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,…

On this, your birthday.

Over on the Top Suspense blog we’re trying out a form of online craft discussion in which a bunch of us tag-team the post over a number of days. Here’s my contribution; hop over and check it out in the context of the others’ thoughts and comments. My take on suspense is a pretty straightforward…

I’ve just released four of my backlist titles as ebooks for the Kindle, with other platforms to follow when I can get around to putting the work in. Formatting for a professional-looking result isn’t the doddle that some would have you believe; up-converting a Word file with Amazon’s own online tool gives a result that…

I just heard on the radio that Dennis Hopper died at his Venice home this morning, of complications relating to prostate cancer. Not too long ago, I was working on a project where the producer was pursuing him for a major role. To be honest, the part and the actor weren’t a fit, and Hopper…