Indelible Freckles

So many things to post about. So few braincells to spare. Meantime, I give you these wonderful links to enjoy:

• Alan Moore is interviewed about his career and latest work, Lost Girls.

• Jeremy Slater has same cry-out-loud posts (here and here) about Heroes creator Tim Kring. Mm… maybe not for Heroes fans.

• Phill Barron is writing a feature screenplay in one week. The man is insane. Virtual rubber-neckers can follow his progress so far: Day One and Day Two.

• It’s that wonderful time of year when the Vidiots hold their annual Dead Pool competition. They may only be in it to see which newbie show karks it first, but for me it’s a good indicator of what to look forward to in the near future. Pushing Daisies and Dirty Sexy Money seemed to pass muster; here’s hoping The Bionic Woman and the long-silent Josh Friedman’s The Sarah Connor Chronicles do the same.

• Stephen Fry - yes, that Stephen Fry - has a blog. Nuff said, mm?

Messrs. Ethan Smith and Kurt Oram, the DOP and Soundie/Editor on Daniel Power’s Hunting the Phoenix, have a website: Tuna Town Productions.

They keep busy. And it looks like they have fun regardless. (Check out their equipment page: Senor Rodriguez’ Ten Minute Film School - eat yer heart out.)

(Deadlines have been met - normal transmission shall resume.)

Been flat out with work this past week. Not even enough time to throw together a Point & Click. I’ve more of the same this coming week.

Meantime, try Phill Barron’s blog on the scriptwriter’s life in the shallow end - ask him about his supercool new laptop.

I managed to get the number of Unread posts down to less than 200 when I add a few new feeds - and phwappp as the Unread posts leap gaily to 315. Fine. I can keep up with my essential daily reading out of the way. If I don’t sleep.

• There is life after How To Write Screenplays - Badly - scribe Jeremy Slater has himself a new blog: Hi My Name is Jeremy Slater. The blogging scriptwriter field may be pretty crowded but few - very few - blogs are as deliciously laugh out loud as Mr Slater’s.

• For a hands-on approach to TV-writing, Jill Golick’s Running With My Eyes Closed is a fantastic resource complete with case studies. (Look! A breakdown of The Wire pilot!)

• TV writer and producer (Millenium, Medical Investigation, and Killer Instinct) Kay Reindl has a badass blog called seriocity. Her honesty about her travails are searing and refreshing - and a reminder that you mess with writers at your peril.  (Fedora-tip to the once quiet Lee Thomson for Mesdames Golick and Reindl.)

• Check out ammani over at filthy, funny, flawed, gorgeous for bite-sized prose that resonates. Personal favourites so far are this and this.  (Fedora-tip to The Goddess who I’ve recently gotten addicted to blog-reading.)

• And finally, thanks to National Radio, I discovered that the mercilessly acerbic and clinically hysterical comedian Mike Loder has a website. Sweeet. No blog but it has some brilliant pieces on jury service and the annual Erotica expo.

Enjoy.

- despite the presence of the following words:

• shoot (2x)

• dead (1x)

I thought (hoped) I was less well-behaved than that.

(Fedora-tip to Idiot/Savant.)

Cruisin’… cruuuisin’… cruuuisiiiin’…

• Just discovered the gorgeously effervescent Julie Goes to Hollywood, previously Things They Don’t Tell You in Film School, whose Bunuelesque observations on Juliewood, California have to be read to be believed. Meet her here; see her here.
• James Moran at the pen is mightier than the spork has an interesting blow-by-blow account of his rise and rise as a screenwriter, from getting an agent through to a finished product.
• James Henry joins the blogroll because of his impeccable taste in comics. And he’s a Green Wing-er. (Fedora-tip to Danny Stack.)
• The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain have a blog where the posts aren’t just parochial - you’re as likely to hear about why Hollywood neglects women as the juicy possibility that the BBC is planning a producers academy. RSS feeds are, like, just so cool.
• Helen Leggatt has an entertaining and illuminating blog, A Brit in the Boonies, on life as a Pom immigrant on the Cantabrian plains. I recommend her plum jam recipe.
• Donna of Mike and Donna’s Adventures fame has been busy. Mike’s travels provide proof that real life will always be much crazier than whatever fevered imagination can provide.

Between searching for bill-paying work, and drafting pitches for writing work, all I’s gots for ya this week is more linkages.

• John Rogers has a great post on credits arbitration - it’s interesting in an “as you pass a flaming wreck” kind of way. (See also Josh Friedman’s experience, Being A Play in Two Parts.) For myself, I swear by the excellent New Zealand Writers Guild model contracts, though none of them mention residuals.

• John August has an interesting post on publicity. I admit to being Kiwi-bloke-ish in my self-promotion: essentially a “build it and they will come” approach. (This blog and the attendant dfmamea.com site was a tentative step in the self-promotion direction. It’s provided a fantastic avenue for procrasturbation.)

• Whilst clearing up my massive RSS backlog (and inadvertently deleting a mass of ‘Important’-flagged ones), I found a wealth of left-field ideas and approaches to film distribution from Tim Clague’s Projector Films blog. The ideas are a bit scary and newfangled for a conventional and blissful ignoramus like myself, but they’re exciting and exhilarating, and any day now, I’ll understand it all.

• And finally, courtesy of this from TeeVee, there’s the Brilliant but Cancelled site which seems to have some neat feeds on a range of shows that didn’t survive transmission on American t.v. It doesn’t have UnSub, Game, Set and Match or Now and Again, but. Hope springs eternal.

Thanks to this from the kids at TeeVee, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans - and that includes the Webmistresse - now have Season 8 to look forward to.  Yes - or to the ‘mistresse, sorry - it’s a comic.  But Buffy creator Joss Whedon hisself will be deeply involved and here’s a Q&A with Mr Whedon that’ll whet some appetites.

• Congratulatoriations to Joe Hitchcock on his recent betrothal. While his digital feature, Down by the Riverside, nears completion, he’s about to dive into an animated short, The North Pole Deception. Joe was kind enough to help us in our final days of BREAK. Go well, Joe.

• Danny Stack at Scriptwriting and Script Reading in the UK kindly introduced me to writer and director Tim Clague’s Scriptwriter’s Life. It’s almost ridiculously simple and self-explanatory… and a challenge I can’t back away from. (Dammit. I thought this writing gig was gonna get easier.)

  (Today I learnt that a U.S.P. is a “unique selling point”, as per Mr Clague’s post on pitching yourself and your U.S.P.)

• On a completely un-sceenwriting-related topic, courtesy of the avuncular gentlemen at NZBC, may I recommend Paper, Scissors, Rock, which has some acerbic observations about gang patches and gaming addiction, and David Farrar, whose blog been keeping me informed and enlightened, though I suspect he may be of a navy-blue political persuasion.

• Finally, some homegrown name-dropping: Luke Sharpe’s peeps at BunkerMedia are responsible for the new-look New Zealand Writers Guild website. Go check ‘em out.

  This just in: Mr Sharpe is empowering Parnell.

I’m in the final stretch of a rewrite so this week’s post’s an ultra-quickie.

Allow me to direct you to Cory Doctorow’s site, craphound.com, in particular his downloadable short stories. Enjoy.