Indelible Freckles

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.

• Mr T over at Unkreative has finished - well, 98% finished - principal photography on 5. Onwards with post it is. Don’t forget to cruise some nice pics here.
• Writer and director of Narc and the Ticker segment of BMW’s uber-cool The Hire ad series, Joe Carnahan, has a feature coming out: Smokin’ Aces. He’s pluggin’ it aplenty at Smokin’ Joe Carnahan. Looks fun - it’s my first must-see film of 2007.
• The boys at How to Write Screenplays… Badly have given notice. Goddamnit. They were merciless. They were hilarious. I’ll miss the bastards.
• After some period of silence Josh Friedman has a heartfelt post at I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing.
• And I’ve tripped over a couple of UK blogs to recommend: Lee Thomson’s The Light, It Hurts is a humorous and very personable blog about screenwriting around a full-time job; and Danny Stack’s Scriptwriting & Script Reading in the UK is a resource rich site on the nuts and bolts of screenwriting.

(This one’s for DJ Ash.)Over at Ken Levine’s, guest blogger Peter Casey kindly tells us how Frasier came to be. It’s a serial - take a lookee at parts one, two and three.

Fellow Class of ‘02 survivor, Michelle Fitz-William, recently directed me over to her sister Angela Williams‘ website, www.scribbler.co.nz. It lists a noice range of feature scripts that are available for moneyed interest. So what’re you still doing here? Go!

Longtime Kiwi scribe Dean Parker (Came a Hot Friday and Greenstone) has an entertaining and pragmatic look at writing for a living in New Zealand.

Can’t say I’ve seen any of his plays - but I certainly grok the road he’s travelled.