Art Is Never Finished…

Art Is Never Finished…

…only abandoned. When IS my screenplay finished? Every time I don’t finish a script, I think of this observation attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It’s partly the nature of the beast. You keep tweaking, until somebody takes it away from you. Should...
Cartography for Writers

Cartography for Writers

World building is a big thing for writers today. Readers and viewers like to escape to the familiar, fantasy or unknown worlds where our characters dwell. As we embark on designing our new world, we’re thinking landscape and orientation, key features and...
New Normal

New Normal

What is the New Normal? I cut my hair with kitchen scissors today. Some of you mutter, “That’s not normal.” Which was deliberate on my part, because now I can ask you, “What is normal?” The old one has gone and none of us has any idea...
Writer’s Learning Curve

Writer’s Learning Curve

2019: Context, Focus, and Distraction I’ve travelled my latest learning curve in what has been a strange year for me and for most Brits, I think. I won’t be sorry to see the back of it, although things can always get worse. What writer was ever an...
Peak Performance

Peak Performance

I can’t believe it. We’re almost halfway through 2019. Feels like I haven’t done much these past few months, but I try to measure writing progress in more than output. Thinking time is also writing time, although a working writer needs it on the...
Format Matters

Format Matters

I Hear You, I See You To begin a discussion about why format matters in screenwriting, I’m going to start with an amazing story. In 1977, NASA launched two exploration vehicles into space, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were programmed to explore around Jupiter and the...
My 2018

My 2018

The Helsinki Bus Station Theory If any writer’s roller-coaster emotional journey could be plotted on a graph, it would probably look like a sin wave, or like the knee-jerk stock-exchange pic I’ve attached to this post.  Writer, do you ever feel like one of those...

Flat Squirrel Book

It’s out! FLAT SQUIRREL My new book for middle graders, and for grown-ups who never grew up. I had a lot of fun writing it, although there were the tough bits of nailing the story logic and making the prose readable. You’ll find it in the Troubador...
Focus or Die

Focus or Die

Focus or die is a line from my new book, FLAT SQUIRREL, to be published on 28 June this year. It’s in the screenplay too, which I wrote just for fun, since animation studios like to write their own scripts and I’m not inside the magic circle. Yet. Blogging...
How To Survive the NaNoWriMo Quicksand

How To Survive the NaNoWriMo Quicksand

NaNoWriMo is the acronym for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a 30-day write-fest in which you write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. It happens every November. Breaking this down, you have to nail 1667 words a day, on average, for each day of the month....