Feel Good TV

I'm back from my trip up to Cumbria to visit family (not that I told you I was going), and I come back a year older - I'm 33 years and 2 days old as I write this.

For my birthday I got (among other things) Scrubs seasons 2 and 3. This is my feel good TV. It used to be Friends but when I watch the repeats it just seems so dated and I wonder why I ever liked it.

Feel good TV is great; you find yourself alone in the house with an afternoon to spare and nothing to do, so you watch your feel good TV and have the most relaxing afternoon you can remember. Some people may reach for the computer and visit interesting (ahem) web sites, but I'd settle for Scrubs. Plus I know my wife sometimes reads this blog, so it's not like I'd admit to that here ;)

I was off work yesterday and my better half was out with the kids for the afternoon, so I had my fix. I'll be okay until the end of season 3 and then I'll have to suffer the shakes because I don't think season 4 is out yet.

Writers out there may be horrified to hear that I didn't use the afternoon to rattle off a good handful of pages, but I remember my resolution to write at my own pace and only when I feel like it (I'm determined to prove I'll write more that way).

Anyway, I'll rattle more pages off tonight as I think I'm in a writing mood. To aid in this I seem to have developed the ability to write in the living room with a 4 year old running around and the TV on. Admittedly I only manage a page in the time it would normally take me to write four or five, but one page is still better than nothing.

Later

C

Page count increasing.

The time is approaching again:

I am soon to hit the "end of act one" mark with the hit man script. I am over half way through the first act and may have a little trouble getting things in the correct place (I don't want to drag it out to page 60), and I do want to keep this script out of my act one pile.

Wow, what a link that was (I should be on the radio or TV). If you have an act one pile check out the following:

The Act One Project.

Register your interest by leaving a comment here, on the project blog (follow the link above or on the right), or drop me an email with Act One Project in the subject. Leave contact details and I'll be in touch.

Later

Chris

The Act One Project

The hit man script has been added to, so I'm now allowed to post this.

Let me introduce a little collaborative project I've thought up:

The Act One Project.

I know we all struggle to get on with our own spec scripts, but I'm thinking a little structure may help speed up the writing process and allow us to put the odd stalled act one to some use.

If you are interested then leave a comment here, on the project blog, or drop me an email with the subject "Act One Project" and I'll be in touch (don't forget to leave your contact details).

Kind regards

Chris

Changes Complete

I think I've got all the changes to the new template made:

• I've replaced HaloScan comments with blogger comments.
• I've got the progress bars back.
• My blogroll links now open in new windows (please let me know if your pop-up blocker doesn't like that).
• I've got SiteMeter linking again.

That should do me for now and if you are new here I apologise as most of this will mean nothing to you. Writing posts will resume shortly.

Later

C

Do you fear change?

After waiting for ages, I've finally been moved over to the new style of blogger.

Has a good thing came to someone who waited? We'll see.

To mark this monuments occasion I will be changing the look and feel of the blog to take advantage of the new features. I will probably put HaloScan to bed as what I use for comments and move to blogger comments. They have served me well as they are not password protected and only had one piece of spam (manually entered I'm sure), but one must move with the times and it will mean one less web account to manage. This also means that historic comments will disappear, but I can live with that. I just hope you guys can put up with the word verification (but most blogs have that nowadays).

Of course, new people coming to this blog after the event reading the archives will have no idea what I am on about, but that can’t be helped (I currently use a white template and before that (and a week of "suck it and see" template experiments) it was orange (yuck)).

I'm determined to do more writing tonight so I may get to post about a little collaborative project I've go up my sleeve.

Later

C

Let's try it this way instead

True to my resolution, I have written more before I wrote this post.

The hit man thing is moving along at a slow pace, but that's the important thing; the moving.

I have decided to take a different approach to my writing this year. In the past I would go out of my way to make sure I wrote as much as possible, and then get pissed off when I didn't manage anything. This year I'm putting myself under no such pressure. If I don't manage to put finger to keyboard for 3 weeks then that will be fine. I'll plod along at a snail's pace if I must, but all that matters is I plod along.

All that said, it does seem to downsize my ambitions towards screenwriting as a career. In the past I would have said something like: "Write and polish three screenplays and use then to get an agent…", but 3/4 of a screenplay won't get me that (not that 3 polished efforts would guarantee it either, but you know what I mean).

This isn't really a step back from things, but more of a less ambitious approach. I'm sure many, many people would disagree and say 100% ambition is a must to succeed, but I think ambition can often get in the way. Sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees.

Who knows, less pressure may mean this approach may become more productive.

Later

C

Resolutions and Rules

So 2007 has arrived and life goes on.

I've thought about making a large list of resolutions (like get fit, promoted at work, get an agent, sell a screenplay, make a ton of extra money, work for myself), but I won't commit to anything more than the following:

Write a new spec script.

Simple as that. If you look over on the right you will see a new script has appeared (the hit man one). You could say I have cheated a bit as I kicked it off on New Year's eve when the most people were partying, but I'll put it down as effort from this year.

One other thing that I will change is the order blog and write. I know I had a blogging absence at the end of 2006, but apart from that I always tried to blog once a day. This usually meant that by the time I had done that and caught up with my blogroll, I had no time left to write. So the new rule:

I am not allowed to blog until I have written at least one page.

Well there you have it. Now I should get on with it.

Later

C