Presumably you’re on the side of the writers in the US strike: if not, hello, it’s funny you should stop by here just when I’m talking about you and the other five people backing the producers.

But if you are one of those, do please look away now and don’t spoil the surprise: I’ve just sent you a gift. Like socks at Christmas, it’s a nice gift that you’re going to get sick of.

Writers across the world are being asked to show support for the US strike by sending a box of pencils to the heads of the studios holding out. Being writers, these pencils are imbued with symbolism and you want to chip in, don’t you? It’ll cost a dollar: click here to do the deed.

Ta to Piers for blogging about it even as he should be giving me notes on a script.

William

There are birds in the trees. I’m writing again. My Oscar is in the post. I don’t want to make too big a deal out of this, but on my way over here, I healed some people.

Yes, I have an iPhone.

William

Some writing competitions require you to enter entirely under a pseudonym. So the other day Maxine Desk, who inexplicably lives at my address yet doesn’t contribute a penny to the food bill, got a letter from a theatre company saying how sorry they were she’d been rejected, how they knew this was a blow.

I couldn’t even remember entering the contest, I don’t know what I sent, I don’t know who these people are. If there’s a real Maxine Desk out there waiting for news on her script, let me know. No need to hurry.

This utter blankness over a contest I’ve entered is unusual, yes. But I’m minded of it because the reverse has happened today: a contest I’ve said before would be the best TV writing competition in the world, ever, if they had only thought to beef up the prize. Really, they were so close: a guaranteed TV commission, a guaranteed TV agent, some cash and the opportunity to work with Tony Jordan plus a good stab at getting your winning script filmed. Would it have hurt them to add a bacon sandwich and an iPhone?

I haven’t made the cut.

This time, though, even more than remembering who I emailed my entry to, I also know the names of the judging panel and they are all people I rate very highly: Stephen Fry, Julie Gardner, it goes on, you count them, I can’t face it. So instead of a faceless producer, there’s a panel of people whose writing I admire and who do not admire my writing. To be practical here, they might have loved and cherished every syllable, but I didn’t make the cut and a miss is as good as a mile.

There won’t be feedback on this one (Red Planet’s judges must’ve read at least 20,000 pages of script, they’d never be able to comment usefully on my 10) which usually means you have to shrug and move on. The scale and weight of this one means that’s harder to do, and it’s much easier to re-examine the material and try to guess where I got it wrong. So I’ll obviously be doing a bit of that.

But otherwise, you know what needs to be done next, don’t you? Every sane person in this world would tell you that that thing to do is to keep writing and, if you were even halfway clever you would already have other things out there. I have other things out there.

But still, I’m tired of being a rebel. I am stopping writing now, it’s all over. I’ve been eating my own bacon sandwich while I’ve talked to you and soon I’m going out to buy my own iPhone.

William

PS. Rackfay is pig latin, if you hadn’t guessed.

Take three blog entries into the shower?

Not sure if this is a busy day or not, but it’s definitely not my usual Tuesday news shift at RadioTimes.com so I admit it, I am intrigued: Piers Beckley just tagged me to copy what he’s done and list five things about myself that “other people might think lame, but which make me who I am”. He’s preceded in this by Helen Smith. (Hello, Helen Smith.) Who’s next depends on you.

But in no especial order, here you go: me in five lame point.

1) Just so stories
When a piece of writing is just so, just exactly right, it can and regularly does move me to real tears. Can’t define what’s right but I know it when I get that tingle. Dar Williams‘s songwriting does it to me repeatedly; Christina Rosetti; Alan Plater plays. It’s almost endless.

2) I’m scared of paper
Strange, but true: I have papyrophobia which is strictly speaking a fear of paper. I know you think I’m joking, being a writer and all, but while I think fear is a strong word, it’s about right. Small pieces of paper, especially, can make me shake. Consequently the BBC’s habit of using post-it notes a lot does give me problems, most particularly because I regularly hotdesk there and can be using other people’s computers instead of my own paper-free one.

3) I’m a nut for cartography
‘Course, I gave that away about an hour ago, but still. Mapping, GIS, all this stuff, arrests me. I am in no small way excited by the Maps application on iPhones.

4) Pilgrimage
When I went to Los Angeles, I made a pilgrimage to Pershing Square where the exterior of the Los Angeles Tribune newspaper offices were in Lou Grant.

5) I like typing
More than writing, sometimes. The feel of the keys under your fingers; I’m a self-taught touch-typist, once clocked at around 120 wpm, and writing is a tactile thing for me; I like the sense of kneading words together with my fingers. I think a lot about how we can think of keyboards in different ways; right now, for instance, I’m not looking at mine and all it means to me is the next letter, the next word, yet in a word processor I can in the very next second be using those same keys to save, to print, to email. I also think a great deal about word processors; I used to write about them. A friend recently complained that it was ridiculous that Microsoft charges hundreds of pounds for Word, “it’s only a word processor”, and by God she regretted it – or she would have done if she hadn’t glazed over a few seconds into my “Ah, but you say that…” speech.

Am I allowed a sixth? You’re the only person I can think of to send this to and suggest you do one yourself. No telling me that you have already. This is primarily because every bleedin’ writer on the planet has already done this business. I am late to the table, again.

William

No reason you should know this, but I’m a nut for cartography. If you have a look at the About me page on my website, you’ll see me with my nose in a book: it’s a beautiful volume called Mapping Boston.

But being a writer, a particular fascination for me about mapping is the naming of places and features. If you don’t already know this, you may be startled by just how much rage is stirred up by toponyms: there are several places in America called “Squaw Tits”, for example, and somewhere in the States there’s a “Nigger Point”. My first reaction is to change them, but if you erase them, aren’t you sanitising history? And if you don’t, aren’t you perpetuating the offense? That’s my ideal drama: two opposing sides, both deeply felt and both rousing anger, but both sides right and both wrong.

I’ve learnt today about an almost opposite thing: a place that has no name. It doesn’t sound possible, does it? You think of the world as having been thoroughly and completely explored, named, practically settled. (Incidentally, the UK is the most-mapped region of the globe, seriously. And of course it was started for military reasons; why don’t we twig the reason it’s called Ordnance Survey?).

But imagine a place with no name. You’d want to name it, wouldn’t you? And pretty quick. So, yep, one of the current issues being debated by the US Board on Geographic Names is what to call a stream in Washington state. I’d tell you where it is but I can’t find it, it doesn’t have a name.

It will. I just can’t decide whether this is good silly or bad silly: it’s likely to be called Lambee Creek – “in honour of a nearby resident’s 12-year-old cat, Lambee”.

Quote from USA Today.

William

Previously on this blog… I told you I’d seen a draft of a Radio Times cover that I wanted to tell you all about – and realised halfway through the sentence that I was simply not allowed to. If you don’t already know, covers are extraordinarily important. When I was on PC Direct magazine we’d have covers meetings and you’d see that, all else being equal, the cover affected sales by 10 per cent or more.

Anyway, now read on. Or rather look on. The issue is on sale as of this morning and the cover has been released: Outpost Gallifrey has the largest image of it I could see and that’s here.

I told you I’d watched the image be really painstakingly arranged on the page (Peter Davison and David Tennant were shot in front of a green screen; the TARDIS behind them is a separate image). This isn’t the cover I saw, it’s a different shot of the men, but it still makes me think what I did at the time. That it’s weird.

Good weird, but still. Much as I liked Peter Davison’s Doctor at the time, he looks so jarring now. Hard to believe this is the same show that it was, don’t you think?

William

Christine Patton, whose blog I would link to if link-based technology were working, has written about how she’s completed her period film script, the latest in a series of scriptwriting challenges that I’m also part of. (Hang on, would you put up with an old-fashioned, crude and frankly passe URL? She’s on http://mycatlikeselvis.blogspot.com/.)

Stuart Perry (http://stuartperryuk.blogspot.com/) was also doing said period challenge but has only gone and got himself a proper script writing job. (How do I do green text?)

The period idea was mine, and I thought of it partly because I like certain period films but also because it seemed difficult to do. The primary reason for the challenges is to make you get down on your arse and write, rather than think, but it’s good to have a goal that’s going to be tough beyond just having to reach a certain page count. So I suggested period films and Piers Beckley (http://pavementandstars.blogspot.com/) who has run these things ever since I said “‘ere, what if we did challenges?” determined that the definition of a period film was anything prior to 1989.

I could’ve objected. And I did. But I could’ve objected more, I could’ve pointed out that he wasn’t even doing this one. But instead, like the Englishman I am, I nodded politely and mentioned later that I was ignoring him.

My period film is set in 2010.

Also 2000.

And 1991.

1980.

1975

1820.

I was a heartbeat away from saying to you that this makes it a periods film when I realised that sounded medical.

I had a point when I started telling you this but I’ve lost it now. What was I getting at? That I feel good another script is written? That’s happy for me.

Trust you’re well,
William

Universal has just released six screenplays online right here. They’re the ones the studio is hoping will get a Oscar nominations – well, presumably they’re hoping for an Oscar win but steady on – so they’re arguably the pick of the bunch.

They’re all the shooting scripts so none of the rubbishy tarted-up transcripts you so often see published and they’re all in PDF format. A personal favourite is there, The Bourne Ultimatum, which I’m planning to read as soon as I’ve stopped talking to you. But there’s also American Gangster, Breach, Elizabeth – The Golden Age, The Kingdom and Knocked Up.

I didn’t know this but Paramount Vantage, kind of the arthouse end of Paramount if there is such a thing, has already done much the same. If you haven’t seen it, here’s Paramount Vantage’s collection of scripts.

You will notice that Jason Arnopp‘s screenplay, Look at Me, is not yet available online anywhere but this will surely be remedied soon.

William

There are certain books I read when I’m bored. Not because that’s the only time I can face ’em, or because I’ve been keeping them ready for boredom-emergencies, but because there’s something about them that bears re-reading and they’ve somehow become handy.

It’s not always obvious why: when I was a boy it was the Piccolo Book of Codes and Ciphers. What I don’t know about wrapping a strip of paper around a stick before you write a very short message on it is simply not worth knowing. I can say that with authority because nothing about wrapping a strip of paper around a stick is worth knowing.

For many years, though, my grab book has been an anthology of Alan Coren’s writing. You certainly know him from television and radio, you probably know he’s Victoria Coren’s dad, and you’ve probably heard that his death was announced today. I can’t find the book. I could quote you whole chapters, though I wouldn’t do them justice. But I can’t find it to read again.

I wasn’t always 100% sure I agreed with his perspectives but the sixty-odd pieces in that book, all two- and three-pagers, made me shake so I couldn’t hold the page still. I’d fight the page to keep it steady and let me read, and I’d lose. You can’t go back, nothing can ever be as funny the second time, but the more I’d read it, the more the writer in me would kick in and I’d appreciate the casually artful construction, the very offhand punch he had.

There’s an obit on BBC News Online.

w

You know I want to tell you. You know.

But I can’t.

I saw a draft cover of a future Radio Times issue this afternoon – and maybe I’m extremely warmly-dressed but covers are fascinating to me, both from how important they are and from seeing them made with care. The thing I can’t tell you is what’s actually on the cover but standing in a conversation, I couldn’t stop watching RT’s art editor Paul Smith making the tiniest, tiniest adjustments. Nudging elements of the cover a pixel here or there.

I’ve seen this before, the time and the talent spent getting an image just right, but I’ll tell you that this cover was surprising.

When’s Comic Relief? At the moment, this particular image is planned for the RT issue of that week and if I did tell you what was on, you might shrug and say everybody knows about this particular thing. I think I did, I think I did. But seeing the image in the flesh, so to speak, is different and I’d like to talk to you about that.

But of course I can’t, so I’ll shut up. And apologise for being mean. Let me tell you what I meant – when the cover’s on sale.

William