Monday, January 22, 2007

Can you feel the COLD tonight?

Got home on Saturday after spending the day in Edinburgh to discover the central heating boiler had gone bung. Inevitably, this has coincided with the coldest spell of winter thus far. When you love in Scotland, you tend to take central heating for granted - until you don't have it. I'm hoping the problem will be fixed today before my fingers fall off, as they may be an impediment to my writing career. Brrrrrrrrr.

Finished and submitted my 25-minute screenplay for the script development module on my MA course last week. This week I need to submit a 3000 word essay as the final piece of assessed work on the other module I'm taking this trimester, From Script to Screen. Our task is to select and write about a film made before 1980 that we would like to remake. There are all sorts of issues to contemplate and we're required to quote from a minimum of twelve sources, of which no more than six can have been taken from the internet.

Happily, I got the chance to gouge the British Film Institute archives for relevant material when I was down in London last month for the TAPS TV script editing course. I'd have struggled otherwise, as my chosen film is a New Zealand movie from 1977 called Sleeping Dogs. It's not widely known outside NZ and finding relevant sources of information and opinion about it would have been next to impossible otherwise. I plan to watch the film two or three times today, to help solidify my ideas.

Before I can do that, I need to finish plotting an issue of The Phantom for Egmont Sweden. I was supposed to do that at the start of this month, but other tasks intervened. If I want to see any money in late February or early March, I have to do some paying work in the next week or two. Devoting more time to the mentoring project and my MA Screenwriting course is good for my advancement as a scribe, but bad for the bank balance. Besides, if the boiler needs replacing, it won't be cheap.

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