Geek heaven or convention hell

Comic-Con is happening in San Diego right now. What started out as a small comics convention has grown into a multi-media behemoth, like the geek equivalent to the Cannes Film Festival but covering film, TV, computer games, all manner of other entertainment media. Oh, and sometimes comics, too. Forthcoming genre films get their first serious pimpage at San Diego, genre TV shows are now reserving their best sneaks for San Diego and it's the place to be seen if you're launching something big.

The problem is getting seen or heard amidst the wall of sound the convention now generates. Actually, it's closer to an concrete car park building of white noise than just a single wall of sound. I went to San Diego ten years ago and was overwhelmed by the scale of it. I went back in 1999 and it took an hour to walk from one end of the convention to the other. Frighteningly, the building was being expanded. I think Comic-Con now covers two or four times as much floor space as it did in '99.

You could always tell the Brits at San Diego, they were the pasty white people dressed in black, standing outside chain smoking. Finding a hotel room at the convention rate is next to impossible. You can't move for people. The waft of fanboy body odour gets pretty overpowering once you stick more than 100,000 geeks in one space at one time. Despite all of that, Comic-Con can be a blast. The pound to dollar exchange may be a nightmare for Brit creators at the moment, but at least anyone going to San Diego from the UK this year has massive spending power.

In other news, nailed a deadline yesterday morning and then raced into Screen Academy Scotland for a session with the guest mentor lined up to help MA screenwriting students with their final projects. Peter was enthusiastic about my TV project and offered lots of good notes I'll be weaving into the next stage of development. Of course, his enthusiasm may have been driven by the fact I was the first student he'd met. That may change once 24 of my colleagues have had their wicked way with him.

Got two more deadlines looming and a Phantom script to write before I can return to my final project, hopefully the end of next week. At that point I'll have four weeks left to deliver my project, and still won't have started the first draft. My hope is all this preparation and contemplation will make the scripting that bit easier. I've spent a lot of time sorting out my story structure and getting to know my characters. Now all I need to find is their inidividual voices...