I had a long talk last night with some friends (backgrounds as actor and TV producer - assertive women...!) who were berating me for not doing the networking and marketing I know I need to do in order to get somewhere with my writing career. I didn't dare tell them that I have not yet sent off the scripts which were requested of me in answer to a pitch I posted on Shooting People last Wednesday, or the writing samples which were requested by the various agents I contacted on Monday.
It's as if I get so far and then get cold feet and don't follow through. God knows why. Maybe it's a really acute fear of failure. Or of success...
Talking of not doing things, I didn't talk in my last post about having gone up to London and met two lovely and talented women, Kay Sexton and Caz Ferguson, both very sussed writers who have grasped the nettle of the business end fo the business. It was terrific and very invigorating to meet them, but it also pointed up to me what a solitary life, from a writing perspective, that I lead. I really don't know anyone else who does this stuff.
So this morning I shot off a couple of networking emails, and I have decided that I really have to join our local, and very proactive, scriptwriters' group. That'll be a good start.
The whole idea of networking just makes me cringe, I hvave to admit. It just smacks of opportunism and sycophancy and all those other things you just don't want to be seen to be associated with. I accept that this might be a slightly erroneous impression, but my parents' instilled intellectual snobbery dies hard.
Still, I'll let you know how I get on.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Friday, May 12, 2006
What's in a list?
It being the beginning of what is risibly described as the British summer, I've just got out some summer clothes. In the pocket of the trousers I've put on, I've just fished out a list.
It says:
pizza
fruit
Halfords - seat-back bags
Blockbuster
all-purpose cleaner
wax strips
moisturiser
My God, what a lot of memories lurk behind this innocent little missive! It's holiday time! We're going away very imminently - there's just time for me to wax my legs and assorted other areas of my person, moisturise my flaky wintry body, clean the house (I can't bear coming back to a messy, dirty house), get the pizza and fruit for the last meal before departure (no washing up - no leftovers). And we're going on a long trip with the kids, so we've stocked up on books, comics, cereal bars, drinks, wipes and miscellaneous sundries, and I've seen those bags which drape from the headrest to store them all in. We have to go to the video store, because we've also got ourselves a portable dvd player so that we can travel in relative peace without the inevitable "Are we nearly there yet?" which usually starts one hour into a seventeen hour journey. I smiled as I remembered it all!
My name is Frances and I am a list-maker. There are people who make lists and there are people who don't. Looking about my workstation I can see several scrappy pieces of paper. There is a handwritten list of the best schools in the area, graded according to price, GCSE results and A level results and aggregated to provide the definitive ranking. (My daughter will be starting at one of these schools in 2008 - I really don't need to start yet...!) There is a list of dates which need to be put into the diary and a list of people who need to be added to the contact lists and registered on my mobile. I have a list of CDs and books I want to buy, and one of clothes I need to order for my children. There are lists of Things To Do, shopping lists, thank-you letter lists from the kids' birthdays, a list of the short stories I have written, a list of screenplays I am pitching, a list of publishing and agency contacts, a list of the 'must-do's of dog-training (not doing very well there, am I?) and a list of the calorific contents of the foods I am most addicted to.
But I love coming across these lists - they are such a barometer of where I was at a certain point in my life, on a certain day. And I love it when I come across an abandoned shopping list in the bottom of the shopping trolley I have grabbed in the trolley park. The handwriting, the items, the length of the list give a little glimpse into the life of someone anonymous with whom you have no contact except that you have both touched this little part of their life. It feels somehow voyeuristic, and is the reason I am so careful not to leave my lists behind. And in the same way I occasionally leave out a list which I think shows me in a positive light. (Most are automatically disqualified, as you can imagine...)
When we were moving house and putting old books on new shelves, I came across a 'Schoolgirls' Diary 1964', chronicling a short trip my grandmother made to Hollywood in that year to visit her actor son. It is FULL of lists. And the lists are marvellous! Sights she had to see, people she had met, things to do, presents to buy. It brought her right back to me, and she died in 1980. These little scraps of paper are people's lives laid bare much more baldly than letters or stories or other considered writings.
It says:
pizza
fruit
Halfords - seat-back bags
Blockbuster
all-purpose cleaner
wax strips
moisturiser
My God, what a lot of memories lurk behind this innocent little missive! It's holiday time! We're going away very imminently - there's just time for me to wax my legs and assorted other areas of my person, moisturise my flaky wintry body, clean the house (I can't bear coming back to a messy, dirty house), get the pizza and fruit for the last meal before departure (no washing up - no leftovers). And we're going on a long trip with the kids, so we've stocked up on books, comics, cereal bars, drinks, wipes and miscellaneous sundries, and I've seen those bags which drape from the headrest to store them all in. We have to go to the video store, because we've also got ourselves a portable dvd player so that we can travel in relative peace without the inevitable "Are we nearly there yet?" which usually starts one hour into a seventeen hour journey. I smiled as I remembered it all!
My name is Frances and I am a list-maker. There are people who make lists and there are people who don't. Looking about my workstation I can see several scrappy pieces of paper. There is a handwritten list of the best schools in the area, graded according to price, GCSE results and A level results and aggregated to provide the definitive ranking. (My daughter will be starting at one of these schools in 2008 - I really don't need to start yet...!) There is a list of dates which need to be put into the diary and a list of people who need to be added to the contact lists and registered on my mobile. I have a list of CDs and books I want to buy, and one of clothes I need to order for my children. There are lists of Things To Do, shopping lists, thank-you letter lists from the kids' birthdays, a list of the short stories I have written, a list of screenplays I am pitching, a list of publishing and agency contacts, a list of the 'must-do's of dog-training (not doing very well there, am I?) and a list of the calorific contents of the foods I am most addicted to.
But I love coming across these lists - they are such a barometer of where I was at a certain point in my life, on a certain day. And I love it when I come across an abandoned shopping list in the bottom of the shopping trolley I have grabbed in the trolley park. The handwriting, the items, the length of the list give a little glimpse into the life of someone anonymous with whom you have no contact except that you have both touched this little part of their life. It feels somehow voyeuristic, and is the reason I am so careful not to leave my lists behind. And in the same way I occasionally leave out a list which I think shows me in a positive light. (Most are automatically disqualified, as you can imagine...)
When we were moving house and putting old books on new shelves, I came across a 'Schoolgirls' Diary 1964', chronicling a short trip my grandmother made to Hollywood in that year to visit her actor son. It is FULL of lists. And the lists are marvellous! Sights she had to see, people she had met, things to do, presents to buy. It brought her right back to me, and she died in 1980. These little scraps of paper are people's lives laid bare much more baldly than letters or stories or other considered writings.
Blimey!
It's been awhile since I've been here. Our poor old computer was on its last legs, groaning and coughing, so we turned grave diggers and cobbled together parts of old computers to use while we save up for a new laptop for me and a new desktop for the family. (I'm always amazed how people can just find a couple of thou to renew their IT facilities... Don't they have anything else to spend it on?). In the process of rebuilding our system we have lost patches of our email history, my entire contacts list and ALL the calendar items. Bloody nightmare! I have no idea what's going on...
But I've also not been updating this because I'm useless. I've got too many things to obsess about, and writing this somehow makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. I think it feels self-indulgent, and the words 'self-indulgent' were always spat derisorily in my family when I was a child.
However, I'm going to plough on. So here are a few things which have happened to me recently:
1) I had some indirect positive feedback on me as a teacher from the parent of one of my students. I am unreasonably happy about this. I tend to focus on my shortcomings as a teacher - and there are many to choose from. It's nice to hear that someone has been "going on about how great you are."
2) I was invited to be recorded reading one of my short stories for a CD of authors reading their work to accompany an anthology of short stories. I'm going up to town tomorrow for it. While there I will be meeting up with a few writers with whom I've been communicating but have never met. I'm really looking forward to it.
3) I signed up for a course of hypnotherapy to deal with my excesses - food, drink, nicotine. The hypnotherapist told me not to drink alcohol for three weeks and gave me a few food rules, which I didn't really expect. I just thought I'd have a nice rest while he put my subconscious off the idea of smoking and drinking. And the other slight fly in the ointment is that now I've made the decision, I'm rather feeling that I'll miss the immoderate me - it's always been an outlet for my inner rock star...
4) Apparently the film development is going well. The producer has apparently been engaged in at least one funding meeting. I'd quite like to have an update at some point. In the meantime I've been calling agents and punting myself as a client. Everyone's been very nice and encouraging. That obviously means diddly-squat. I've already received two email dismissals. Apparently they're 'not looking to take on new clients'.
5) Yesterday my dog ate my will. Unlikely, but true.
6) The day before yesterday my dog ate eight mini double-choc muffins, a pack of Cadbury mini-rolls (including the packing), three fillets of smoked mackerel and my wellington boots all in one sitting. He spent the next day shitting fishy chocolate puree and farting rubber.
7) I discovered that the woman who lives opposite with her 5-year old went to the same school as me. In Singapore. What are the chances? There is at least one other woman in the neighbourhood who went to the same school. I know because she stopped me in the pub one day and told me that she'd done the common entrance exam on the same day as me in the school san in Singapore twenty years ago. I've got a good memory but really...
8) In the day before I lost all my email I posted a pitch for my new 9read rewritten) script and recieved 5 replies. All lost.
See what I mean? Stuff happens. Some good, some bad. Just got to deal with it.
But I've also not been updating this because I'm useless. I've got too many things to obsess about, and writing this somehow makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. I think it feels self-indulgent, and the words 'self-indulgent' were always spat derisorily in my family when I was a child.
However, I'm going to plough on. So here are a few things which have happened to me recently:
1) I had some indirect positive feedback on me as a teacher from the parent of one of my students. I am unreasonably happy about this. I tend to focus on my shortcomings as a teacher - and there are many to choose from. It's nice to hear that someone has been "going on about how great you are."
2) I was invited to be recorded reading one of my short stories for a CD of authors reading their work to accompany an anthology of short stories. I'm going up to town tomorrow for it. While there I will be meeting up with a few writers with whom I've been communicating but have never met. I'm really looking forward to it.
3) I signed up for a course of hypnotherapy to deal with my excesses - food, drink, nicotine. The hypnotherapist told me not to drink alcohol for three weeks and gave me a few food rules, which I didn't really expect. I just thought I'd have a nice rest while he put my subconscious off the idea of smoking and drinking. And the other slight fly in the ointment is that now I've made the decision, I'm rather feeling that I'll miss the immoderate me - it's always been an outlet for my inner rock star...
4) Apparently the film development is going well. The producer has apparently been engaged in at least one funding meeting. I'd quite like to have an update at some point. In the meantime I've been calling agents and punting myself as a client. Everyone's been very nice and encouraging. That obviously means diddly-squat. I've already received two email dismissals. Apparently they're 'not looking to take on new clients'.
5) Yesterday my dog ate my will. Unlikely, but true.
6) The day before yesterday my dog ate eight mini double-choc muffins, a pack of Cadbury mini-rolls (including the packing), three fillets of smoked mackerel and my wellington boots all in one sitting. He spent the next day shitting fishy chocolate puree and farting rubber.
7) I discovered that the woman who lives opposite with her 5-year old went to the same school as me. In Singapore. What are the chances? There is at least one other woman in the neighbourhood who went to the same school. I know because she stopped me in the pub one day and told me that she'd done the common entrance exam on the same day as me in the school san in Singapore twenty years ago. I've got a good memory but really...
8) In the day before I lost all my email I posted a pitch for my new 9read rewritten) script and recieved 5 replies. All lost.
See what I mean? Stuff happens. Some good, some bad. Just got to deal with it.
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