After slaving away for a month on my Red Planet screenplay submission, I was dealt a blow when my keyboard suddenly lost its ability to 'shift'. So there I was, mid-sentence, unable to Capitalize, exclaim (!), quote ("), ampersand (&), denominate currency (£/$), e-mail people (@) and bracket (()).
It was like losing an arm!
Things were made worse when I spent £10 on a keyboard from Argos, only to find it didn't have USB, and my laptop doesn't have PS2. Yes, I hook up peripherals to a laptop these days. I mean, dedicated PCs are so last century, darling...
Those nice Argos people accepted my return (as their blessed new catalogue had it listed as being USB), and I purchased a £15 USB Logitech keyboard instead. A nice, compact, black, slimline one... with its keys in strange places, so I can't "page up", "page down" or "delete" now without accidentally typing 447841 and putting the NumLock on. Aaagghh!
Anyway, I'm getting used to it now and said screenplay is slowly coming together. It's been a bit of a rush job, but I've used an idea I've had buzzing around in my head for a year now, so it's going better than I expected. A deadline always helps my creative juices, too.
Of course, given the deadline is 1 September, I'm focusing on the first 10 pages (as that's all they require initially) and plan to spend next month writing and rewriting the remaining 45. I'm on page 28 right now... but everything after page 10 isn't quite as polished. The characters have also begun to dictate changes in the plot! Isn't it annoying when your characters begin to take on a life of their own and stuff up your story? Sigh. Oh well, I suppose it's better than having lifeless characters mundanely shuffle through the story like written glove puppets.
All this writing, blogging and (consequently) watching films and TV, has eaten up a lot of my time recently. I've actually made a point of watching TV pilots (hence my Sarah Connor Chronicles, Reaper and Pushing Daisies previews) as "research" for the Red Planet competition. Everything helps! Well, that's my excuse.
I also watched the first episode of Burn Notice and the entire season of John From Cincinnati (reviews pending their UK airdates). Oh, and the first two episodes of Dexter's unaired second season, a month before its US premiere. Shhh, don't tell the 'net cops...
Some bad or average films I'd been meaning to miss also got a viewing, like Da Vinci Code and Number 23, via a well-known DVD rental service's Free Internet Trial. It's actually my second freebie with them, because they keep sending me "trial coupons". So if you register online with a different credit card, they don't notice the same address is participating in another free trial. I should get my next Free Trial sometime in November if their marketing strategy stays as useless. God, I feel like such a villain! Mwuahahahaha.
Anyway, that's all for now. Great to see so many new readers of the blog in recent weeks, perhaps due to links from various websites (most notably a Dirt fansite and The Guardian's media blog), so that's very nice of them. I hope you'll stay.
