I love it when deadlines have been successfully met. Or at least, not too badly missed. That's the best bit about writing - sending stuff off into the wild where people will rip it into tiny little shreds and send it back to you in the mail with a ransom note.

CVs are evil. Biographies more so. Whoever invented them should be taken outside and shot. Or maybe disembowelled. With a blunt spoon.

I don't like writing my CV. Can you tell?

I had a vision today. I saw my future. It was amazing - really clear, precise, accurate and other tautologies. I have no doubt that this premonition will prove to be 100% accurate.

It involves typing. A lot of typing. Huge amounts of typing. And possibly RSI.

You see, I kinda got this literary agent, and he's quite keen on the idea of me writing this thing call a... er, hang on a moment, I've got to look it up... oh yes, that's right, the thing with flappy pages in. Book. That's it. So I have to write a book proposal. On top of all the other things I have to write, which currently are many, multitudinous and legion.

I may be gone some time.

My latest article about intellectual property, copyright and Creative Commons for web designers is out today in Issue 4 of Design In-Flight. Here's an excerpt:

Who owns your portfolio?
It might seem logical that you own the designs you create; but it's not always true.

With the advent of the first graphical internet browser came a whole new design discipline – web design – and with it came a new way of getting work. Instead of collating examples of their best work in a book to be carried from interview to interview, designers started to use websites to display their talents. Online portfolios allowed designers to include not just a set of images, but links to the finished sites so that prospective clients could examine code and functionality. Now designers of all ilks can send not a physical portfolio but a simple URI to new employers, and can promote themselves online using their website as their business card.

But the very thing that makes an online portfolio so useful – the ease with which it can be found – is also its biggest drawback, because if you include content which one of your former clients or employers thinks is infringing their copyright, they can quickly and easily find you and take action.

If you want to read the whole thing, then you can buy a copy of Design In-Flight for just $3, or you can get the first four issues for $10. Editor, Andy Arikawa has consistently drawn together some great writing from some of the industries best designers - so it's always well worth the investment.

Other cool stuff in this issue includes: Eye on type 01, by Hrant H. Papazian; Feeling your way around grids, by Mark Boulton; and The more things stay the same, the more they change, by Molly E. Holzschlag. So run, don't walk, and get your copy now.

Back in August I submitted my script to the Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. I then forgot about it. A few days ago I remembered that the winners will be announced on 1 Feb. I don't really think I stand that much of a chance of winning - my script is very British and there's a reason that Francis Ford Coppola's company is called American Zoetrope. Yet, somehow, I can't help holding on to just a speck of hope.

Please keep your fingers crossed for me.

UPDATE: Pfft. Some people have no taste. Wasn't placed.

Earlier in the year I had the pleasure of writing for the inaugural edition of Design In-Flight, an online PDF magazine for designers. My feature, It’s not just all pretty pictures, took a look at how content affects web design, navigation and page layout and I'm happy to say that you can now dowload it in full (PDF, 110k).

I now have a new feature running in the January edition examining the reasons why designers keep blogs and what they get out of it.

Not your average blogger
It's tempting to dismiss weblogs as the personal online diaries of semi-literate teenagers, or vehicles for the inflated egos of opinionated politicos. Yet a blog can also be an invaluable business tool for designers wanting to improve their online presence and find new clients. Suw Charman talked to four design bloggers who have cut a path through the blogging jungle to find out why -- and how they do it.

Why do Bloggers Blog?
"I see it as a community," says Jon Hicks of hicksdesign, "and if I don't blog, I don't feel like a part of that community. It's a place that's larger than the room where my computer is and I love that feeling. There's a great community spirit whenever I've asked a question or put forward ideas -- other bloggers' responses have been really helpful, and that's a lifeline I wouldn't have if it wasn't for blogging."

Subscribe to read the rest! (It's well worth it - $10 for 4 issues)

Many thanks to Jason Santa Maria, Jon Hicks, Todd Dominey and Eric Meyer for their time and help.

The day has come. The day has gone. And my mental state is still somewhere between 'squeeee!' and 'oooooh!'.

Now, we all know that I don't deal well with fan/star situations, we all know that I have a perfectly healthy and not in the least bit obsessive interest in Shaun of the Dead, and we all know that at midnight, the coach turns into a pumpkin in a nasty case of apocolocyntosis.

I've spent most of the last few weeks since my friend Paul got tickets for The Cult of Shaun, a Shaun of the Dead masterclass with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, sublimating my nerves into other activities. After all, there's nothing like a kick in the shins to take your mind off a stubbed toe. And I did quite well - this morning was not spent nervously shuffling round London waiting for impending humiliation, mainly because I knew that it would be perfectly possible to totally avoid any actual contact with either Simon or Edgar.

Instead, I met up with Steve, Paul and Bal at the Marquis of Granby for a few pre-masterclass drinks and some lunch. Then on to the Curzon Soho cinema which, I must admit, I rather like - it just has a nice atmosphere to it.

Never been to one of these ScriptFactory masterclasses before, so really had no idea what to expect. The format is basically that Simon and Edgar were interviewed on stage by Jason Solomons, a film journalist who writes for The Observer. They also showed three snippets from the film.

Actually, that in itself was interesting. I've only seen SotD on DVD, so have never seen it on the big screen at all. Although the quality wasn't particularly good - it wasn't a film projector that they were using - to see the film at that size was illuminating because even after seeing it ten times already, I was still spotting things I'd never seen before and jokes that I'd missed.

An example is the sequence where Shaun and Ed have just killed Tim the Groom and are discussing the Plan, trying to decide where would be safe to hide out until the crisis is over. They comment that they can't bring Shaun's Mum and Liz back to their flat because it's a mess - this said whilst in the background is Tim the Groom's body, covered with a coat. I'd never spotted that before so I fair near pissed myself at a gag I'd not previously noticed.

It was also interesting to hear people around me reacting too. I've only ever seen the film with a maximum of me and one other person in the room, but to hear the peals of laughter ripple through the audience was really fantastic. That, precisely, is the reason why you cannot beat seeing a film in a cinema with a hundred-odd other people, and why I have to see SotD on the big screen some time.

But back to the masterclass. I'm crap at remembering spoken stuff, so I can really only give edited highlights here, things that stuck out. I also need to disclaim on behalf of my memory - I'm doing my best to be accurate but, well, fallibility is my middle name.

The conversation ranged from discussion of the writing process to working with WT2 to why the Second Coming is not such a bad record after all - although not everyone likes it, it does have some good tracks. (I agree with Simon on that, actually.)

Interesting points were that Simon admitted that originally, when they had started to think about writing a film, he had the usual 'I don't need to read about writing feature films - no one can tell me how to write' attitude. Despite that, he had got a copy of Syd Fields and read about structure etc., and that he found it really useful stuff. That is, to my mind, good to know.

Essentially, they had had so much fun with the zombie episode of Spaced that they decided that they wanted to do a zombie film. Over a period of time they toyed about with ideas and until eventually they had the time to sit down and really work on it.

Whilst they were making Spaced, they did get quite a few film producers asking if they had any ideas, an admission to which Paul and I mouthed to each other 'Bastards!'. I wish some film producer somewhere would ask me if I had some ideas - I've got a small book full.

Anyway, they winged a meeting with Working Title, which came to nothing, and then successfully pitched to FilmFour. Seven drafts and two years down the line, however, FilmFour scaled back and Working Title (WT2) stepped in to pick up the pieces. Lucky for us all that they did.

In terms of the writing process, they started off with index cards, each with a scene on, which they then arranged into some sort of order. They then brainstormed that with a flipchart, writing each scene out, making character notes and generally beginning the fleshing out process. (*cough* no pun intended.)

The flip chart is actually on the DVD and, as Simon pointed out today, doesn't differ that much from the end film, which goes to show just how bloody talented the fuckers are. Apparently they did cut out a plane crash, but that was voluntary. After all, no point putting something that you know will get axed for budgetary reasons. The original title was apparently Teatime of the Dead, which was a stab at encapsulating the quintessential Englishness of the film.

Another interesting point that they both made was that this idea that Americans don't get irony is bollocks. As Edgar said, this is the country that brought us the Simpsons, so the idea that they don't get irony is totally illogical. In fact, they didn't think about internationalisation at all during the writing process apart from for one gag. In the garden, during the scene with Bloody Mary, they changed the word 'pissed' to 'drunk' because in America, 'pissed' means 'angry' and the gag just wouldn't work.

As it happens, when an American friend of Edgar's quoted the line back to him, he actually misquoted it as it had been originally written: "Oh my god! She's so pissed!"

The American audiences, in fact, 'got' Shaun of the Dead without any problems. The only gag they didn't get was the Cornetto joke (Shaun asks Ed if he wants anything from the corner shop, and Ed asks for a Cornetto), because they don't have Cornettos in America. But for a 90 minute, very English film, that's pretty good going.

In fact, I think SotD spent three weeks in the American top 10 box office charts, which is not to be sneezed at.

Regarding product placement in the film, Simon's advice was to be brand specific. Now, I've heard people on Zoe get quite apoplectic about brands in scripts, but I think Simon has the stronger point - if the brand is integral then you have to be explicit. For example, in the film Ed is playing Timesplitters2. Now, that's more than just a name of a game, it's a cultural reference and as such it needs to be spelt out.

They had hoped that they could clear the rights to use Medal of Honour, but the games studio wanted to vet the script before they would clear anything. When they realised that Ed was a weed-smoking layabout, they decided that they didn't want to associate with weed-smoking layabouts so vetoed the game's use. Simon pointed out that this pretty much describes their entire customer base so is a touch on the illogical side.

Simon and Edgar's attitude was that it's actually better to be explicit and go through the (painful) process of clearing rights than it is to save the effort and make brands up, because everyone knows when a brand is fake and it's detracts from the reality of the film.

They also discussed the marketing of the film, and how they were involved in pretty much every facet of it, down to Simon writing the copy for the Threshers SotD promotional leaflet. The drawback of this, as Edgar said, was that once you say you want to look at everything, you have to look at everything, even the promotional beermats.

I'm delighted to hear that Simon and Edgar are going to be involved in the comic book adaptation. Initially they had not been sure that they wanted to, but they realised that it was going to happen anyway, and that it would be better if they were involved. That has to be good news for all of us.

Some of the other stuff that they talked about is also the DVD commentary, particularly stuff about the order in which they shot various bits of the film, but what was interesting was the discussion of how much stuff they actually improvised on the day.

One example is Shaun's walk to the shop. The first slate on the first day was the second walk to the shop, after the zombie invasion. Simon improvised much of the physical aspects of the walk - the trip, the scratches, the coughs - all of which he then repeated when they later shot the first walk to the shop, so that the two sequences closely mirror each other.

They also talked about how the original ending was a bit weak, because they ran out of money and time to do anything more impressive. After the test screenings, the responses were unanimous that the ending didn't work, so WT2 asked them to write two versions of a new ending - the ending that they'd do if money was no option and a more realistic one.

Apparently the 'ideal' ending involved Phil driving the Jag through the pub wall and explosions and stuff. WT2 picked the sensible ending, which they shot six months not only after principle photography had finished, but after the first cut had been made. Simon said it was a bit weird to be going onto the set of a film that, essentially, he'd seen finished and on screen.

Edgar talked about test screenings too. Simon had wimped out and not gone, preferring instead to skulk around at home and let Edgar go instead. The test subjects, though, didn't get to see the finished film, but an early cut. The sound hadn't been redubbed, the SFX were missing, as were some of the sound effects, making it a not entirely pleasant experience for Edgar, who knew what was missing.

This highlighted, however, the important of sound design. In the Bloody Mary scene, with Shaun and Ed in the garden, Ed takes a photo of Shaun struggling with Bloody Mary. After pushing her over and holing her on the rotary pole thingie, the two men stand in shock and Ed, almost instinctively, winds on the camera for another shot. Understandably, without the sound of the wind-on mechanism the audience just didn't pick up on what Ed was doing, so the gag fell flat.

There was a short question and answer session, during which my nerves reasserted themselves (potential for interaction, you see). One of the questions was 'How do you maintain control?', to which Simon answered 'Stamp your foot'. Somehow, I think that may be closer to the truth than most people would care to believe.

After the questions finished (ooh, I'm getting nervous now just thinking about it), Simon and Edgar left the auditorium. I honestly thought that was the end of it, that they wouldn't then be hanging around in the bar area just outside the auditorium, so I was a bit surprised to see them there.

Now, I suffer, as we all know, from that whole 'don't bother the talent' mentality, the one that prevents me from going up to anyone famous. But, well, I thought to myself that if I didn't go and say something, I would really kick myself. Simon was standing there, without much of a crowd around him, so I went over and shook his hand and gathered my nerves and attempted to express my admiration for his work.

Unfortunately, the best I could do was 'I just wanted to say that I really like your film'.

What the fuck's that? I'm supposed to be a writer, for fuck's sake. Articulate. All that shit. And the best I can do is 'I really like your film'?

I then went on to explain that it was, in fact, the first zombie movie I have ever seen. Unsurprisingly, Simon recommended that I watch Dawn of the Dead, which I duly promised to do. And of course, now I'm going to have to because a) Simon told me to and b) I promised. Oh fuck.

Anyway, by this point I was verging on gibbering. I don't really remember what he said after that, but I thanked him again, mentioned something about hiding behind cushions and ran away.

So, Simon, if you're reading this, you have joined the ranks of a very small elite. Only you and Gruff Rhys from the Super Furry Animals have actually made me truly lost for words. Yet, like Gruff, Simon was the perfect gentleman, polite, friendly and not in the least bit star-like.

As Steve said afterwards, one gets the impression that Simon just doesn't do the star thing, that he's just him, and this attention is a perplexing and peculiar aberration. Of course, I guess he might actually be a complete git, but his apology to the audience that they didn't have time to answer all of our questions was obviously honest and heartfelt and gives the lie to the complete git theory. (Waffling in a cinema near you...)

After talking to Simon I couldn't possibly leave without also talking to Edgar, and it occurred to me whilst waiting that I could give him the uri to OpenZombie, my SotD wiki. Of course, I had to explain what a wiki is, but he said he'd go take a look.

I also asked if they were going to release the script online, but apparently they are probably going to do a script book, so they are not going put it online anywhere. I refrained from giving them the Creative Commons argument, but I did beg for a copy anyway and gave Edgar my email address. Not expecting to hear anything at all, but you never know. There's the chance that he might go to my wiki and thence to here and he might take pity on me and email me a copy.

So, Edgar, if you're reading this, please, let me have a copy. I promise I won't put it online.

Then, suddenly, we leave the Curzon and I'm left somewhere between 'squeeee!' and 'oooooh!'.

Rather than go to any of the other London Film Festival screenings, we repaired to The Cambridge for a full post mortem. Conclusions were that it was a really good masterclass - entertaining, interesting, educational.

I must admit, one of the reasons I love SotD, Spaced, Simon and Edgar so much is because when I watch their stuff, when I look at what they do, I am not left with a bitter taste of envy, but with the most delightful feeling of gleeful enthusiasm. When I listen to the soundtrack or watch the film, it immediately renews my love for film, and my belief not just in the British film industry but also in myself. It makes me want to get on and market Tag, to finish the next screenplay, to start the one after that.

I also love sitting around with other writers dissecting everything from Spider-Man 2 to the state of father's rights. I was joyous, though, to discover that Paul had only recently seen SotD for the first time, and I really did love discussing it with him in some considerable detail.

But the thing that is going to stay with me is the memory of Simon, sitting only a few metres away from me, saying "I'm really pathologically a geek and I'm very proud of it".

We need more geeks like Simon around, and more films like Shaun of the Dead.

Guess who's gonna be in the same room as - yes, that's right, physically in proximity to - Messers Wright and Pegg? Yup! Me!!

FRI 29 OCT
Curzon Soho Screen 3; 1.30-2.45pm (£6/5)
Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright: a cult comedy class on Shaun of the Dead
Since their smash hit Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have been picking up celebrity fans by the dozen. Raimi, Romero and Tarantino have all spotted that Pegg and Wright are the UK’s most talented comedy-team since Monty Python. Here they talk about exploiting genre for comic effect, the joys and pains of co-writing, and how Brit humour travels.

Eeep!

Thank you Paul, you are a star. I owes ya big time.

*does little dance of joy*

Erm, ok, so what day are we? Monday... Right, yes, good. It's all starting to blur one day into another here. I have essentially spent my days writing, or thinking about writing, or thinking that I should be writing.

Finished the treatment and decided not to bother workshopping it. Whilst logic dictates that it's a good idea to iron out wrinkles earlier rather than later - it being easier to edit a five page treatment than a 110 page script - deep down I knew that the whole thing would change in the writing anyway.

So, I started writing the first draft of the script on, well, it was either Thursday or Friday. Not entirely sure which day it was. Anyway, now I'm up to 10,134 words, and the end of Act 2. It's a wee bit short because I've basically skipped writing some scenes because I wasn't sure what needed to happen in them. I'll wait til I've got the easy bits out of the way and then go back to fill in the gaps.

Still, passing the 10,000 word barrier feels good, even if I am having to write it in Word. *spit spit* I had planned to use Final Draft, industry standard scriptwriting software that does, theoretically, work on a Mac. Sadly, my copy of FD6 refuses to 'authorise' on my PowerBook, which means that I can only use it if I have the CD in the drive. My FD CD is sitting on my desk back home, so I had to resort to the pain that is Word. Bleurgh. What a pile of shite.

One thing that this week has really shown me is how much I want to do this stuff for a living. Writing scripts is basically extended periods of faffing about, punctuated by brief spasms of intensive typing. Somehow that just feels like exactly the right thing for me to be doing.

I'm off back to Daaaahset tomorrow evening, so I shall then start to seriously put together a marketing strategy for the first screenplay whose time has, I think, come. Keep your fingers pre-emptively crossed for me, please.

Hijacked Kate's broadband connection just so that I could get a blog fix. Hoorah for ethernet cables, I say.

If you're curious, the treatment for the next script is coming along nicely. Finished the first draft on Tuesday, started to mindmap it yesterday and that's bringing to the fore all the structural flaws which are, at this point, legion. For a change, I seem to have a weak first act and a strong second act. Usually it's the other way round for me. We'll see how the third act pans out, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my ending is pants.

Gonna stay down here a bit longer than I had originally planned. Sitting at Kate's desk, looking out over the fields and watching the trains rushing through the landscape like caterpillars on speed is just too nice to give up too soon. From here I can see the sea as a thin blue smudge between the trees - how could I up and leave just as I'm starting to relax and chill out?

Arundel is lovely - terribly quaint, with lots of ducks to feed. Been sleeping like a log, dreaming like mad, really weird, vivid dreams that sort of kick start my head first thing in the morning. Kate's doing an art course at the moment, so we've been doing daft arty stuff in the evenings, which is hugely fun. (Although I must apologise to Johnny Depp for accidentally cutting his eyes out - I didn't mean to and I promise I'll never desecrate your image again, Sirrah.)

I'm even managing to survive comfortably the sub-arctic conditions that usually prevail in this creaky old house.

Anyway, one question for you all before I go back to murdering the romcom genre. Apart from Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later, what was the last British action film? I use the word 'action' in the loosest possible sense, mind. Beyond those two, I just can't think.

UPDATE:
Ok, we now also have:

Dog Soldiers from 02, action/horror involving soldiers going up to Scotland on exercises (couldn't they just have gone to a gym?) and finding themselves fighting werewolves.
The Last Great Wilderness from 02, which I had thought was a horror, but apparently is comedy/drama so not sure if it belongs in this list anyway.
Face, from 97, crime/drama/thriller, apparently involves Damon Albarn dying a nasty death, which can never be a bad thing, but is also straying over into the gangsta genre, so probably doesn't count.

So British 'action' films... zombies, armed robberies and werewolves. Maybe the time is ripe for a bit of demon slayage then.

Warning: ***Spoilers. But only little ones.****

Ok... so we all know I'm obsessing over Shaun of the Dead right now, and obviously it's not everyone's cup of tea, but to give myself a bit of a change I decided tonight to watch About A Boy, which I'd picked up in a three-for-18-quid deal on Saturday. Seen it before, a while ago, and laughed quite a bit at the time, but somehow it really doesn't stand up to even a second viewing, let alone the sort of repeated heavy rotation I've given Shaun lately.

Now, About A Boy is not a bad film, really. I've seen plenty worse, but it doesn't have that... *thing* that makes it rewatchable.

So, what is that *thing*?

I think it's all down to layers. You have the story. That's layer one. But if that's all your film has, then it's a bit of a one card trick. Beneath the story is the subtext which gives the film a bit more oompf, but even then there's not all that much there - it's a two horse race.

For a film to be really rich, really watchable, it needs more than just story and subtext. It needs stuff in the background that you only notice if you look hard - in Shaun of the Dead, for example, it's little things like a still-running lawnmower with an arm attached, or Shaun calling David 'four eyes' at one of the rare moments in the film when he doesn't actually have his glasses on, or the repetition and mirroring of certain bits of dialogue or scenes, or the foreshadowing when Ed outlines their plan for the evening which plots out the whole of the rest of the film (except you can't see that first time round).

The fourth layer is made up of 'in jokes' - references to other films, tv shows, music, etc. that you don't get unless you have some sort of prior knowledge. I think that, done badly, this layer can be very tedious, but I think Shaun of the Dead does it well because it doesn't detract from the other layers. So when you see the character Tyres from Spaced turn up as one of the zombies, it's funny, but only incidentally so. The homoerotic non-subtext between Shaun and Ed similarly echoes word for word a scene in Spaced, but again it doesn't matter if you haven't seen it because the overt joke is still funny.

Furthermore, I think that the way that Shaun of the Dead changes mood in the blink of an eye is a major asset. They go from humour to pathos to horror and back again, yet they never lose the momentum. The ludicrousness of the standoff in the pub, where you have what is a stereotypical gangster/heist movie style Mexican standoff, except instead of guns, they have one rickety old Winchester rifle, broken bottles and a corkscrew.

About A Boy also tries to do the mood change thing, from humour to pathos, e.g. when Marcus, Will and Marcus' mum's friend come home to find that Marcus' mum has overdosed. Yet although that works as a plot point, there's no subtext there. In fact, I found the whole film to be somewhat lacking in depth, which is a shame because I'd like to see Hugh Grant do something with depth if only to prove that pretty boys can have brains. (Vain hope, but I am an optimist at heart.)

Question is, how do you create this depth? Surely some of it happens when you come to designing the sets - all that background stuff, e.g. the posters on the wall, the playstation game that Ed is playing (Timesplitters 2).

But the main element to creating this depth is simply spending enough time developing the script, and that's helped by having the people who wrote the script also directing/acting because the development never has to stop. You can bet your bottom dollar that Pegg and Wright spent ages bouncing ideas off each other, throwing out the stuff that didn't work, refining the stuff that did, right up to the moment they shot it.

Same thing with The Matrix I (let's pretend Matrices II and III never happened, shall we?). The Warchowski Brothers obviously spent ages honing the script, adding in layers of meaning, little details that you could then pick up on when you rewatched the film. Unfortunately, Matrix was such a big hit that suddenly they were thrust into the situation of having to make II and III without having spend enough time in script development. (Note: I'm being generous here. It could just be that they were shit scriptwriters to start with and just got lucky with I.)

So you end up with a nasty case of Second Album Syndrome. Look how long it took the Stone Roses to manage Second Coming (which, for the record, I quite like). Second albums are notoriously difficult because you used the accumulated best bits of years and years of work for your first album, but you only have a year or less to write your second. Suddenly, your nose is against the grindstone, you're still touring and promoting your first album, and yet you're expected to come up with the second one, fucking around on the tour bus with a four-track, a pounding hangover and the biggest case of sleep deprivation since the Stanford Prison Experiment.

If you're lucky, you started writing your second album before you'd finished your first, or you had enough quality material left over that you’re not under too much pressure, but the difficulty in producing that second masterpiece shouldn't be underestimated. Psychologically, success can be as scary as failure, whether you believe that success was deserved or not.

So, two three points. Firstly, I hope Pegg and Wright don't do a Second Coming on our ass. Hm, ok, let me rephrase that in a slightly less wishful manner. I hope they get the opportunity to spend enough time developing their next script so that they can make it as good as, or better than, Shaun. It'd really suck if their next film blows.

Secondly, one reason that the film industry in this country closely resembles Tyres' undead persona is because there are not enough resources for script development, not enough time spent on the story, on the subtext, on the layering. It's as if people are saying 'Hey, let's make a film! Let's cobble a script together and go shoot it!' without ever stopping to ask if the script is actually any cop. Thus the majority of films that get made are, well, shite.

Thirdly, this is all stuff I have to pay attention to. It's all well and good recognising it, but I've gotta work all this theory into my scripts too. I'll be the first to admit that it's easier said than done, easy to criticise other people's work but not so easy to replicate the ideals in your own. What can I say? I'm working on it.

Just started drafting out a prose version of Screenplay #3, or a 'treatment' as it's called.

It's funny how it doesn't matter how long you spend looking at the plans and thinking about the design, it's not until you start digging the foundations that you really start to get a feel for how the house is going to look or what it's going to be like to live there. I've been mulling over this story for a few months now, but haven't really made much progress in terms of thinking about structure and character arcs and the like. Now that I've started writing the treatment, all that is becoming much clearer. Already scenes have been dropped, new ones added, and motivations explored. And I'm not even a whole page in yet.

In case you're curious, this one's a romcom. No zom. Absolutely no zom. But I do have Simon Pegg in mind for the lead.

Javier Candeira has translated my Free Culture AudioBook essay into Spanish: Algo a cambio de nada. El proyecto de audiolibro de Free Culture.

This is really very cool. It's free culture in action. This blog has an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence, so it's good to see someone making use of those freedoms. Maybe this is only a wee drop in the creative commons ocean, and maybe it's not even a very important drop, but if there were no drops at all, there'd be no ocean.

Thanks, Javier, for all your hard work, and to José Antonio Millán for helping with and hosting the translation.

So that's it. Tag. "Finished".

The last week or so I have been pouring over my screenplay, Tag, trying to make it the best I can make it without a major rewrite. It's not finished - it'll never be finished, not even if it's ever made. But the time has come to abandon it, pretend it is finished, and submit it to the Second Annual American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest.

I think I am happy with it as it stands. I also think that it is a good screenplay, and that it stands a fighting chance of being placed. (Well, I would think that, otherwise I wouldn't now be $40 lighter.)

Please keep your fingers crossed - not for me to win, but for me to find the patience to wait until 01 Feb 05 to find out if I've won.

Ah, hell, by then I'll have the next one written anyway.

When I started writing my first feature film script in July last year, I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I knew the story I wanted to tell, having lived with it lurking in my mind for over two years, but I didn't know how I should tell it. What I did was just to start writing. I could make some guesses about how I should structure the document and what it should look like, but I was really just groping about in the dark.

Read the rest on Strange Attractor