Like many people who’d embraced Sherlock I was prepared to dislike CBS’s Elementary just on principle, but I don’t. The Brooligan household watched the pilot and we decided, after some discussion, that it maybe wasn’t for us; based on that first viewing it felt less than fresh, and the mystery element was weak. Subsequent episodes…

Guy Adams, the Torchwood/Sherlock/Hammer novelist and Angry Robot-published author, has tagged me for this. I didn’t even realise I’d annoyed him. It’s called a Blog Hop. Here’s how it works, he said to me. You answer ten questions on the next big thing that you’re working on, then tag five other writers to do the…

“I like working with the actors and with the producer, it’s normal for me, but outside Danish Broadcasting, maybe it’s old school – the director is king, the writer’s more the guy you get some scripts from and then you see him again at the premiere. If they’re just looking for a writer, then maybe…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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,…