mike[space] dot net

After a rather lengthy review of my running earlier in the week, I was aiming to make this a more succinct review of the other aspects of my life. But instead it has turned into another lengthy load of waffle, this time focused on the writing. Apologies for the length, but it has been useful to try and really summarise my thoughts ...

Obviously the biggest change of last year was quitting my job and starting a whole new career as a writer. Never has the word career seemed more appropriate. It's proven to be a mixed bag of successes and failures. I took two courses during the year, a creative writing course, and a screenplay writing course. Both were very useful as they provided some basic structure to my work, as well as covering some useful groundwork for my writing approach. I came up with the idea of chucking a short story up on this site every couple of weeks. It's obvious how well that's worked out, but in mitigation not long after coming up with the idea, I shifted to focusing on the web series that would become Out of Office, which kinda blocked my ability to work on prose as well. I'll come back to this shortly.

I managed to put together a couple of short film scripts over the year as well. One was based off a short story I wrote in the creative writing course. I'm very pleased with this script, and hope that it'll get made this year. It is currently sitting with a director, but his schedule is constantly shifting, and I don't currently have any sense of when he might be able to get on it. I'm going to try and catch up with him on it some time this month if I can (this currently has the working title of Just Good Friends).

I think Out of Office has to be my biggest success so far, even if it's not actually made it online yet. I've managed to write a 10 episode series, and actually get the first four episodes filmed. There's a fantastic cast and crew behind it who are enthusiastic and encouraging, and it's been an awesome experience so far. I've learnt a huge amount from making the show so far, and I am really excited about taking it through to release.

One of the biggest lessons I have learnt from the year actually came from a tweet that Felicia Day made, which said something along the lines of "commercial goals are the death of creativity" (I paraphrase). But it's absolutely true. If you spend time thinking about how you are going to make money before you've even put pen to paper, you'll be throwing ideas away before they've even had a chance to fully form in your mind. You have to let your ideas breathe, grow and take shape. And then realise they have no chance of succeeding commercially. I don't know what the future holds in terms of ever getting paid, but the reason I am doing this now is because I have been able to give myself the space to breathe, and I should be taking advantage of that, not panicking every few days or weeks because I remember that I have left behind a really good job.

I also learnt just how much time in the day can be wasted on miscellaneous nonsense. It's entirely possible to spend hours at a computer and get nothing of any real consequence done. A blog post here, a few news articles there, the usual flicking through the regular comics and blogs, spending a bit of time checking out facebook. Thinking of how it would be nice if you could just retrieve a couple of tracks off your old iPod and spending time researching how to get the right files (a recent example). It all adds up, and I am not the most disciplined of people. But I try, and every now and then, I will throw new rules at myself in an effort to get more work done. I've tried turning off the internet connection, sitting down with just a pad and pen, heading to a cafe with the laptop, sitting in a pub, going to the park (not very practical in this weather). I've sat in just about every possible part of the house at various points (asides from the bathroom, nothing to lean on in there for a pad or a laptop. And all things have a varying degree of success at various points.

A final lesson that kind of links of a couple of the earlier paragraphs is the limitation of writing stuff for the screen. The more people you involve in the end product, the longer it takes to make it. The line of dependencies is big, and my skillset is small. And most people don't have the luxury of not needing an income, which means that it takes even longer. Which is of course to be expected, but it does mean that I need to be increasing my project rate to compensate. Having written Out of Office, each stage after that took a little longer than I had envisioned. It's something I need to get more used to. At the end of Out of Office I also had trouble moving onto a new project - I found it difficult to let go of the work needing to be done on it, even though I was actually fairly limited on what I could do. Weirdly, when I had a very specific goal, I was able to get on with it. "A Step Too Far" was a direct requirement for the screenplay course, and I was able to write it in the 3 days after shooting from scratch. But after that I went back into a sort of drifting listlessness ... and in the end wound up pissing about with the footage myself to see what I could achieve (answer, not a great deal).

Overall, I am pretty happy with how the writing went last year. But, I feel like I should be being more productive than I have been. There've been way too many periods where I've slacked off or messed about when I should be generating new ideas or working harder on the projects I have. Both running and domesticity have become distractions, concrete worlds in which clear goals can be met. I've found myself having days at a time where I've really only achieved a clean kitchen and bedroom, and getting some shopping done. Useful in the short term, but really not helping my medium/long term goals. Getting started in the morning is also something I find hard. I know that at least one person reading this will be scoffing at me (yes Dave, I mean you), but it's true. And the reason for this is late nights, partying or otherwise. I still have this weird determination to stay up late, even when I come home after a night out, I then want to stay up for a bit before going to bed. And this is woefully incompatible with living with Claire, and the idea of being organised about tackling my writing. If I actually get up at 7, I can do all my pissing about online, and still be ready to start writing at 9. Sadly this doesn't happen anywhere near as often as I would like.

Which leads neatly into the plan for the year. The big thing is that I have to write every day. No more excuses. If I am not getting stuff done on the computer, I have to sit down in front of a pad of paper instead. I had intended on getting to the local library to remove all distractions, but I haven't managed that this week, primarily because actually I was happy to get on with shit at home, and didn't need it. But I do want to check it out in the next couple of weeks to see how I find it as an approach to working. Interestingly this ties in quite well with Cory Doctorow's WRiting in the Age of Distraction column, although his goal of only 20 minutes is lower than my aim of four hours, but I'll settle for two hours full writing. Note this doesn't preclude other work on other projects like Out of Office.

Getting Out of Office out is a big goal for the first half of the year, which is all I really have to say about that right now ...

I also want to look at taking advantage of the bbc's writer's room. There's a bunch of great opportunities there which any aspiring writer should be looking to take advantage of, and generally I want to start finding ways to move me to the next level of generating an audience for my writing through competitions etc.

Overall goal for the year is to really have a couple of things out there that have gained an audience beyond my circle of friends and acquaintances. However small ;-)