Scriptwriter
I’m always writing notes for one thing or another. It helps pass the time if I’m waiting in a very long bank queue, or trying to look busy and productive. At some point, those scribbles on recycled paper are scrutinised in the hope that something interesting has popped out of my idling brain. Below is an …
Late last year, I got asked to work up a little something that would probably open with — BASED ON A TRUE STORY. I hadn’t done a based-on-actual-events job before* but I accepted the gig because 1. it paid, and 2. how hard could it be? The concept was simple enough: a mini-series based on …
Yes, 2020 was quite the year. I had plans: people I’d worked with in the preceding years also had plans that were progressing, and those progressing plans’ becoming could/would/should have made 2020, like, My Year. But, alas. I could/would/should have been more productive so that at the beginning of a new year, I could look …
INT. DEN, FORTRESS MAMEA -- AFTERNOON THE LOVELY WIFE, a slab of “Owner Builder” MAGAZINES on her lap, glances up at her PET WRITER’s reading: a NOVEL by [a very famous New Zild writer]. THE LOVELY WIFE How’s it going? PET WRITER ... Ehh. I’m fifty pages in and it’s all been introductions of a …
This time last year, I opened up issue 192 of The Walking Dead and did my usual first-pass read — the kind of breath-held-whaat’s-happeniiing-neeeext first-pass read — and partway through I sat back, stunned. I remember turning to the Lovely Wife and telling her what I’d just read. (Not a comic reader herself, she made a sympathetic …
It’s that time of year when baby birds drop out of nests — or nests themselves drop out of trees — and whomever chances across such sights must decide between nurture or nature. Much as I front as a man of the land, when I come across such a sight, the choice is obvious. View …
This is the view of Wellington from the International Institute of Modern Letters’ work room: Contrary to The Lovely Wife‘s opinion of Wellington weather, this was how the city looked most days I met with my fellow scriptwriters. What can I say about my year in that work room? We all worked hard to be in there. We …
Late last year, I had the brilliant idea of doing a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. The University of Auckland offers an equivalent MA and is only a couple of hours drive south of Fortress Mamea, but there was a certain je n’ais se quoi that an MA from the International Institute of Modern Letters at the Victoria University of Wellington held for …
I have a number of reputations to uphold, among them a prodigious appetite for saturated fats. Cheesecake and doughnuts have been a staple for a large part of my life, and I can only presume that obesity and diabetes have been kept at bay only by the love of a good woman and semi-regular exercise. …
I suppose it’s an annual pilgrimage: as Matariki descends upon this lush nation, I take myself to my hometoon of Wellington for a bit of colour and culture. The Lovely Wife didn’t accompany me this year as our schedules didn’t work out (and we’d been down this way only a few weeks earlier). This time …
