Took delivery of a new white board today. The walls of my office are already covered but this will free stand at the side of my desk so when my eyes wander to the outside world I’ll be reminded of the most pressing business. I may also draw genitalia on it.

This weekend I’ll be able to turn my attention to New Stuff so that’ll be the real beginning of 2012 for me I guess. Speaking to my guys in LA on Friday to get a game-plan sketched out before my next trip out there and the first meeting of the year over at Sleepydog HQ on Monday. That’s the long term Stuff, but also hoping to get a bunch of short term Things running before the end of January.

One more first draft to finish tomorrow and then it’s time to get all the notes from various notepads, scraps of paper and gadgets together to see if they fit together into anything meaningful. I also have a new Loose Ideas folder to sift through and at least one Big Stupid Thing that I’ll probably pitch next month.

If you see me shuffling, yawning and away from my keyboard do me a favour by buying me a coffee and sending me back to my laptop. Cheers.

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…

Surfacing.

On the final leg of a first draft of pilot number two. Fun, but had a very different set of problems than Slingers.

I somehow skipped Friday completely, lost as I was trying to get this fucker to respond. This week’s writing is planned to the hilt so should run a little smoother… best laid plans and all that.

Plenty to catch up on. Sorry if I owe you email or a call. Getting on top of that right now.

I was explaining to @documentally on Friday the way I use index cards to help map out just about everything. I tend to over think projects and also spread them far and wide over notebooks, bookmarks, iPhone/iPad apps, scraps of paper, several laptops and the margins of books. All of that is eventually collected and ends up on index cards. I know that @sleepydog now has his own system of cards and we’ve been discussing how quickly these 6″ x 4″ blanks amount into something.

Then I saw this over on Warren’s blog:

Loose Ideas folders are great. Any half-formed idea that you think might have potential to become something someday? Type it into a .txt file of its own and fling it into a folder marked Loose Ideas. Make sure it’s linked to your backups. A Loose Ideas folder is saving for the future. One day, you’re going to find in that folder the exact thing you need at that moment, whether it be a new project or a bit of business that fixes the script or book in front of you

I was assuming that everyone did this. Maybe not.

My own loose ideas folder is where at least two of the things I’m working on right now started out. You need to make a home for those crazy 3am revelations otherwise they slip down under the bed and get eaten by something that doesn’t want you to succeed.

The stuff you write doesn’t have to make it into a library, a book or even a blog post for it to be important enough to save and more importantly you don’t know when that single sentence or word you tucked safely away won’t come roaring back and save you.

Plus .txt files take up less room on your hard drive than all the HD porn you’re saving for a rainy day.

The best laid plans of Mike and men.

Turns out I had almost non existent connectivity in Ireland and the time I wasn’t in the writing room was spent thinking about the next story beat or character problem. Intensive work and a lot of fun. Getting back and I’m straight into the Sleepydog slate. Did take time out to see a couple of my favourite people and one of my favourite movies, but I’ll get to that.

Next LA trip is now booked. I’m out there from the 30th of January until February 6th and I’m writing some cool names in my diary. Should be a fun trip. See some of you out there.

Until then this is what an embryonic TV show looks like:

Not my baby, but it’s been fun getting it up walking, making noises and pulling guns on me.

I’m currently throwing a bag together for an early morning flight as I’ll be spending a few days in Ireland to work on a new (sorta secret) project. While SLINGERS sits with the network (can’t spill any beans yet, but we’re getting there) I’m taking the opportunity to get stuck into something… criminal.

This offer came in a roundabout way via SLINGERS (suddenly being taken seriously by people who have been doing this for a long time is very cool) and breaks down into myself and an industry pro squirreled away putting this new concept together. Already had a preliminary meeting that went really well and this week we begin working on the framework. When we’re happy with that we’ll start throwing some meat on the bones.

We just started work on the other shows on the Sleepydog slate and there are some really well received concepts now starting to maneuver into position behind SLINGERS. Can’t talk about any of them yet, but I’ll be using the blog as a research dump for some of them as we start to bulk them up. The work I’m doing now goes quite a bit beyond writer, but that’s something I’ll get around talking about once I have the time.

Hoping to be back in LA in February – some really interesting meetings already lined up and I hope I can talk about some of that stuff as it unfolds. Then as a sort-of break I’ll be heading to Portland in March to catch some of Con-Con before driving down to San Francisco for a little road-trip (and research).

Couple of meet-ups too I expect…

Lots of time to fill in hotel rooms between now and April which is generally good news for sizemore.co.uk. Also starting to pile up a few posts in draft form and have an ever growing list of blog fodder to get through.

You have been warned.

I got the word yesterday that Slingers is entering pre production.

This means we are now on a road that will take us to producing an industry sizzle (kind of a two minute mini episode/trailer) followed by a movie length pilot.

We’re also beginning to haul tv show #2 into the same position that Slingers used to occupy. It’s hard to say right now which I’m more excited about.

We’re still a small team which is great and we weirdly still have almost total creative control. Right now we’re working to my shooting script and have Slingers planned out as far as the third season. Working ahead like this has gotten us this far so we’ll keep at it and see where we are a couple of months down the road.

In the meantime I’ll try and blog some of the process here (and elsewhere). There’s still a lot we can’t talk about and it may be that I’m able to hint at flavour rather than give out too many details until the pilot is completed.

And of course I’m still having a lot of fun with the social media and film stuff so that will also have a place here on the blog.

All alongside the usual crap I’ve been commenting on and complaining about for the last seven years.

So let’s get on with it…

The main reason I was busier than expected while out in San Francisco was that I had the great news that my TV show concept had been very well received by the powers that be. There is now every chance well be shooting a pilot in Canada as early as next year. This took a little time to digest. A good single malt helped.

I had to go back and look at exactly when it was I first put the pin into the board on this particular idea and it turned out to be July. So in just over 4 months we went from what was going to be a comic book to an almost fully realised science fiction TV show. I feel another drink coming on just thinking about that.

In that time I sold the concept (my first TV sale) and was taken on board as creative lead – not only for Slingers but several shows for the same company. Speaking to friends who work out in L.A. this isn’t the kind of thing that happens everyday and at least one of them has probably stopped speaking to me.

I’ve been lucky to be working with people who also embrace the JFDI philosophy which is why I think we’re so far ahead in such a small space of time. It’s similar to the way I’ve been working for that last year or so in social media and once again the learning curve has been a lot of fun to navigate. What’s also been interesting is spotting the problems that traditional television production hits and routing around them in the same way I advise old media to do when embracing new media. The results so far speak for themselves. Right now we’ve not only fleshed out the show through 3 projected seasons, but also have two spin off shows conceptualised – I feel we bring a lot to the table and that’s the main reason we’ve got so far. I’ve been complaining about TV and film for so long now that it feels good to finally get a chance to push some of my ideas in the right direction and have them taken seriously.

It also seemed very natural to spend an afternoon sitting in the sunny garden of our apartment in San Francisco working out the details on another show and then working on the pilot script while drinking vodka at 35,000 feet.

So I guess for the next 18 months or so I’m a TV writer.

I’ll keep you posted.

Damn. Time flies. Thankfully my job is now to manipulate the fuck out of it. Sort of.

I’ve been asked to help put together some sci-fi TV shows from scratch.

American distribution was all settled before I came on board, so now the tricky bit is creating something that hasn’t been done 2001 times before. Early days of course and I’m still working in the froth of social media, but please excuse me if I get distracted both here and on Twitter from time to time and drop in some reference to Metal Mickey having sex with Irene Handl (slight pause while America nips off to Google that).

Not a lot more I can say at this stage. Feels good to be writing in an area that I’ve been complaining about for so long. Let’s see what happens next.

It’s important to read outside of your comfort zone*. I know people who love themselves some Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Anything gets published with a spaceship or an elf on the front and they are somehow forced to read it. As if Terry Pratchett’s diminishing faculties are caused by a Firestarteresque ability to push people into doing what they don’t want to – like reading the same tired shit 9,000 times.

I have friends who are fucking experts on warp drives and siege catapults. Some of them even write Sci-Fi and Fantasy and the stuff they send me is every bit as good as Star Nipple or The Book of the Wrym Volume 5: Blood Sapphire’s Apprentice. And by that I mean derivative as fuck and as appealing as the pod thing that gets forked in the greenhouse in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I try and read broadly. Although ironically in this post I’ll be referencing airport bestsellers rather than Beckett and Sartre.

I dip into Sci-Fi and Fantasy from time to time (unless it’s book anything in a cycle of something else - then life’s too fucking short. If Brautigan could craft a perfect short story in two sentences then some long-winded bastards need to tie up their loose ends within 500 pages. That should be a law), haven’t read a good horror novel in a good long while (but live in hope) and still pick up as much sparkling stuff piled high in the new releases section as I do in the dustier corners of a second hand bookstore. I order crap online on a whim and am surprised to see it appear, but also pace near the front door waiting for that one meticulously researched text that I NEED to arrive. I have e books on my phone and laptop, a reading pile by my bed, on my desk in the office and in the bathroom (note to self – remove all references to Nazi exploitation from 70′s pulp magazines before inviting friends over for the first time). There’s not a room in the house that doesn’t have a dogeared mess with a broken spine lying around with it’s dust jacket torn waiting to be put out of its misery. And my bag always has a paperback stashed inside. Sometimes three.

All of them tend to be quite different.

And the great thing is that when your head is in the right place any one of these books can fire things off in directions you weren’t expecting or be in some way connected to the thing you were hoping to be distracted from.

I had a brain freeze today. Like I was eating a Cornetto in an Edgar Wright movie. And so I collapsed on the couch with two kittens and a book entitled The Art of Charles M Schulz. Here’s what I found in the introduction by Jean Schulz:

“The ideas Sparky used are out there in the world. We all know them and that is why we relate to them. It is the particular twist Sparky put to the ideas that described his genius, and that draws us, enchanted, into his frame.”

The wiki page I’d been building and had to close half finished had been about constructing narrative to form what Hugh would call a social object. It seems Jean and Sparky were way ahead of us.

“He understood instinctively the value of the story which illustrates a human truth, and which allows his listeners to take from it what they need at the time. The best stories can be told over and over again – forever new – because the listener changes.”

This is where I began scribbling in the margins. I loath people whose books look unread. My own father had a complete set of ridiculous Dennis Wheatley novels in red faux-leather that he ordered once a month from a book club. He never read them and I wasn’t allowed to touch them. They were bought to match his leather chesterfield reclining armchair.

My dad was kind of a dick.

But I know a lot of people who read books without somehow managing to crease a single page. The majority of my books look like they’ve been fucked and tattooed. Like Mötley Crüe groupies.

“He had to draw what he thought was funny and hope that his audience liked it too. He was always glad to know people liked his characters or a particular storyline, but he knew he couldn’t write to that audience; he always wrote for himself“.

Film studios have still got my dial up to 4 because they can’t make a movie without worrying about some single fuckwit in Nebraska who won’t find anything in the plot to hold onto if they don’t drop some lowest common denominator bullshit into the script by rewrite number fucking 14.

These are the same people who then say sloooooooow down when you have an idea that will only work if you kick it the fuck out of an ever shrinking window of opportunity in the next five minutes.

So before I even got to Charlie Brown’s angst over the little red-haired girl I was back at the desk and writing.

Now I could have taken down an appropriate book – Stephen King’s Dark Shadow of Writer’s Block Volume IV with a foreword by Richard Bachman or Getting Things The Fuck Done by Henry Rollins – but it was the book I went to for escape that turned me in.

Maybe it was scared I was gonna fuck up more of its pages.

*And even more important to meet people outside of that zone. Otherwise the echo can be deafening.