Spent yesterday in The Smoke doing "some stuff" which was the culmination of "stuff I was doing before", so today, as I gather my senses to press on with "real stuff", I find I have about ten days before a whole bunch of deadlines kick in. Before I start though, some nice bloke with a camera to hand took a decent picture of me whilst in The Smoke - so for everybody that wanted to see the shorn version of hair, this is as good as it gets. Suit. Tie. Slight air of prefessionalism... and said hair straightened to within an inch of its life just in case it decided to misbehaveduring the day. Curly unruliness has already resumed.
Anyway, first out of the deadline trap would be the childrens book I've been working on with my friend Emma. This one is a self imposed deadline and therefore moveable in theory but I don't want to. I think if I start moving stuff about, it will lead to all sorts of implications later on. Meet the new me. Same as the old me... but different. I'm actually pretty close to the end of that anyway - a few tweaks and then back to the start for some heavy editing and it will be away.
There's a couple of competition entries kicking around with brick walls at the end of the month too. One is for the Bridport Prize which I'd really like to smack on the head this year. Last year, I mailed in an entry in the poetry category. I'm absolutely convinced it was the darkest poem ever written by a human being but maybe too dark for that sort of audience, so this year, I've taken the opportunity to use it as a deadline to finish up the next Inspector Kang story, The Moon Upstairs. This is number two in the series - anybody interested in previously mentioned dark poem can find it in the forthcoming "Palm Trees..." release.
Also on the cards is a comp that Waterstones are running - rather than have two Kang shorts running at the same time, I thought I would throw The Run-Along Man Sells Spoons into the mixer.
Quite possibly the weirdest story I've written so far - but you wouldn't know that would you because I've never put any of the others out have I? All will change over the next couple of months - more on this in a few weeks.
Finally, there's a TV screenplay going out to play somewhere nice in the next couple of weeks. It's working title is Fox On The Run and that's all I can say at the moment. I hope it keeps that title for its entire lifespan. I can't imagine it ever being called anything else but I guess its not very professional to become too attached to nuances like that. There's a whole bunch of other stuff as well but I'm feeling a bit under pressure now, so over the next couple of weeks expect rather a lot of head-emptying nonsense instead of real stuff.
Yeah, I know... that's how everyone prefers it.
In closing, been reading and chatting to some people about the forthcoming Doctor Who series finale. Word on the street is that the next two episodes are Moffat at his very best and when it's over, you'll want to watch the whole series again from the beginning and you won't believe that you could have been so stupid as to no notive all of its nuances... that's what I hear anyway. I wonder if it has anything to do with the repeated references in EVERY EPISODE to nursey rhymes - or is it just me that's noticed that?
