea that you could write, edit and so forth on something so small is still amazing to me. It also ties into my reaffirmed desire to 'do' something in the summer of 2007, like visiting the States or Europe for several weeks, finances depending. If I did do such a thing, being able to write on the hoof has a huge amount of appeal.

So far, it's been a busy December, without much in the way of writing. My boiler died, and it cost me more money than I'd really rather spend after several months unable to work both to get it fixed and to replace the ailing and now somewhat dangerous old boiler. I just spent the better part of a fortnight without any heating because it died after nearly blowing itself off the kitchen wall. My heating is back, but my savings have taken a big dent. My current lodger is leaving in early January, about the worst time to be trying to get someone new in. I've always got someone in really fast, though, so I don't think there'll be a problem. A friend has been muttering about taking the room for a couple of weeks, circumstances depending, while in-between places.

Otherwise, I find myself thinking no longer in terms of 'when I get better' so much as 'now that I'm better'. A couple of miles brisk walk is no problem now, which is good because I need the exercise. The only thing keeping me off the bike at the moment, really, is that it's so cold, although one of the wheels may need replaced and it probably needs a tune-up at the bike shop.

Every now and then, someone comes up with a point of view on some current topic - something so clearly and concisely true - that it offers itself up as the kind of conversational gambit that, in the mind at least, can easily be imagined creating one of those surprised and speechless breaks in a flow of heated conversation relating to that topic.

The topic: Iraq and the Bush Administration. There's an interview with James Morrow - one of the great satirists, and author of erudite and excoriating novels such as Towing Jehovah (about a tug delivering the fallen body of God, all one and a half kilometres of him, from the Equator where he landed to the North Pole before he gets stinky) - in the new Locus, and if you go here you can read an excerpt from that interview, in which he says:

For me, the great irony of our time is that even as Bush is denouncing Darwin, condemning stem-cell research as blasphemy, and encouraging what he calls 'faith-based initiatives,' his administration is hoping against hope that something resembling a rational, secular, post-Enlightenment republic will emerge in Iraq. It's a towering irony.

And that nails it, really.

Just over a week since I finished the book, and I feel like I'm finally starting to recover. I spent about six or seven days flopping about, getting inexplicably tired at various times, and waking up at really odd hours. Things have stabilised in the past day or two, though, and I'm getting up and going to bed at (for me) normal times.

Outside of that, I think the universe is telling me it's really, really time I got another day job.

Let's have a look at the list of cataclysms so far: my laptop died, and I bought a mac mini to replace it. Cost, about three hundred quid. Then there's the new sofa from Ikea - cost, about the same. Okay, it wasn't an essential, but I got it several weeks before everything else went haywire. A giant bill from the electricity company (long story) doesn't help either. Then my boiler died the other day. Cost of fixing or replacing: don't even ask, because I'm not sure I want to know. I have someone I've been recommended coming around next week. And now my mortgage is going up. Hoo-fucking-ray.

I'm not penniless - yet. But given I'm walking home from the West End a lot these days, I think I might be more or less fixed. More or less, because I still get some pain, but probably not any more than a lot of people have to deal with in the course of their normal working day.

What I do, normally, is graphic design on the lower end of the scale - meaning, I don't usually originate illustrations, and the majority of what I wind up doing is by the standards of the trade relatively simple, using software like Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop and so forth. I could probably get full time work, but that would severely cut into the writing. So I figure come the New Year, if nothing else has shown up by then, I'll get a job in some small shop somewhere for a couple of days a week. That, plus the money I get from a lodger, should just about keep me afloat.