Subway: the editor-author-editor sandwich

This weekend I hope to edit the first three quarters of my Warhammer novel, while squeezing another 1500 new words into the manuscript. I suspect it's all a bit ambitious, bearing in mind the fact we have house guests, it's my 40th birthday party tonight and that means a hangover tomorrow, and sundry other distractions that will impinge upon my editing and writing time. Need to learn my last few speeches for Major Barbara as the local am-dram workshop performance in which I'm acting is on stage in less than a fortnight. Not to mention the opera workshop, or prepping for going back to college on Friday. Argh. Too many tasks, not enough time. Lke Calvin and Hobbes observed, the Days Are Just Packed...

Daft but fun: Pimp My Gollum

Image swiped from those wonderful people at The Beat.

Back to college; search for cheese abandoned

Yesterday was induction day for the new Screen Academy Scotland sutdents. I didn't need to go along, but thought it might be useful to see the new facilities, get the guided tour and put some names to faces. Met Miss Read and Andrew Tibbs, both of whom are starting the MA Screenwriting course. Andrew's part-time, so I won't see much of him through the year as he'll be at college on Friday and I'm a year two bod, who go in on Fridays. But I'll be sharing classes with Miss Read, so that's kind of fun.

Arrived half an hour early for the meet and greet with nibbles, so tried to pay my fees for the new academic year. Got sent to reception. Reception sent me to Matriculation. Matriculation sent me to the library, but all the computers were busy. Went back to Matriculation, who sent me to room B55. Couldn't find B55 anywhere, so tried C55 and D55 is case I misheard. After quarter of an hour wandering in increasingly frustrating circles, I wandered though an engineering department and found myself back at - you guessed it - Matriculation! Felt like a lab rat in an experiment, searching for the cheese.

Eventually found B55, a room cunningly disguised by being unsigned and unlabelled in any way, shape or form. Must be Napier University's equivalent of the Secret Garden, but with the garden replaced by an airless, computer-filled chamber choked by body odour. Smells like teen spirit? Nope, more like geek locker room. By the time I logged on and found the relevant page to pay online, I discovered I didn't have the one number I needed to pay my fees. So, that was a colossal waste of time.

I did get some nibbles and a tour of the new facilities, but in all honesty they are mostly meant for directors and editors. All writers need is a place to write, some talent and inspiration. So, I wiped out an entire day when I could have been working and progressing the novel. Something of a pisser. Let's hope this isn't a foretaste of what I can expect from the second year of my MA.

Emailed River City to check for progress on the sample scenes I submitted at the start of September. Alas, the show is double-banking again and, understandably, that how to be the production team's first priority. It was the same when I worked on 2000 AD and the Megazine. Yes, you want to be actively finding, nurturing and encouraging new talent - but your day-to-day job is getting the comic out. So it is with River City and Doctors and all other TV dramas they are kind enough to offer opportunities to newbies like me. The show comes first, second and third.

Right, back to the novel. Lots to do and little time in which to do it. Away, tempting diversion we call blogging!

Great ideas? Easy. Great scripts? Not so much

A friend of this blog sent me an email, asking how they could best develop an idea they’d had which seemed perfect for Britain’s weekly science fiction anthology comic, 2000 AD. Not sure why I seem to have become some sort of oracle in such matters [I've been getting lots of requests for advice lately], but I guess it's what comes of opening my big, fat mouth and spouting opinions. Anyways, below is what I sent back to them by way of a reply. Some of the advice is 2000 AD specific, but some of it applies to writing in general and especially script-writing...

The best writing is so good it looks like anybody could do it, the scribe makes the end result look effortless. But the effort required, the level of craft and the storytelling talent to pull that magic trick off is immense. Not many people think they can compose a symphony, yet everyone believes they have a book in them. With comics, that perception - how easy it must be to write a good comic - is even more deceptive. You'd be surprised how many writers who had won acclaim in other writing fields decide they have a graphic novel in them. Writing is writing, right? Yes, but writing good comics is hard and writing great comics is bloody hard.

Let's say you have an idea for a one-off 2000 AD or Megazine tale like a Future Shock, Terror Tale, Time Twister or Tale from the Black Museum. All you need do is write up the plot as an exciting single-page synopsis and snail mail it in, with a covering letter and contact details - and be very, very, very patient. If you felt sufficiently enthused, on a one-off you could also send the finished script to show you can write, but you're probably better to send the synopsis and covering letter, mentioning that you can supply a script by return post if the editor is interested. Their time is strictly limited and they don't need a load of unsolicited scripts cluttering up their desk.

If your idea is for a story set in an existing character universe, like a Dreddworld story, an ABC Warriors adventure or a revival of an old favourite like - I don't know, Shako or Project Overkill - I'd say forget it. 2000 AD already has a stable of writers who can successfully revive old favourites [such as Dan Abnett on The VCs], so the editor's covered there. And he generally has the original writers available for many existing strips, such as Pat Mills on Flesh or Invasion. To get work on 2000 AD in an existing character universe, you first need to establish yourself as a skilled and reliable writer - and that takes a couple of years hard work, assuming you've got the time and talent.

If you have an original idea of your own devising for an serial or on-going series, that's good. But you'll almost certainly need to build up a track record for yourself at the comic before the editor would commission your great idea for a series. Pay your dues, show you have a firm grasp of the art and craft of writing for comics. Like I said here a week or two back, most comics creators need to get at least 100 pages published before they start getting halfway decent.

Alan Moore did Future Shocks and Time Twisters, more than 50 of them. John Wagner wrote for girls' romance comics and gag strips for Buster. Grant Morrison wrote and drew for Starblazer, wrote Future Shocks and wrote for Marvel UK's Zoids before he got the chance to write Zenith, an idea he'd been nurturing for years. Even the mighty Neil Gaimain did a Future Shock or two before ascending to the lofty heights of superstardom via Vertigo.

Comics scripting is a craft-based industry, like writing a screenplay. It takes years of practical experience to get great at it. That's not to say there aren't great natural talents [a.k.a. bastards], but these are rare indeed. So, to sell a series to 2000 AD, you'll need to prove first that you can write comics. Chances are, that'll mean some Future Shocks, Terror Tales or Past Imperfects. The editor recently made mention of the fact he doesn't get many submissions for the Past Imperfect slot, so that could be an opening. Write two or three great Past Imperfect stories for him, and you'll make a positive impression.

Ultimately, a great idea for a 2000 AD story is just that - a great idea. Sad to say, but the world is full of great ideas. Turning a great idea into a great script and selling it to the editor - that's the hard part. Even if you have the chops to make your great idea into a great script, there's no guarantee it will be to the editor's taste or that it will be what he's looking for. As in so many writing arenas, timing can be crucial to success. Submit a Future Shock about a virtual reality prison back in 1978 and you'd have been on a winner. Submit it now and you'd be laughed out of the building.

One of my favourite 2000 AD series of recent times - Necronauts, written by Gordon Rennie - was rejected by one 2000 AD editor. But Gordon resubmitted it when that editor left and it got commissioned. Gordon believed in his story and was patient enough to wait for another chance with another editor. So persistence is another crucial ingredient for success in comics. Talent, a little luck, persistence, a grasp of the craft and professionalism - you need all these things to turn your great idea into a great script, and to get it commissioned.

It's Banned Books Week in America

The United States of America is the land of the free, right? It's free speech and freedom of expression, both rights enshrined in key documents that were cornerstones of creating the modern democracy that is America. Well, not everybody seems jazzed by those notions - and the American Library Association has the proof. For the past quarter of a century it has staged Banned Books Week, publicising attempts to have books banned from public libraries.

In anticipation of this inauspicious silver anniversary, the ALA has compiled a list of the top 10 most challenged books from 2000-2005. Challenges are defined as formal, written complaints filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness. The ALA reports there were more than 3,000 attempts to remove books from schools and public libraries between 2000 and 2005. So, without further ago, below are listed the 10 most challenged books of the 21st Century (2000-2005) in America - how many of them have you read, sinners?

1. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
4. "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck
5. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
6. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
7. It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
8. Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz
9. Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey
10. Forever by Judy Blume

From Rings to Halo: Wingnut goes interactive

Variety reports that Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is teaming with Microsoft to create Wingnut Interactive. The new company will produce at least two projects featuring videogame and interactive media components, starting with a spinoff of Halo which Jackson is executive producing with his partner Fran Walsh.

The deal was revealed at X06, a Microsoft videogame conference taking place in Barcelona. Variety says the deal is part of a broader strategy by Microsoft to expand its audience beyond the core game player demographic that makes up most of the Xbox audience. "We're looking for Peter to help us create interactive entertainment that will expand our audience into the mainstream," Microsoft Game Studios general manager Shane Kim told Variety.

The Kiwi film director's presence was apparently a big surprise, as was the Wingnut deal. Variety quoted him as saying the Halo project would be "not quite a game, not quite a film". Let's hope the results are a fusion of the best elements, not an attempt that ends up falling between two stools.

Older today, but things could be worse

It's my birthday. And it's a birthday with a zero on the end, something that apparently makes it more significant. The good news is that compared with the last time this happened, back in 1996, I wasn't that happy. I was three stone [about 15 kilos overweight], unfit and overworked, trying to keep weekly comic 2000 AD going to the year 2000. Now I'm lighter, fitter and still overworked - but now I'm [hopefully] developing a new career for myself as a screenwriter. Yes, I've only got the one broadcast credit to my name, but that's more than I had even a year ago, let alone ten years ago. I'm halfway through my screenwriting MA course, I'm two months into a mentoring project working with an established writer-director and I've also working hard to get my winkle-picker shod toes in several other, interesting doors.

On the minus side, as well as losing lots of weight I've also lost lots of hair. Frankly, I'm surprised it hadn't gone sooner, since my dad was way balder than me when he was 20 - so I caught a break there. [Personally, I blame 2000 AD for the abrupt recession in my hairline during the late 90s. Tearing your hair out is strangely unconducive to remaining hirsute for life.] Plus I'm another ten years closer to death, oblivion and generally ceasing to exist. Being used to working with deadlines, I decided to take an online life expectancy test. With a bit of luck, I still have more than half my life ahead of me, so there's no need to panic just yet.

So, what am I doing for my birthday? Writing. Hey, a writer writes, right? Today was running day, so up at six and twenty minutes pounding the pavements. A present frenzy of ripping and rending parcels to unveil an exciting bunch of stuff - books, DVDs, chocolate and that wonderful New Zealand beverage, L&P. Rest of today? Writing, writing and more writing. Added 5000 words to the Warhammer novel yesterday, need to do at least that much more today. Realised last night I haven't mentioned several characters for too many chapters, so will go back into the book and give them a drop-in scene or two. Right, time for a bath and a shave. It's introduction day at college tomorrow and it's better if I don't turn up looking like a yeti and smelling like a yak.

Thinking versus Typing

On his blog Was I Something I Wrote?, professional TV drama scribe English Dave has some interesting things to say about the difference between smart writing and fast writing. As usual, he hits the nail on the head. I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that when my writing grinds to a halt in the afternoon, that usually means my subconscious is telling me to stop. The big well of inspiration has run dry and I need to stop pulling up the bucket of words, otherwise all I'll get out of it is dirt. [That's one butt-ugly metaphor, but you get the idea, right?] Yesterday I was hoping to knock off the last third of my Phantom script, take a light lunch and then power back into my Warhammer novel. I confidently expected to produce at least 4000 words, keeping me on schedule and on track.

Cue cliches about best laid plans. My average Phantom script runs about 200 panels, to be divided by the artist into 30-32 pages. [Team Fantomen likes lots of panels on the pages, which gives stories a pulp density - only one balloon or caption box in most panels, keep the narrative driving forwards.] By 10 in the morning I'd hit panel 170 and I still had another 60 panels worth of story to write. So, it was back through what I'd dashed out the previous day and some ruthless pruning. I always write flabby at the start of a project, while I'm feeling my way into the proper pacing for the story I'm trying to tell.

Sure enough, I cut 30 panels out of my existing material. That left 60 panels still to write for my 60 panels of story to tell. Finishing that by half twelve, give it a final re-read and polish, before emailing that to the editor in Stockholm. Follow-up phone call, set deadline for next Phantom script, mark it on wall planner, time for lunch. Having run in the morning, I also needed a bath. Plus emails needed answers too. By the time I'd done all that, it was 2:15 and suddenly I've only got three hours of writing time left. Where the hell did the day go?

Back to the novel. It'd been three days since I last did any work on it, and I have to re-read the last chapter to remind myself where all the characters, who I had just killed, who I was about to kill and what would happen as a consequence. I'm loving my best ensemble cast [especially now they're starting to die], but keeping all those plates spinning is challenging. So I skimmed through my previous chapter, did some tweaks and twiddles on that and finally made a start on some fresh writing by three.

In the end I only managed 2000 new words for the novel yesterday, so today needs some good solid work. From now to the finish will be one mad dash, but I've had months to think about this, getting it all ready in the back of my head. Now is time to unleash cause and effect, and see how my cast of characters react as the pressure gets to them. Who'll be a hero and who'll be the anti-hero? I love it when a character's choice surprises me. I'm looking forward to being surprised over the next two weeks.

We're all going on a busman's holiday

Been going at it hammer and tongs to finish my Warhammer novel before starting year two of my screenwriting MA. By the end of play Friday I'd clocked up 57,500 words and the bodies have started hitting the floor. From here to the end is a war of attrition and terror for my heroes [and, inevitably, anti-heroes]. This week I've got three writing days, the introductory day for the MA, and another writing day. The coming weekend will be something of a write-off, with the house crammed by visitors. Hopefully get back to work on Monday with Thursday October 5th as my deadline to deliver the manuscript. It's gonna be a push, but I'm well past halfway now and it's all downhill from here.

So what did I do this weekend past? To give myself a break from the novel I've been writing an issue of The Phantom for Egmont Sweden. The plot was supplied to me by the editorial team but I couldn't get happy with certain elements of it. As a consequence I'd put off writing the script for several months, until my subconscious could figure out a solution. That arrived a few weeks back, like a bolt from the blue. I called the editor and made sure he was happy with what I planned to do [always, always, always check with your script's editor before going off piste]. Then it was simply finding the time and energy to tackle replotting the story from scratch.

That was supposed to be Saturday's job, but life got in the way. I did spend two hours re-reading all the reference material I'd previously gathered - the plot for Verdi's Aida, the life of Gaston Leroux, facts about the Paris Catacombs, the Franco-Prussian war, the Pasteur Institute, pyramid power and Geroge du Maurier's Trilby. Then I decided upon a dual plot story structure, opting for two antagonists rather than the single enemy usually found in Phantom stories.

Sunday afternnon and evening was set aside for scripting. My goal was to get the whole story written, but first I needed to write a new plot synopsis that pulled together all the elements I wanted to include. That ran to four sides and more than 2000 words. By then it was four in the afternoon and I still hadn't started the script. Got the first 35 panels down, before stopping to cook and eat tea. Back to work and got to panel 141 by ten pm when I stopped to wind down before bed. Four thousand words down, a third of the script still to write this morning.

Got up at six, went running for twenty minutes before dawn, ate breakfast, read newspaper, time to blog and a quick surf of my favourite sites. All things being equal, I'll start back in on the Phantom script at nine, get it finished and sent away before lunch. Then it's back to the Warhammer universe. I'm not going to get my 6000 words done on the novel today, but I've got to get it restarted. Deadlines loom. Right now, I'm quite looking forward to October 9th, when I start a research week without the black shadow of deadlines at my shoulder. Shame that's two weeks away.

No clear image

For anyway wannabe screenwriters like me, may I recommend the blog of professional reader Lucy Vee at Write Here, Write Now. She's got a particularly useful entry up at the moment about the dangers of your script containing something that will likely get it slammed for having No Clear Image. It's not something I'm aware I have a habit of doing, but I certainly be watching out for it in future.

Books by David Bishop that I didn't write

Having a common as muck name as I do, I frequently stumble across books written by David Bishop for which I am not the author. I mean, I've given a pretty good account of myself thus far - 16 novels published, a fistful of omnibus editions featuring my work out soon and a clutch of non-fiction tomes too. But my various namesakes have also been busy, it would seem. Below are a few of the books by David Bishop that I didn't write. You've got to admire any author called Denzil Lush. Also, can I swap careers with the David Bishop who writes pop-up books about dinosaurs?

Elderly Clients: A Precedent Manual by Helen Clarke, Denzil Lush, and David Bishop
Heart Throb (Harlequin Intrigue, No 323) by David Bishop
The Wheel of Ideals by David Bishop
100 Walks in Cheshire by David Bishop
Valentine's Child (Silhouette Special Edition, No 1086) by David Bishop and Natalie Bishop
Cohabitation: Law, Practice And Precedents by David Bishop, Denzil Lush, and Helen Wood
Introduction to Cryptography with Java Applets by David Bishop
Hamlet's Clashing Ideals by David Bishop
Hot Blooded (Harlequin Intrigue, No 22314) by David Bishop
My First Pop Up Book of Prehistoric Animals by David Bishop
Princess Of Coldwater Flat (Silhouette Special Edition, No 882) by David Bishop
Best Pastas (Bon Appetit, Volume Two) by David Bishop
Poems and prairie songs (Midwest poetry library) by David A Bishop
American Orchid Society Awards, 1932-1992 by James R. Fisher and David A. Bishop
My First Pop-Up Book of Dinosaurs by David Bishop
History of the forest preserves of Winnebago County, Illinois by David Bishop
Spermatozoan Motility, a Symposium Organized By the American Society of Zoologists, by David Bishop

"So, have you got anywhere sex-wise?"

Just days after the Casino Royale trailer for the new James Bond film hit the net, some wag has bootlegged it and added their own dialogue. Daniel Craig - he's blonde and he's Bond. Get used to it, that's what I say. Anyway, enjoy the silliness...

Apparently, I now run Sony Home Entertainment

Well, not me personally, you understand but somebody who is also called David Bishop. According to various online sources, "Sony Pictures Home Entertainment worldwide president Ben Feingold last week left the position he held for 12 years and was replaced by David Bishop, the head of Sony's North American division. Bishop has plenty of experience going into his new role. He was the president of MGM Home Entertainment before its merged with Sony and had been with MGM for 15 years." So, do I get a company car? A big salary hike? [or, for that matter, a salary at all?] A Playstation 3?

This is what comes of having a name that's common as much. There are David Bishops evrywhere, much like that scene in Being John Malkovich where everybody looks like John Mlakovich. Besides the new head of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment worldwide, there's also a David Bishop who manages Pat's Pizza in Auburn, a David Bishop who is VP of Nanotechnology Research at Bell Labs and a David Bishop who specialises in food photography. Plus many, many more. David Bishops, we are legion. Join us!

Napalming the candle at both ends

Gotta say, taking on three books, back to back, all with tight deadlines? Not so clever. TPO was a long, hard slog, turning some four-year-old articles into 120,000 word tome. Two weeks of solid research to refamiliarise myself with the material, followed by six weeks of writing. Now in the middle of my first Warhammer novel, another 95,000 words in four weeks. The good news is I'm enjoying writing a novel wehre I can make stuff up. Virtually every character in the book is my own invention, and there's little or no research involved. I'm rediscovering the joy of making stuff up, not knowing who's going to live and who's going to die.

Once I stagger across the finish line of my Warhammer novel [Thursday October 5th, to be precise], it's back to college for year two of my part-time screenwriting MA. Stuck my head round the door of the new facilities on Tuesday, when I was in Edinburgh for the day as part of my TV screenwriting project with mentor Adrian Mead. New place looks transformed, hard to recognise it as the draughty, crumbling shit-hole Napier had us in for the first trimester last year. It's induction day next Thursday and - novel permitting - I hope to wander along, meet the new intake and find out who's taking what modules this year.

No sooner does college resume than I start the three book on the trot, a fresh tome for Black Flame. Another 95,000 words and that's due by November 24. The first week will be pure research, as it's another tome set in a precise historical period that requires lots of accurate detail. That leaves me five weeks to write the manuscript, but ever Friday of those five weeks I'll be in at college. Plus thee'll be college work to do, and continuing development of the project on which I'm being mentored.

The good news is my extra-curricular activities [acting in Major Barbara, singing and acting in an opera performance workshop] conclude by the end of October. The bad new is that until then, I'm going to be shuffling round like a zombie, writing seven days a week and producing tens of thousands of words. If I feel this drained and tired now, how the hell am I'm going to feel by the end of November? Oh yeah, and I have a birthday next week that involves a big, fat milestone. Another year closer the grave, folks. Oblivion beckons like a trip to the dentist.

I think I'll listen to some Cure today, probably The Drowning Man off Faith. I could do with some cheering up.

Talk about your untimely headlines

The new issue of Broadcast features this unfortunate story: Hammond's dangerous debut on BBC1. It's a story about a new 5 part series called Dangerous Britain, in which Richard Hammon was to be set the challenge of visiting some of the UK's most hazardous landscapes, with filming due to start before Christmas. Of course, the issue went to print before the presenter was critically injured in a crash yesterday while filming a segment for anarchic motoring show Top Gear. Sometimes, you can't legislate for life. Here's hoping Hammond has a good recovery from his injuries.

Julie Gardner's star continues to rise

As speculated on Vicious Imagery a few months back, Doctor Who executive producer Julie Gardner is getting a powerful new post within the BBC. From next month the current head of drama for BBC Wales will be responsible for 'putting together a drama strategy for UK independents working with BBC Vision, the corporation's new multimedia content, commissioning and channels group', according to the new issue of Broadcast. Gardner's boss, BBC controller of fiction Jane Tranter, will continue to have the final say over commissioning alongside channel controllers.

While Gardner works with the indies, John Yorke will control the Beeb's in-house drama production. He chairs an in-house drama board and Gardner will do the same for indie dramas. [Among those on the board is Anne Mensah, the head of drama for Scotland. She popped up at the Writing for River City Q&A last month in Edinburgh and seems wonderfully approachable.] The good news for people who enjoy the likes of Doctor Who and Life on Mars is that Gardner will continue to act as executive producer on those series, as well as the Who spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

You've got to wonder, when does Julie Gardner sleep?

Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys

Yesterday's mumblings about reading Enid Blyton as a child got me thinking about how my early reading has probably - scratch that, definitely - influenced my writing style. I think Famous Five books were probably the first novels I read with recurring characters. In a lot of ways, Famous Five books are classic examples of the problem that bedevils a lot of superhero comics [and soap operas, for that matter]. It's all about the illusion of change. You make the reader [or viewer] care about the characters and want to know what happens next, so that's good. But ultimately everything goes round in a circle. At least in soap operas, characters get older and die [or get killed off or leave] because the actors get older and die. There's no need for that in superhero comics. Batman's been punching the Joker's face for sixty years or so, but you don't see either of them propping up a Zimmer Skimmer. But I digress...

Enid Blyton gave me a love for excitement and adventure [not to mention making being kidnapped and tied up and menaced seem like fun - I wonder how many people acquired a passion for bondage and discipline from too much Enid Blyton in their youth? Not me, I'm pish at pain]. From there I graduated to the Hardy Boys mysteries. Nancy Drew was for girls, obviously, where the Hardy brothers [hell, what were their names? Frank? Chuck? Dick? Something ending in the letter K, I'll wager] were rough and tough teens solving mysteries and having adventures. Alas, I was too old to enjoy the Nancy Drew and Harby Boys mysteries when they got transferred to TV. I always wanted somebody to launch Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys, about a tough lesbian teenage who solves mysteries and has adventures, gamely assisted by two gay brothers. Do you think ITV would go for that? Queer as Folk meets Veronica Mars... no, probably not.

Terrance Dicks' endless series of Doctor Who novelisations was a massive reading experience for me as a nipper. Lots of plot, lots of kinetic energy and momentum [hardly surprising when you're turning 150 minutes of TV into 128 pages of big type], and bugger all in purple prose. That's my writing style all over. Literary fiction is wasted on me, I want the juice. Sod the deathless prose, gimme all your action. So Terrance Dicks is definitely a big influence. You can add Malcolm Hulke to that mix too. He adapted a few of his Doctor Who TV scripts into novels and, unlike Uncle Terrance, he fleshed out his subsidiary characters a little. Not much, just a few paragraphs that gave them a second dimension, that extra touch of humanity. I must have read Malcolm Hulke's Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters a hundred times as a boy and can still recite parts of it from memory, almost. The sections that linger in my memory are the added character moments.

I was a voracious reader as a kid. Hell, I'd try reading anything once, if it fed my serial jones. The school library got a series of trashy novels about young nurses falling in love with hunky doctors and having medical misadventures. Think No Angels, but without the drugs and booze. I ripped through those in about a month. The cosy sci-fi calamities of John Christopher? Check. The ripping mysteries of Agaton Sax> Yep. Anything with the Target Books logo on the front, of course. Thanks to facilities like eBay and abebooks.com, I've slowly been reassembling a little library of boks I read and re-read as a nipper. The Robber Hotzenplotz? Found him again, and the music box he stole that played Nuts in May.

In New Zealand where I grew up, Scholastic Books had this deal where they went round schools offering new books for sale at discount prices. My mum was a teacher, so that may have been an influence too, but so many books I read were thanks to Scholastic. If there's one book I'd like to find again, it was the one about a tearaway teenager who gets caught and sent on some probationary placement where he has adventures and scrapes with danger. It was called something like Smuggler's Cave or Smuggler's Cove. Green cover with a stone carved thing on the front that looked like a lion's head. Must go and have a look for that online.

So, ponder this, readers of Vicious Imagery - what books do you still remember from your childhood? Why did they stick in your memory? And what influence, if any, have they had on your writing style if you're a writer?

My girl's got pointy ears (oh yeah)

Some wag has created a range of inspirational posters based upon imagery from Star Trek. The poster below is one of my favourites but there are plenty more where that came from. Where did that come? Here, of course. [Thanks to John Freeman for the link.]

Breaking into British comics

Got interviewed by emailed yesterday about how I came to work in comics, and the joys and jerks you meet while looking for new creative talents. Here's the Q&A in full, as I doubt the feature will run all of my endless ramblings...

Q: Did you read 2000 AD as a kid - did you want to go into comics as a result of reading it?
A: I was born and grew up in New Zealand, where supplies of British comics were not always reliable and certainly weren’t cheap. I tended to buy Marvel comics from America – they were colour, they were monthly and so didn’t seem to cost as much. I did read some early issues of 2000 AD – I distinctly remember Visible Man made a big impression on me as a nipper, as did Ant Wars. One image stuck in my head, the junk pharaoh in early episodes of The Judge Child who had a coat made of ring-pull tabs from Coke cans. The idea that something so disposable and common could be valuable in the future fired my imagination, as did Ron Smith’s wonderful double-page spread of the Cursed Earth slaves.

So, no, reading 2000 AD as a kid didn’t inspire me to go into comics, but it wasn’t a realistic option for a kid in New Zealand. The country was too small to support its own comics industry and for a long time I didn’t really pay any attention to why I liked certain stories or their artwork ahead of others. I think it was Frank Miller’s first run Daredevil in, I guess, 1979 that first made me pay attention to creator credits. I watched out for his stuff after that. I think New Zealand didn’t get its first specialist comics store until 1984. I was lucky to live in the country’s biggest city, Auckland, where Mark One Comics opened. They got me into things like Cerebus and Love and Rockets. When I moved away to start my first job as a daily newspaper journalist, I opened a mail order account with Mark One. They would send me the latest issues.

In the late 1980s I moved back to Auckland and a colleague at work discovered I was into comics. He kept pushing me to try a British comic called Crisis but it wasn’t really my thing. Little did I realise I’d be putting together letters pages for Crisis within a couple of years, in between early issues of the Meg.


Q: How did you come to be Tharg?
A: I emigrated to London in 1990 – January 25th, to be precise. A few weeks later some kindly soul told me if I wanted a job, I should buy the Guardian newspaper on Mondays and apply for every job in it, no matter how unqualified or inexperienced I might be – so I did. In those halcyon days the Guardian had up to 30 pages of ads on Monday. [Still waiting to hear if I’m on the shortlist to present Channel 4’s exciting new gardening show, Dig.] From that I started getting freelance sub-editing work. Among the job I applied for in the Guardian was an assistant editor position at the 2000 AD Group. That was to be Peter Hogan’s assistant on new launch Revolver. I didn’t get the job, but Steve MacManus told me afterwards he would be launching another new monthly called Judge Dredd The Megazine and he’d keep me in mind for that. A few months later the TV listings mag where I was working offered me a full-time job, while Steve was offering me 3 days a week freelancing for £65 a day - £20 a day less than I was getting on the listings mag. I decided working in comics sounded more exciting and creatively challenging than TV listings, even if the money was much worse, so I took Steve’s offer. I started on the Megazine July 25th, 1990 – six months to day after arriving in the UK.

Within a year I was working five days a week, still freelance, but now editor of the Megazine. Revolver had folded, the TV listings mag had folded and the recession was biting hard in Britain. [The Guardian’s media jobs section - always a fair barometer of the country’s economic health - was down to two pages on Mondays.] So I guess I made the right decision.

Fast forward to November 1995. I’ve had my fill of the Megazine, the Dredd film has failed to catapult the character into a massive global brand and the future looks bleak. I decide to start looking elsewhere for work, realising that five years in comics has trained me to get work as a comics editor and little else. 2000 AD’s publisher got a new managing director and he asked me to stick around, indicating I’d be offered the job of editing 2000 AD if I did. I had been gagging to get my grubby mitts on the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic and was determined to reverse what I saw as the failings of my predecessors, so I stuck around and became Tharg on December 18, 1995. I quickly discovered how tough editing 2000 AD really is and gained a newfound respect for my predecessors. It’s very easy to snipe at whomever is Tharg and criticise their choices, but until you’ve sat in the big chair you have no idea how tough that job is. It’s a bit of a bastard, frankly.

I was Tharg for four years, seven months and five days, before resigning to become a freelance writer in June 2000.


Q: What's it like being bombarded with scripts and portfolios to view? Is the slush pile as terrifying as it sounds and, as Tharg, did you ever encourage readers to try and be droids like your predecessors had?
A: On the Megazine I actively sought to encourage new writers and artists. Steve MacManus told me that was my job, to find the Meg a new generation of talent to take it forward and help differentiate it from 2000 AD. Every month or so I would clamber through the slush pile, searching for promising, latent talents. Finding and nurturing new artists is relatively easy, assuming you’ve got the time. You see a spark of talent in their unsolicited submission, you send them a spec script and ask them to do some sample pages from that. It will quickly become apparent if they can tell a story, draw existing and popular characters, work to anything resembling a deadline and are not a total nut job. If they’re close but not close enough yet, you give them another spec script to sample. If they’re just not getting there, you say thanks for trying and goodbye – it’s harsh, but it’s also necessary. If I believed an artist had latent talent, I’d keep feeding them spec scripts until they got better or gave up. Jim Murray went through 18 months of spec scripts before he got his first commission, but it was worth it. Even then, I showed his first commission to another editor and they weren’t fussed – but I could see Jim was a star in the making.

Something about his art appealed to me, and I wanted to keep giving him chances.
Even when somebody got that first commission, often it was also their last commission. They didn’t step up, they didn’t improve on their last spec job, they just weren’t good enough. Look in the Mega-Specials from 1994 and 1995 and you’ll find plenty of one-hit wonders who didn’t make the cut. Others got that little bit better and did enough to be given another chance. Some prospered and some didn’t. That’s the nature of the profession. In all honesty, an artist needs to get a hundred published pages under their belt before they start being much good. If they’re managing only two pages a week, that means they need to find steady work for a year before they start producing their best work. There’s a lot of artists who can’t deliver year in, year out, and they fall by the wayside. They go into character design for videogames or something else. Comics is a tough profession and British artists who make their fortune from it are one in a thousand, at best. Most can make a decent living, but only by working their arses off. It is a profession, it is job – it is not for dabblers.

Finding new writers is much, much harder than finding new artists. It is hard to impress with a synopsis, hard to show what a great writer you are via a five-page script. You can prove that you’re competent, that you have a grasp of the craft and you have a decent idea – but not much more. Writers prove themselves by the length of their careers, their ability to generate a great idea week in and out. I believe anyone can write one decent Future Shock. A good comics writer is the person who can write a decent Future Shock , with a beginning, middle and end, with a compelling central character and a fresh, utterly original twist ending – and do all of that every bloody week. It is so, so hard. Writers start every story with an empty sheet of paper, they have to overcome the tyranny of the blank page.

There’s no easy or obvious system for training comic writers in the craft of the medium. Artists can learn by do sample pages from spec scripts, by taking life drawing classes. It’s much harder for writers – you can only sit in your room practising your panel descriptions for so long before your parents call the police, or get you sectioned. Writers learn by doing, like artists, but writers are also dependent upon finding artists who will draw their scripts. As with screenplays for films, scripts for comics are merely blueprints for the construction of a narrative. It needs other people, talented collaborators to turn those blueprints into a story told in pictures and some words. The best things would-be writers can do is get involved with small press projects, start their own with a mate or an acquaintance, get themselves published and keep trying, But it’s a long, long, long hard road, with bugger all rewards at the end. To become a comics writers and to make a career from it, you’ve got to be talented, able to listen and single-minded beyond belief.

I have to admit, once I went on to 2000 AD I quickly stopped having the time to find and nurture new talents. It did happen on a few, rare occasions, but mostly I entrusted that to others – work experience people until I had an assistant, and then Andy Diggle when he joined as my assistant in 1997. Tharg simply doesn’t have enough hours in the day to be cosseting wannabes, alas. In the early days of 2000 AD, there was an art editor whose job it was to nurture wannabe artists. That left the assistant editor to deal with the slush pile. Alan Grant was a demon for dong that in his time as Steve MacManus’s assistant on 2000 AD, he got so many people their start. [He still does it now, covertly, even though he’s been freelance for quarter of a century.] By my time, the art editor was effectively a designer, leaving the assistant editor to deal with both wannabe writers and artists.

When Andy joined 2000 AD, I gave him total control of the slush pile. He was diligent about it and he found plenty of new people, many of whom I had previously rejected – Jock, Simon Spurrier, Rob Williams, Dom Reardon, Fraser Irving. [Most of them have since told me I was right to reject them at the time, they weren’t ready, but a rejection is still painful when it happens. Later on, you can rationalise it as a learning experience, but at the time it’s a paper cut on your creative soul and your memory keeps reopening the wound and squeezing lemon juice inside it.]

The slush pile is daunting because there is so much of it and, even if you make a concerted effort to clear that pile, there’ll be a new pile a week later. When an obvious talent appears as if by magic in the pile, you dance a little inward gig of joy. Mostly, you regard the pile with a sick, stomach-churning dread.


Q: Are there any artists/writers that you're proud to have discovered, are there any that you aren't or that you rejected, only for them to go elsewhere? And do you have any humorous/horror stories about artists/writers who couldn't get the message?
A: Lots of artists got a break thanks to the Megazine in my time, a few on 2000 AD and a couple on the short-lived Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future. This list isn’t exhaustive and several of these people have done some work elsewhere beforehand, but the Megazine made a big difference to their careers: Dean Ormston, Peter Doherty Steve Sampson, Charlie Gillespie, Frank Quitely, Trevor Hairsine, Jim Murray, Jason Brashill, Simon Davis, Alex Ronald, Simon Fraser, Dylan Teague, I’m probably forgetting quite a few. Not so many writers, alas. On average, I’d say one great British writer emerges each year – but you can only tell they are great years later. Robbie Morrison was probably my best success among the many, many writers had got a break on the Meg.

Nobody has threatened my life after being turned away [unlike my time in newspapers], but I have had a few people go crazy monkey ape shit. My favourite was the writer who decided to try driving me nuts. As his vengeance, he went through the colour supplement of some Sunday newspaper like the Telegraph and sent away for everything advertised in the back pages – in my name. You name it, it got delivered to the editorial office for me. Letters telling me I was buying a stair lift, letters telling me about the Saga cruise I was booked on and how much I owed them as my deposit. A porcelain figurine of Cleopatra turned up, the first in a 100-piece series, each one costing close to £100. My favourite was the fact this nutter enrolled me in a correspondence course with a language school. His course of the perfect language for me? Welsh. At least I could a laugh out of that. Come to think of it, I wish I’d accepted that course now – it might come in useful if I ever get the chance to work on Doctor Who in Cardiff… Eventually the police were called in and I think they paid a visit to the suspected culprit. By an incredible coincidence, the mysterious parcels stopped after that.

I’ve had people try to show me their portfolio in the toilets at conventions. It takes a supreme effort of will not to piss on their pencilled pages in such circumstances, but I try not to hang around in the toilets at conventions any longer than I have to. It’s not the most hygienic place to host an impromptu portfolio review panel.


Q: What's it like giving people their big break?
A: It’s great. You feel proud to see their talent blossomed. Of course, you feel pissed off when their blossoming talent is vacuumed off to work for DC or Marvel, but such is life. More to the point, how come Trevor Hairsine can draw a monthly 22-page book for Marvel when he couldn’t finish eight pages in a month for me? Lazy sod! [Just kidding, Big T!]

Q: Why do you think 2000 AD's readers get so inspired to try and work for it?
A: It’s a natural reaction to anything that inspires you, particularly as a child. My lifelong love of time travel stories was fired by the likes of Doctor Who, Timeslip and Sapphire & Steel when I was a nipper. Then again, as a six-year-old I used to fantasise about being kidnapped and having adventures after reading too many Famous Five books, so these things aren’t always a positive influence. Ban Enid Blyton now, before she perverts the minds of any more impressionable youngsters!

Ends.

Tom Cruise: Bollywood Superstar

Another quirky trailer remix from YouTube, this time recreating the cheesy 80s Tom Cruise romance hit Cocktail as an all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood musical. Come to think of it, the 1980s were very Bollywood - the big hair, the bright shiny clothes, the massed dance routines. Footloose is crying out for a Bollywood remake, assuming somebody hasn't already done it. Anyway, enjoy...

One for the writers and the wannabes

If you've ever written anything creative [or, Grud forbid, you do this regularly for money], you must read the opening paragraphs of this posting on The Artful Writer. Boy, does this absolutely nail the I-have-no-talent-long-dark-tea-time-of-the-soul blues. After the first few paragraphs, it turns into an interesting dissection of how screenwriter Howard Michael Gould writes. Lots of good ideas and stuff. But the first few paragraphs? That's the juice.

How Scarface Got His Groove Back

Watch out for the credits at the end, too.

Spamalot meets the new James Bond

Unseen Star Wars: Negotiations with Qwint

This is a class-in-a-glass jam, mixing Jaws with Star Wars. Enjoy!

400th post

The great sitcom writer Ken Levine posted the 300th entry on his wonderful blog today. By a strange coincidence, this is 400th entry on my blog. Alas, that's about all we share in common. He's a hugely successful, award-winning comedy scribe of many decades standing. Me, I'm bashing my way through a Warhammer novel for Games Workshop. It'll be my 17th novel to get published. In fact, it'll be my 17th novel full stop. It's a strange thing, when you tell people you're writing your 17th novel, they asked if all of them have been published. Well, yes - I wouldn't write a novel unless I thought it was going to be published. I write for a living. The results ain't always pretty, but they're almost always published. So, I guess that's an achievement of sorts.

Still waiting on feedback from River City on my sample scenes. I know the production office is fiendishly busy but I'm fast reaching the point where I wish they'd just put me out of misery, so I can stop thinking about the possibility of being invited to the River City writers' workshop. I don't know what's worse - the waiting or the hope. Right now, I guess both of them are driving me a little barmy. Also in the mix is my growing case of cabin fever. Chained to the desk, thrashing out a minimum of five thousand words a day, a picture frame hung over the window to stop me getting distracted.

The book feels like it's going somewhere, but until I pass the halfway mark [I've got 10,000 words to go before that happens] I won't get comfortable with it. The novel's got a huge ensemble cast and that's created it own fun and games, just trying to keep all the names and characters straight in my head. Think I'll kill one or two in the next chapter, make life easier for myself. Book's due in two weeks and I'm supposed to deliver the first half today. Barring a miracle, that's not going to happen but I'll get mighty close.

Tomorrow I'm heading in to Edinburgh for the second of our mentoring meetings with screenwriter and director Adrian Mead. The three mentees have all created one-page pitch documents for our respective projects and now it's time to talk about them. I had five or six ideas when the process initially began, and chose one thinking it might offer the chance for some light relief. So far, it's turning into a typically dark and bleak tale, exactly the sort of thing I always end up writing. I guess I've found my voice and it's an ultra-violent Eeyore who kills everyone he meets.

Like I said, not a lot of similarities between me and Ken Levine.

MI5 [not nine to five]

There's a fascinating article about writing for the new series of British spy drama Spooks [known as MI5 in the US] in a Glasgow newspaper, the Sunday Herald. Read all about playwright Zinnie Harris's experience of being recruited for one of the most secretive shows on UK TV. [Thanks to Matthew Cochrane for the link.]

More groovy artists go blog-tastic

Dave Taylor is one of those unsung comics illustrators who deserves to be famous by now, but he isn't. He hasn't produced a whole lot of work and has never been given the dream project that shows off his talents to their best advantage. However, you can see for yourselves a smattering of this stunning artist's work by visiting his blog.

The Phantom: Lost in Translation

I regularly write scripts for The Phantom, the world's longest-running costumed hero. Created by Lee Falk for a newspaper adventure strip, the Ghost Who Walks appears once a fortnight in new stories commissioned and published by Egmont Sweden in its title Fantomen. I supply my script to Egmont Sweden in English and they get translated into Swedish [and several other Scandinavian langauges] for publication. The stories are reprinted in English by an Australian publisher, Frew Comics.

Unfortunately, Frew doesn't work from my original English scripts. I'm told they use online translation software to change the Swedish language version back into English. Unsurprisingly, this is a less than exact process. As a result, the Frew version of my dialogue bears only a passing resemblance to what I actually wrote. More often than not, the consequences read like I'm still getting to grips with English as a second language. Here are a few examples from the latest Frew comic, No. 1456, featuring Part 2 of the Circe's Island story I wrote. You'll see my original dialogue first, then what ended up in print...

Panel 15.
Artemis looms over the six guards. Guard #1 nurses his face.
Artemis: NO INTRUDER WOULD COME THIS FAR, YET FLEE SO QUICKLY!

Frew version:
Artemis: NO-ONE TAKES THE TROUBLE TO COME HERE JUST TO LEAVE IN A BIG HURRY...


Panel 18.
The Phantom watches this from the shadows on the opposite side of the open area, having circled round without being seen.
The Phantom (thinks): SHE MUST BE AT LEAST TWO METRES TALL – A FORMIDABLE WOMAN!

Frew version:
The Phantom (thinks): WHAT A TALL WOMAN! SHE MUST BE AT LEAST 200 CENTIMETRES TALL!


Panel 44.
Once the guards have passed, Diana emerges from the shadowy entrance.
Diana (thinks): THAT WAS CLOSE! I MUST BE MORE CAREFUL…

Frew version:
Diana (thinks): THAT WAS A CLOSE SHAVE! ONE OF THE GUARDS SAW ME! I MUST BE MORE CAREFUL...!


Panel 67.
Panzier points at the Phantom, while screaming at Artemis and the five guards.
Panzier: GET HIM!

Frew version:
HA! YOU'LL NEVER LEAVE HERE ALIVE! SEIZE HIM...!

The example below is one of my personal favourites from this issue...

Panel 83.
Diana turns away from the centre of the Parthenon, her mind racing.
Diana (thinks): IF HELENA’S SCHEME SUCCEEDS, SHE’LL BECOME RICH BEYOND IMAGINING. BUT HOW IS SHE DOING THIS? AND WHY?

Frew version:
Diana (thinks); IF HELENA SUCCEEDS, SHE WILL BE RICH. BUT SHE MUST BE STOPPED!

Yes, Diana, yes - we must stop Helena from becoming rich at all costs! The obviious question from all this is why doesn't Frew use the original English language scripts when they are available? I don't know. No doubt the editorial team Stockholm tweaks my scripts before they go to the artist and then has to sub-edit the scripts to match the art produced, but I think the real problem stems from the translation methods used. So, for anyone who reads Frew 1456 and winces at the cringe-inducing dialogue, you're not alone.

Go down the tubes

John Freeman's excellent site about comics and related matters, Down the Tubes, now has its own blog - you can visit it by going here.

I heart place names

Thanks to Site Meter, I can see roughly where some of the visitors to this blog live. While many of the place names are familiar or well known, many are interesting and charmingly esoteric. So, here's ten of my favourites from recent visitors to Vicious Imagery, presented in almost alphabetical order for no particular reason: Annandale, Auburn, Cornsay, Diddington, Iborg, Knutsford, Montebello, Parow and, my favourite name of the day, Tally Ho. Be honest, wouldn't you love to visit Tally Ho?

Uptown Top (Ian) Rankin

The Edinburgh International Book Festival is over for another year, but the organisers have uploaded Windows Media sound files recorded during various author events and made them available to the public. So, if you want to hear Ian Rankin talking with fellow Scot crime fiction author Denise Mina (and very droll they both are), or other noted scribes, get yourself along to here. Of course, you'll need Windows Media Player to hear these sound files, but if I can manage it on a Mac, you can too.

Online sketchbooks a-go-go

Loving the new trend for comics artists to use blogs as an online sketchbook. It's a natural extension of the writers' tendency to treat blogs as online journals, places to unload the cares and frustrations of the day, while also offering a few peeks at upcoming creative efforts. So, today's recommendation is Dylan Teague's Drawing Board. Dylan is a wonderful artist from Wales whose pace of production has prevented him becoming as well recognised as he deserves to be.

His work is usually polished to a finish that challenges Brian Bolland for excellence. Of course, the downside of that approach is you don't output a lot of work. The good news for fans of Dylan's art is that he's using his blog as a motivational tool, putting up sketches and unpolished pieces, pushing himself to loosen up his style. Gotta say, I'm loving the results, as shown in the Batman piece above.

Coming soon: ...and Company

Well, it's official: Sarah Jane Smith is getting her own TV series. The Sarah Jane Adventures is being created for CBBC and begins with a 60-minute special, written by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts. That's due for broadcast early in 2007, with SJS teaming up with her 13-year-old neighbour Maria [played by Yasmin Paige] to battle the scheming Ms Wormwood [Samantha Bond]. Filming of the special begins next month on location in Wales, while a series will go into production during spring 2007 for broadcast later next year.

Sarah Jane's faithful robot dog K-9 will make an appearance in the special according to the official BBC press release, but the tin mutt won't be in the following series. The new shows will be transmitted on the CBBC Channel, and in the CBBC segments on BBC 1. So, 25 years after SJS got her first spin-off, K-9 and Company, she's going to get another. Only this time it's effectively ...and Company - I guess the K-9 series planned for digital channel Jetix stopped him being a regular in the CBBC series. Nevertheless, congratulations to Elisabeth Sladen and good luck to everyone involved with The Sarah Jane Adventures. I can't wait to see the results.

Scream (if you wanna go faster)

Back in 1984 IPC launched Scream!, a horror comic full of thrills and chills. It only lasted 15 issues, allegedly a casualty of an NUJ strike that crippled the comics division that summer. Now a new website, Back From the Depths, has been established to resurrect the lost comic. Enjoy...

Why pursue script editing as well as an MA?

Got an email last night from someone who reads the blog [hi Tony!] and asked me some interesting questions. Being the shameless recycler of material that I am, here are edited version of the questions, and my typically verbose and self-regarding answers. For those who don't read this outpouring of opinions and observations regularly, I've just applied for the TAPS short course on TV script editing, but I'm also halfway through a screenwriting MA at Screen Academy Scotland in Edinburgh...

Q: Given that you’re already on an MA I just wondered why you felt it was worth the extra time and expense to take an additional short course in script editing. Doesn’t the MA give you enough background or information as to what a script editor does or how to assess story and structure? I was rather surprised to read that you wanted to take the TAPS course to be honest, and it makes me wonder about the virtue of doing an MA…

A: I suspect no two MA courses are alike. The tutors are different, the emphasis on what to teach is different, the intake of students brings their own dynamic to the course. For example, one of our tutors is a producer and documentary maker, so we had a module on the business of screen project development with a lot of examples and emphasis placed upon documentaries. Personally, I don’t get that jazzed by docs, but others found that emphasis fascinating – each to their own. Certainly, I did learn a lot about the business side of film and TV making.

I get the impression that many screenwriting MAs focus more on films and short films than on TV. Doing the first year of the course has made me think I want to write for TV much more than for film. Writers in TV get more respect and more control, especially if they pursue the executive producer/showrunner paradigm. Film writers might get paid first, but unless they also direct payment seems to be the only category where they come first. I could resort to a crude sexual metaphor at this point, but I’ll let you fill in the blanks – so to speak.

The Napier screenwriting MA is trying to cover a number of bases, including film, TV and writing for interactive. This is problematic, because there’s always the danger of not devoting sufficient time to all three different areas. Yes, there’s a lot of blurring between film and TV, whereas writing for interactive requires another bunch of skills and mental presets. I think if Napier offered a TV screenwriting MA, I would have chosen that ahead of the more generic MA I’m doing. Alas, it didn’t. The course I have started hasn't spent any time on script editing skills yet, so I’m looking to TAPS to plug that gap. I enjoy working with other writers and helping them make their scripts better. I did a lot of that when I was a comics editing.

Hell, on 2000 AD I was editing up to 1600 pages of script a year. I was commissioning the writers, choosing the artists and other craftsmen to bring those scripts to life. I was rewriting the scripts t achieve a 2000 AD house style where necessary. If I wasn’t getting the stories I wanted, I would create characters and plot before farming these out to writers. Looking back at it, the job was a lot like that of a showrunner, but with less emphasis on my writing. I hadn’t created 2000 AD or most of the characters inside it, I was merely the latest in a long line of editors, so I didn’t have the total possession of the core concepts that Pat Mills had on the early days of 2000 AD, or someone like J Michael Straczynski had on Babylon 5.

Another element of working on 2000 AD I enjoyed was finding and nurturing new writers. That’s part of the job of script editors on some TV shows, and it’s something I miss from my time as a comics editors. No doubt my mother’s teacher genes are rising to the surface, but I get a sense of pride and achievement from seeing writers [and artists] I helped break into the comics industry going on to do outstanding work and building a career from their creative talents.

Q: I’m currently comparing the TAPS course with the Script Factory’s Script Reading course. Have you seen this? In many ways the Script Reading course appeal to me more as it seems to be much more hands on – you have to work at home prior to each course day. The two days are a few weeks apart to give you time to prepare a report which will then be discussed in class. You might be interested in the details. It seems to be more devoted to assessing script and story than covering the relationships between script editor and producer etc.

A: I’ve looked at a lot of courses online. I’m not that interested in becoming a script reader. I think it’s a valuable role, and something which I’ve done in other fields [such as vetting submissions to novel publishers] – but there’s a limit how far you can go with reading and writing reports. I guess it’s good for pointing up problems in your own writing and establishing industry contacts – there are several script readers who blog that are also making their way as writers. But the emphasis is again more on film than TV, though that may merely be my impression of the situation, rather than reality.

The TAPS course more specifically targets an area I’d like to pursue. It’s also only two days, as against the two years I’m devoting to doing a screenwriting MA part-time. If I get on the TAPS [that could be a big if for all I know] and discover it’s not for me, I’ll only have spent a few days and a few hundred quid doing so. My MA is more than £3000 in course fees. Then there’s the books I’ve bought for it [several hundred pounds], transport costs for the 60 miles round trip to college [between £600 and £1000 over the two years at a minimum] and the lost earnings. During my first nine months on the MA course my earnings were £11,000 less than during the preceding nine months. Put simply, it’s costing me an arm and a leg, and I’m not certain the expense is worth it thus far. Perhaps my attitude will have changed by this time next year – perhaps not.

But the MA course is not simply about money. It’s get a greater value for me, providing validation as a working writer, my first experience of university life [while turning 40], numerous networking opportunities and other intangible benefits. Best of all, it’s made me get serous about my writing and focus on building a career, not simply drifting from one piece of hackwork to the next. The fact I am spending so much time, energy and cold, hard cash on the course requires me to make it worth my while as much as I can, even if the course itself isn’t achieving what I want it to do.

Q: I’m still balancing the virtues of doing a series of targeted short writing courses against doing a two year masters. An MA is very expensive so it’s got to deliver, yet all of them seem to be lacking in some way! What do you think of the Napier course now? I remember you posted some rather negative views on it a while back.

A: It sounds to me like you might be better off pursuing short courses in the meantime, to get a flavour of what’s out there. An MA is a much better commitment than I realised going in and, given the choice again, I might well do things differently now. My attitude to the Napier course hasn’t changed much since May, simply because I haven’t been doing the course over the past four months. The part-timers got sent away for 19 weeks while the full-timers did their major module. Aside from a single one-on-one tutorial, that’s pretty much been the extent of my contact with Napier since May. I’ve got a couple of weeks until it all starts again. Hopefully some of the teething troubles from the first year have been ironed out.

Rocky statue: not just a prop, it's art!

The statue of Rocky from Rocky III [you know, the one with Mr T where he first says 'I pity the fool!'] has finally a home after years of wanderings. It will be sited at the foot of the steps leading up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art - the steps up which Rocky ran in his first two films. Not before time, that's what I say. Hell, those steps are probably more famous than most of the exhibits inside the museum. Anyway, you can read more about it here (thanks to Kiana Moore for the link].

Managing expectations, Private Fraser style

I tend to expect rejection, probably as a defence mechanism. When I submit a story idea, an application for something I want to do or a script, I habitually operate on the basis that it will be turned down, smited and generally derided for the talentless shite it is. Private Fraser from Dad's Army is definitely my role model in such matters: "Domed! We're all doomed!' My thinking is that rejection when it comes will be less crushing, less hurtful, less humiliating. Obviously, this is rubbish. Rejection is rejection, no matter how low you preset expectation.

The higher I'm aiming a submission, the lower my hopes of success. I honestly don't know if that's good thing or not. As a professional writer, you'll be turned down or turned away more times than you'll be accepted, hired, commissioned [unless you're some kind of freakish genius, in which case we'll all hate you]. Rejections are inevitable. It's picking your bruised ego back up off the floor and breathing life into it I find tough. Of course, when I was an editor, I had no trouble handing out rejections. So much easier to give than it is to receive in such circumstances.

Right now, I'm waiting on a couple of big replies. The production office at BBC Scotland's soap River City has got my sample scenes. Amanda Verlaque sent out an acknowledgement last week to all this who had submitted their sample scenes, promising a reply within a few days. Nothing more was heard last week, but yesterday I went to an internet cafe in London and found a fresh communication from Amanda in my Inbox. I immediately told myself it was bad news and opened the email, heart sinking to the floor, eyes not wanting to see what felt like the inevitable.

In fact, it was simply a 'sorry for not replying properly to you all yet, madly busy' holding pattern email. Good of Amanda to keep us in the loop, but I hope we get answers soon - not sure my nerves can take the strain of opening too many emails like that.

I'm also waiting to hear whether I've been accepted for the TAPS script editing course. It'll be two consecutive days in October or November. Right now October is looking like a disaster area for prior committments, so November would be better for me - just - assuming I get accepted. [Let's not get into how I'll be funding my participation on the course, the cost of transportation to get me wherever it'll be held and the price of accommodation for at least two nights.]

Again, my Inbox had an email from the lovely people at TAPS about the course. My heart sank, until common sense kicked in and told me this was simply an acknowledgement of my application being received - and so it was. The rejection or acceptance email is probably several weeks away yet. Plenty of time to practise my Private Fraser imitation.

That fancy London

Back to work after two days in that fancy London. Flew down on Monday, September 11, trying not to fret about anniversaries and the like. Having huge plasma screens in airport rerunning footage of planes crashing into buildings is not my idea of pre-flight entertainment, but I guess that was kind of unavoidable. Realised I hadn't been to London since last November. Back then I had to go through Stockwell tube station where the police shoot and killed a shot they thought was a terrorist - he wasn't. Sigh. What times we live in, eh? Of course, back-track 15 years and the IRA was planting bombs in rubbish bins on platform at London train stations, so it's not like things have changed that much - the scale of events simply seems more global, now.

My main reason for heading south was a Writers' Guild of Great Britain forum about writing in interactive entertainment i.e. computer games. The WGGB launched a new booklet that suggests some guidelines for how games developers and writers can get the best from each other. It's a useful item, but since you can download it by going here, the forum's value for me was the speakers and the opportunity to network afterwards. The speakers were good, but after the first hour things tended toward repetitionn or digression. After an hour and a half, people were walking out and it was long past time to wrap things up. Unfortunately, the forum dragged on for another 35 minutes.

By the time the plug was finally pulled, I had to leave and all chance of networking was lost. So, I spent nearly £200 and took two days out of my working schedule for an event I need not have bothered to attend. Thanks for nothing, guys.

Fortunately, I managed to find some positives in the trip. I got to catch up with a good friend who kindly gave me a floor to sleep on, bought far too many books about the Pacific theatre of WWII as research for my next novel, and got to see the barmy action film Crank. It's daft as brush, but a lot of fun and comes highly recommended for those who like inane popcorn action movies. Disengage your brain and laugh your ass off, that's my suggestion. The DVD should be a real hoot.

Best of all, I got two days away from my computer and a chance to recharge the creative batteries. I hadn't realised how much working on my 2000 AD history tome had scrambled my circuits, and going straight from that into my Warhammer novel was not the smartest of ideas. Now I'm feeling considerably more juiced and ready to let rip, it's time to get going - a deadline's a deadline.

Vanity, thy name is Googlism

When boredom strikes, I use the Sitemeter facility on this blog to see how people stumble across Vicious Imagery. This led me to Googlism, a device whereby you can discover what Google finds about you on the internet. This is more than a mere Google search, but a way to find distilled comments about you online. Well, who could resist having their ego massaged? Not me, I have to admit. [Hey, I'm shallow - like you've never googled your own name, right?] Anyways, here are 15 statements supposedly about me from Googlism, of which at least five are true - but which five? You be the judge...

david bishop is a freelance media journalist and author
david bishop is president of waccamaw corp
david bishop is away on business
david bishop is a partner with gowlings in their calgary office
david bishop is no longer on our christmas card list
david bishop is a 1984 graduate of the university of south alabama
david bishop is no exception
david bishop is buried at bethel church cemetery in montgomery county
david bishop is expected to be released in june
david bishop is the owner of tcby & pretzel time in the coral ridge mall
david bishop is contactable by email
david bishop is leaving
david bishop is the author of the infamous "who killed kennedy" novel
david bishop is back in the fray with a stiff kick to the side of vegas' head
david bishop is proud to have introduced a new anticrime initiative to suffolk county

Have some fun, plug your own name into Googlism and see what weirdness you discover!

Scottish water torture

Woke up with a headache, always the perfect start to the day. I wouldn't mind so much if I had a hangover, but I haven't touched alcohol since Wednesday. Can't decide if the cause if a sinus infection or grinding my teeth in the night, both of which could be the culprit. Taken some paracetamol, but the headache's still there at the back of temples, screaming for attention. Bastard.

Had a tap dripping in the bathroom for over a year. Should have got it fixed long ago, but trying to find a plumber who'll come out to fix a tap makes the labour of Sisyphus seem like a little light work in a garden rockery. Now the tap has decided it will not be shut off, even if you apply enough torque to keep the shuttle in orbit. Bastard.

Need to write at least 6000 words today and am here instead, blogging and procrastinating. Why can't I get on with work? Bastard.

As you may have surmised, I'm not in a happy place right now.

UPDATE: Plumber has just been and gone, construction next door has paused for lunch and the living is that little bit easier. The bill came to £81.66, but frankly it was the best £81.66 I've spent for a long, long time. Hurray for the sounds of frickin' silence, as Nicholas Cage once said - in Con Air, I think. Now, hopefully, maybe, finally, I can get some damned work done today.

Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis back in 2007

ITV has confirmed production is underway on three new feature-length Lewis dramas, for broadcast in 2007. The Inspector Morse spin-off was a massive hit for ITV back in January, when a one-off episode netted 11 million viewers. That may not sound much compared to Morse's peak when the show garnered more than 18 million viewers in the UK, but in these multi-channel, digital TV times it's huge. Lewis is the highest rating drama on ITV for the past two years, excluding soaps. Here's the official press release...

Kevin Whately is returning to the role of Inspector Robbie Lewis in three new episodes of LEWIS, ITV's highest rating drama of the year.

When Kevin Whately returned to Oxford in LEWIS earlier this year, the feature length film attracted an audience of more than 11 million. Now the much loved Oxford policeman is back in three new episodesalong with his young partner DS Hathaway, played by Laurence Fox.

Kevin Whately first appeared as Robbie Lewis alongside John Thaw in Morse in 1987. Twenty years on he is a widower, living alone in Oxford and, after a period abroad, is anxious to prove himself.

In the first episode, written by Daniel Boyle, and directed by Marc Jobst, Lewis and Hathaway investigate the death of an artist which leads them to discover a group of former Oxford University students bound by a destructive past. Clare Holman returns as pathologist Dr Laura Hobson and Rebecca Front returns to the role of Lewis' boss, Chief Supt Jean Innocent. Anna Massey guest stars as Professor Gold.

The other screenplays are written by Alan Plater and Guy Andrews. Barrington Pheloung is composing the music for all three films. LEWIS is produced by Chris Burt, who worked on 11 Morse films, and the executive producers are Michele Buck, Damien Timmer and Ted Childs.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Glad to see the emphasis on top-notch writers remains in place, it was always a major strength on Inspector Morse. Interesting to see Anna Massey as a guest star. That'll make her one of the few actors ever to appear as two different characters in Morse/Lewis, having played a killer in Happy Families [also written by Daniel Boyle, coincidentally enough]. Anyway, great to get confirmation Lewis is returning. Can't wait to see more of him and Hathaway, they were building a strong partnership by the end of the first Lewis special.

Bolland does Dredd: less than a week until Origins

Brian Bolland has provided cover art for the launch of Judge Dredd: Origins in 2000 AD. The long-awaited story of how Dredd's world came to be begins in the next issue of 2000 AD, crafted by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. You can read more about it by going here.

Trying out for River City

Last month I blogged about a Q&A session held during the Edinburgh International Film Festival aimed at scribes who want to write for BBC's Scottish soap, River City. But I neglected to mention the fact I'd been watching the show for the past six months in preparation to try out for it as a potential writer. Way back in February I attended an Adrian Mead TV drama seminar and met Louise Ironside, who writes for the show. [By a bizarre coincidence, she was one of the writers on the Island Blue drama strand for Radio 4 to which I also contributed a script - it's a very, very small world.]

During the seminar Louise made mention of the fact RC was open to new writers, so I contacted her afterwards and found out how she'd got on to the writing team. The method was exactly the same as that described by executive producer Sandra MacIver during the Q&A session: get in touch first asking if you can submit material; if they say yes, send a sample of original writing, a CV of relevant experience and a one-page critique of the show. From that people deemed to have potential are then sent a fistful of scene-by-scenes for an upcoming episode and asked to write sample script pages.

Well, I followed the playbook and submitted my original writing sample, CV and critique back in March. But a combination of circumstances [double-banking, illness, deadlines] meant I hadn't heard back one way or the other by August, so I went along to the Q&A session to hear Sandra MacIver - nothing like meeting a person to make a stronger, more lasting [and hopefully positive] impression on them. I explained my circumstances and she suggested submitting a new critique, since my old version was now five months out of date. I did as she suggested, adding a revised CV to take into account the progress I've made since March - first broadcast credit, beginning the mentoring process with Adrian Mead, etc.

Last Wednesday I got the call: would I like to write some sample scenes for River City, based on the official scene-by-scenes created for Episode 413? I'd be sent the scene-by-scenes on Friday and have until end of play Monday to submit my script pages. The real episode would be broadcast the day after the samples were due in, giving the opportunity to see first hand what the professionals had done with the material supplied to the wannabes. [Obviously, I was merely one of several scribes taking part in the same procedure.] Was I interested? Hell, yes. Happily, the call just as I was finishing THRILL-POWER OVERLOAD and before I started my Warhammer novel. Perfect timing for me, although it meant my weekend off went MIA - a small sacrifice to make in the circumstances.

The scene-by-scenes arrived by email around 10.30 on Friday morning. I was expecting a handful, half a dozen at most - we got twelve scenes to write, nearly half an episode. Since professional writers are expecting to produce a River City draft in a week, having three days to write just under half an episode was a fair approximation to real working conditions. Suck it up and get on with it, I told myself. After getting the call, I'd sat down and transcribed two recent episodes from my DVD recorder, to give msyelf a stronger sense of the show's writing. Yes, I've been watching it for six months, but there's nothing like pulling a script apart line by line, almost word by word, to give you an intrinsic sense of how characters speak and act and respond. [Whether I've the wit to grasp all those things is another matter.]

We were scenes from two strands in Episode 413: Gerry and Heather's debate about whether Gerry would accompany Heather to Australia; and a longer thread about Gina's discomfiture at living with her new husband Archie and his mum Liz. I spent Friday reading and re-reading the scene-by-scenes, making notes, studying the story beats within the scenes and trying to think how the individual characters would speak in these circumstances - the rhythms of their speech, the vocabulary, the endearments they use, how their dialogue reflects their mood and character. I also started scrawling some potential dialogue down for the first few scenes.

Saturday was knuckling down and getting into it. Biggest problem was nerves, the knowledge that this was my chance to impress, to progress my screenwriting career. Get this right and I'd hopefully be invited to a workshop for potential River City writers in the next few months. Get it wrong and I'd have fecked my chances of working on the show for the foreseeable future, barring regime change in Dumbarton. What's worse, what's more debilitating - fear of failure or the hope of success? Anyway, by the end of Saturday I'd scratched out four scenes and some notes for a few others. Nothing was coming easy, it had to be said.

Didn't help I was having a panic about what Final Draft template to use for my script pages. I knew that it was my dialogue, my grasp of story beats and my ability to turn that into great scenes that would get me noticed, not what format my script arrived in - but that doesn't stop you worrying about such amateur hour concerns. Then there was the mysterious notation T/C in the slugline for several of the scenes. What the hell does T/C mean? Time Code? Top Cat? A quick email to various screenwriters I know got me the answer to that question - T/C is Time Continuous, indicating one scene flows immediately on from the proceeding scene. [Happily, I wasn't the only person ignorant of that jargon, a fact that perversely cheered me up immensely.]

Sunday and the pressure was on. I wanted to leave Monday free for tweaking and polishing, so I had to write eight scenes on Sunday and fix the four I'd already written on Saturday. And I was leaving the house at 5pm to go to the Bic Runga concert in Edinburgh. Argh. By lunchtime I had three more scenes in hand, but was stuck in a big argument scene between Archie and Gina. Life imitated art at home as the stress got too much, but that was resolved with apologies, lunch and a double-header of the final two Veronica Mars episodes from Season Two on DVD.

After lunch I got my groove on, cranked out the remaining scenes and even did some fixing on my previous efforts - all before 5pm. Finally I was having fun with my writing, where before I'd been churning my wheels in the mud. The characters were talking in my head and inspiration seemed to be my friend once more.

Monday I spent cutting and polishing, as well as switching Final Draft template to a version used by the BBC show Doctors. I'm told River City has its own final Draft template, but the Doctors version is a decent approximation. Switching templates gave me a fresh perspective on my writing, enabling me to cut several clunky sequences and get to the gist of the story. I sent my sample scenes off around 3pm and tried to relax. Since then I've had my acknowledgement email and am now left waiting to see if I had a silk purse or a pig's ear out of the material supplied to me last Friday.

There's the hope of some feedback on my writing - always valuable, even if it's mostly bad news, because it gives you something to work on for the future - and also the possibility of an invite to the writers' workshop. Right now I've got absolutely no perspective on whether what I wrote and submitted was good, bad or indifferent. That's for others to judge, and let me know.

So, last night's episode of River City was an unusual experience. I sat and watched the story unfold, knowing about half the scenes and what would happen in them, while blissfully ignorant of the rest. It was fascinating to compare what I'd written with what had ended up on screen. Sometimes the dialogue was an exact match to mine [not that often, but it did happen a few times], but in other places the scene had gone in quite a different direction, deviating further from the scene-by-scenes that I had. I kept reminding myself that us wannabes only had one draft to get it right, not three, and no notes from which to make rewrites.

For now, I've got my fingers crossed that I've done enough to get a positive response from River City. What I submitted may have sucked like a black hole, or been merely mediocre. All I've got now is the waiting and the worrying...

Lost showrunners talk

There's a fascinating interview with Damon LIndehof and Carlton Cuse, the showrunners on US TV drama phenomenon Lost, on the Writers' Guild of America (West) site. They talk about the mechanics of how the show is written, the development of its many, many ongoing storylines and brand extensions. They say the reason the show connects with so many people - particuarly in the absence of a single, clear antagonist - is its emphasis on deep character. You can access the article here (thanks to the WGGB site for the link).

2000 AD original artwork for sale on eBay

I'm selling on eBay a couple of paintings kindly gifted to me by 2000 AD artists. If you'd like an original work of art by Jim Murray, Simon Davis, Jason Brashill or Steve Sampson, go here for more details.

Bloggin' in the Rain

The American Film Institute has named Singin' in the Rain (1952) as the top movie musical of all time, and that's as good a choice as any, I guess. [For the record, the runners-up were: West Side Story (1961), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Sound of Music (1965) and Cabaret (1972).] I always hated musicals as a kid, but have since developed a fondness for them, so I guess they're a lot like avocados.

Appropriately enough, it's early September and raining steadily as autumn arrives in its usual, unwelcome fashion. The days are getting shorter, I'm having to turn the light on to see my breakfast in the mornings and winter beckons like a big, ugly, beckoning thing. About the only good news to be extracted from that reality is I'm not melting after spending more than an hour in front of the computer, something that'll come in handy over the next few months. Here's my schedule of forthcoming work and deadlines for the autumn, as a sort of online To Do list...

• Write TV series pitch document - due mid-September - 1,000 words*
• Write Phantom script - due September 25th - 7,000 words
• Write Warhammer novel - due October 2nd - 95,000 words
• Write Phantom script - due early October - 7,000 words
• Write Megazine feature - due mid-October - 5,000 words
• Write WWII novel - due November 24th - 95,000 words
• Write Phantom script - due end November - 7,000 words
• Revise Phantom short story - deadline unknown - 5,000 words
• Write spec comic script - deadline unspecified - 2,000 words

[The pitch document is for the mentoring project and will probably be only 500-600 words in reality, but I'm rounding up to make calculations earlier. Besides, there's will be more to follow that as we develop our ideas further into treatments and the like - the pitch document is merely the first step on a nine-month journey.]

That's a minimum of 216,000 words to produce between now and the end of November. And that's before we get into the small matter of going back to college towards the end of this month to resumes studies for my screenwriting MA. I've a feeling the tutors will be expecting me to do some work on that some time soon, too. In other words, I've bitten far more than I can chew, as usual. But having earned tuppence over the past two months, I badly need to turn effort into revenue to pay some bills. Courses fees for the MA are more than £2000 over the next nine months and I'm not eligible for a bursary because I don't hold an EU passport. Frankly, I'm lucky they don't consider me an international student and charge me the full cost of my course.

It's a strange phenomenon, but my income has dropped through the floor since I decided about a year ago to pursue my dream of becoming a screenwriter. I was sick and tired of being a hack, churning out stories featuring other peoples characters, particularly work for hire with no royalties or even the prospect of royalties. I've deliberately chosen commissions since last summer with the hope of royalties and career progression, but that decision isn't paying off yet. It may never do.

The more time and energy I devote to chasing my dream, the less money I'm making. If I crack writing drama for TV, I could easily double my old income. Until that happens, all I've done is half it. Financially, I've tapped out and stressed up. Put that to one side, and I'm much happier. So guess what I'm doing for the next four weeks? Thrashing out a novel for Games Workshop and surrendering my copyright to that company too. But the characters are my own inventions and there's the possibility of royalties, too - even if there's little reality. So, enough blogging about work. It's time to do some damned work. Onward!