So what has kept you away from here for so long? I hear you ask. Work mostly, I reply.

Let’s be a little more specific (without ever actually going into specifics):

The TV stuff

I just finished a new pilot script. It needs one last pass of minor tweaking, but judging from the feedback so far it’s pretty much in the bag. Writing the Slingers pilot was a lot of fun, but just between us I didn’t really have a clue as to what I was doing when I started. Luckily I had a lot of good advice from people in the industry, some writers I’ve admired for ages (that I’m still giddy about now being friends with) and a lot of support.

That was almost two years ago now so I’d hate to think I hadn’t got a little bit better. That first script, ‘The Long Goodbye’, was the calling card that opened a lot of doors, but I find it hard to read now despite it having some great feedback from folks who have been doing this for a living a lot longer than I have.

So the new one now sits with the good guys over at Sleepydog and I move on to the next script. Which aptly enough is a brand new Slingers episode.

I wish I could say more about where we’re at with Slingers. I find the progress bar as frustratingly slow as everyone else, but it is filling up. I also get the impression that it’ll speed up considerably, but we’re not quite at that tipping point yet. Can I put a time frame on it? Not at all. And that’s partly why I’ve been keeping busy on all the other stuff. If Slingers was the only thing I was working on I’d have stabbed someone in the face by now. Thankfully with Sleepydog alone there are two other concepts that are at a very healthy development stage that I’m directly involved with. Plus working with Toby means we also get to throw a lot of cool ideas around outside of the TV stuff.

The Radio Thing

I just started working seriously on a radio pitch with an old friend yesterday. We’re calling that Wave for now. Very much at the ‘flesh meet bones’ stage but I guess its as high concept as anything else I’ve worked on recently. Lots of fun if we get to produce half of what we have in mind. Tackling radio is a whole new ball game and that’s partly what drew me to it. Plus the opportunity to work with Steve is like returning to something we started as kids.

The Comic Book Thing

This is a ‘package’ deal and it’s very raw and a tad more experimental. Slowly lining up the right people for that just now. Most things I work on are time dependent one way or another. This is the thing I slip into when the other stuff is moving along without me. Long term I guess, plus it involves a number of stories (some quite old, some brand new).

The Brit Movie Thing

Just outlined this properly over the weekend and it’s entirely dependent on the person I want to work with. If they pass then it’ll go into a folder to be cannibalised at some point in the future. If they like it I guess we’ll grab a coffee and discuss if it’s really doable. Fun idea though.

The LA Stuff

First and foremost out there is my first feature script, CONTAINER. I’m taking that out to my management, Principato-Young, and they’ve now set up a new round of meetings for me. Last time I met with people involved with some of my favourite movies and I’m slowly putting my inner fan boy away and getting to grips with the weird fact that not only do they still return my calls they also wanna work with me. Madness.

Earlier this year I got to work briefly with Disney and that went well enough that I just got a new project through to give some feedback on. I’ve managed to not fuck this stuff up to the point that I keep getting asked back to the table. One of my other feature ideas is being pitched right back at them next.

Be nice if some of this works, but the odds aren’t bad now that I know what individual studios are hungry for and I’ve been writing pages accordingly. I guess in total I have around five feature ideas that have had enough interest for me to start expanding on them. It’s a good thing I don’t sleep much because the hours fill up pretty quickly these days. Plus it’s a very real possibility that nothing will come of any of the feature stuff I’m currently working on, but that’s all part of the fun too. And even though I’m a miserable cunt most of the time, there isn’t a single thing right now that I’m working on that isn’t enjoyable.

When will any of the above find its way into an actual thing that you can watch and give me grief over? No idea.

I know people in Hollywood who make a very comfortable living form never having anything actually made. I don’t want to go down that particular road myself so I’ll keep banging away at the keys until something slips through or I decide to try to my luck in Hong Kong writing heroic bloodshed.

Looking back over this it seems ridiculously that this isn’t even close to everything that I have up on my whiteboard right now. Some stuff I work on once a year (Carbon Black) and others are slowly morphing into something entirely new (West is now looking more like a novel, but I’m still not as mad as Warren to try and add that to my work load too). The key is to keep coming up with ideas. A lot of them never make it from my desk to the whiteboard and I only have room for two projects at a time on the other walls in my office. I have piles of index cards, rubber banded and stacked that may one day get broken down further. And I have a Drop Box folder that I drop new ideas in to every single day so that I can throw them around on my iPhone or iPad while traveling.

As things progress I hope I’ll be able to talk about each of them in a little more detail here. Or you can just do the preferred thing of buying me a drink and I’ll spill everything.

But enough about my crap. There’s a lot of other people’s stuff I need to talk about now that I’m back on the blog…