A Literary Life

I’ve been busy preparing a final draft of the first three chapters of my second novel, currently titled ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’, to send to literary agents and potential publishers in the hope of securing a proper book deal that will actually see my work reach readers.   I’m inordinately proud of what I’ve achieved with this second novel.   I started writing it in December 2010, after a few months of thought, and wrote the first fifty or so pages through to mid-January 2011 when I stopped.   I was starting to write screenplays for the first time, and they took over.   Through 2011 I returned to the novel rarely, writing just ten or twenty pages before stopping again.   I completed the first draft of another novel in that time (a novel I can’t decide what to do with, as it’s good, but not great) and I wrote at least seven screenplays (three of which hit either the BBC Writersroom, where they recieved reader commentary, a rare honour, or The R...

So my latest screenplay – “Otherworld” – has gotten through to the second stage of the Red Planet Prize.  It is wonderful news, and a real opportunity.  I’ve entered the prize once before, in 2008, with a script that was thrilling, exciting, far too expensive for production on TV budgets, but most importantly, incredibly undercooked.  I’d not thought past episode 1.  I’d certainly not thought of episode 5 or 50 or 500.  With “Otherworld” I see all those episodes, I obsess of those episodes in a way I never have with a TV show before.  Which is why I’m going to be so crushed if I fall at this hurdle – but I suppose why, if I do fall, I’ll take a week, then pick myself up, dust myself down, figure out where I went wrong (and not curse Red Planet for failing to see my obvious genius!) and work on something else.  I already have a few great ideas stewing away. Anyway, I wanted to bring your attention to another wonderful post on Jason Arnopp’s blog –...

Madrid. Just looking at the name on cheap holiday search engines made me tingle with excitement. South European heat, blue skies, sun pouring down onto warm squares. I booked to fly the very next day. I’d never thought of myself as impulsive: I like to consider things through, work out each possible line of attack before I make a move. It’s part of my training as a novelist: you have to be certain that what you are going to do works before you spend time doing it. Are the through-lines of the plot coherent? Would Character X act in such a downright filthy manner? So to book a flight leaving the very next morning to a city in a country I’d never visited: outrageous! (Okay, it was only Madrid, not Montevideo or Mogadishu, and okay Madrid is probably very safe and familiar to someone familiar with any other European city, but the point still holds, the act was impulsive, somewhat rash and possibly foolhardy.) Madrid though. I landed late. The flig...