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Nightmares and Angels
Just after the Berlin wall came down, I threw a bag into the back of the Volvo and drove down to the Hamburg ferry. Not quite as spontaneously as that, of course. I had a plan. I’d lined up meetings with Hamburg’s Sex Crimes division and detectives in the Criminal Investigation department of the Dussseldorf…
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Creating the Audio Drama
The first professional work I ever did was in radio drama, and I did quite a lot of it. Long form stuff, six-part serials and 90-minute plays. It’s a medium that provides a grounding that’s equally valid for both novel and screenplay writing. You learn to structure, and to structure over distance. You learn to…
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Thy Kingdom’s Coming
I got a present at Fantasycon last weekend; the Ebury publicity team had brought along an advance copy of the UK paperback of The Kingdom of Bones, and handed it to me at the launch of Random House’s new Del Rey imprint. It is cool. The cover is by Headdesign, who provided art for the…
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The Entitlement Thing
The magazine Doctor Who Monthly runs a readers’ poll every season. This year, one reader couldn’t even wait until the end of the run before sharing. He gave every story the lowest possible mark (‘Awful’), including those he hadn’t seen. He hated every villain that wasn’t a Dalek, and called for Matt Smith to be…
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Short Horror?
My psychology lecturer friend is looking for a horror short of around 15-20 minutes to screen to a bunch of subjects as part of an experiment to test their recall. She needs to be able to show formal permission for its use, so she can’t just nick a scene from a DVD. If you’ve made…
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The LFS ‘Running the Show’ TV Drama Series Event
At the end of my previous post on people in writing careers without any ideas to drive them, I mentioned an entry in Little Miss Brooligan’s blog said the Actress to the Vicar on the subject of writers and writers’ rooms. It’s part of her coverage of Running the Show, an intensive day of sessions…
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Writers Write. Don’t They?
A couple of weeks ago I had a catch-up lunch with someone I worked with a few years back. She was a script editor then and she’s an executive producer now, but it wasn’t a pitching opportunity, more of a comrades’ get-together. (I was going to say ‘old comrades’, but, you know, that would make…
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Fiction Reboot
A couple of weeks ago I answered a few interview questions from novelist/academic researcher/teacher Brandy Schillace, and the results are now online. I spouted stuff like: “Through my teens I read classic science fiction and ’60s British thriller writers. Then I had the advantage of a very solid three years of education in English Literature…
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CarNivorous
We were driving from Phoenix to Tuscon when the car passed over the body of a flattened skunk. This was a long, straight Arizona road and it cut across the desert like an arrow. We didn’t know it was a skunk at the time, but we found that out soon enough. There was a few…
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How Do I Get My Script Read?
“Any advice for getting a script read by some influential people?” A question asked of me recently that’s impossible to answer in just a few words. But here’s the digest version. My experience is that “influence” is mostly a public illusion of power, and it’s no subsitute for the actual ability to get stuff made,…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
