Back to college

Having spent last Thursday in LA, it's back to college time for me today. I was at Napier two Thursdays ago for the opening day of the new trimester, and once in January for the last teaching day of the first trimester. Thanks to quirks of university scheduling and my triip to Gallifrey, I haven't been in to college regularly since mid-December last year. Time to get back in the groove, methinks. We're getting stuck into Writing for Interactive and - for us part-timers - our first script development module. Seems strange to have been on a screenwriting MA course for five months and not actually written one word of script for it yet, but I guess you have to learn the craft before you do the graft. With any luck, I'll get the results of the two major pieces of assessed work from the first pair of modules today. Eager to find our how I did on my script report and market analysis. Both seemed like good efforts, but like many scribes, I'm the world's worst judge of my own work.

Spent yesterday at BBC Scotland's HQ on Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow. Radio producer David Ian Neville gathered together the five writers creating scripts for a week-long slot on Radio 4's Women's Hour. Me, I'm Wednesday. We read through our first draft scripts, talked about ways of interlinking them and getting best use of the different characters. We also got notes on each of our scripts from David and I'll need to start work on rewrites come Monday. I'm giving my subconscious the weekend to digest the notes and I'm off to That Fancy London tomorrow to visit the in-laws. Back late Saturday, then Sunday will be a general life and laundry kind of day.

Got myself online at LinkedIn, a global networking thing. My old flatmate John Freeman invited me, so I've decided to give it a go. I've no idea whether it has any value or will generate any work for me, but what the hell - it's free and might be of value. If you're interested, click the headline above to see more, or else paste this URL into your browser:

https://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=tab_h


Last but not least, we're tearing through Season 1 of Grey's Anatomy on DVD, which I bought in LA last week. What a great show? Fun, entertaining and witty, with some great characters. You can't go wrong with wise-cracking curmudgeons in my humble opinion. Also bought Season 1 of Hill Street Blues, Season 3 of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and a bunch of other discs, including one of my all-time favourite films, Breaking Away. Who needs regular TV when you've got DVDs, right?