Things this country mouse loves

Sounds - the wind in the pine-copse below the house; the spring behind
it; the scurry of very small animals; pheasants caught roosting in the
twilit woods, raptors mewing; conversation; silence, sheep; the fire,
fluttering;

Smells - deep dark cold smells of winter earth and frost, woodsmoke and
soot, the timber pile in the sunshine, line-dried clothes, snow

Tastes - anything cooked on my own fire.

Sights - open skies, horizon to horizon; the milky way caught in the
trees at midnight, the toad that lives in the woodpile, the view framed
by tiny windows at dawn, randy old Leicester rams, the changing oakwood,
lambs chasing baby rabbits, frost flowers, foxes at twilight, snow.

Touch - lying in the bracken in October sunshine, cold spring water,
wind and rain, toddlers sleeping draped over a shoulder or knee.

Interesting - is this a turning in the road for the mobile phone

I am working updating a contact list for a client, and I have just
noticed something odd.

A sudden slew of business cards for executives which omit the mobile
phone number.

For the past few years people have tended to give their mobile number
more and more as a primary contact number. Now it is disappearing again.

What's driving the change?

Is it status?
The more junior an exe the more likely he or she is to list every
possible number where they can be reached.
The more senior the executive the more likely he or she is to have a PA
to field their calls through a landline

Or quality?
Complaints about phone coverage have soared in recent months, as people
discover that all the features imaginable on a phone won't help if the
network coverage is crappy. Newer phone seem to cut off calls much
sooner, and investment in masts seems to have been slow than anticipated.

Or just a choice?
Maybe it really isn't that conducive to good work to be available to
take and make calls 24/7.

It maybe a quirk - but it's odd that I should notice it, and then flick
to the BBC business site to discover that Ryanair have approved mobile
phone use on one of their routes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7900941.stm

This is my new motto -

"/If the only way to enjoy a book is not to know what happens next,
*it's not a good book*/*.*"

Lightening in a bottle?

It's gone - the creative roll that ended with the software crash in
Sunday has evaporated, and so far I haven't managed to pick up the
threads and start the whole thing moving again.

It's not utterly miserable, because I do at least remember that it is
possible to do, that there was a story coming from somewhere and ending
up on the page.

I do wonder if somehow I (or some ID like me lurking within) didn't
*create* the crash to bring my progress stuttering to a close, just as I
was building up momentum to deal with the most difficult re-write, the
scenes which has brought me to a standstill before.

Certainly that may have conditioned the way I responded, the frozen
shock, the hours spent putting it all together again.

It's even a bit reassuring to know that I have come up against the core
difficulty, the scene, the actions that I don't want to look at, don't
want to describe. Now I know what they are, and how far part of me might
be willing to go to turn aside from them.

Honestly though - where does story come from?

Because it's not from a rational place. No amount of plotting and theme
weaving and character exploration is going to move things along as fast
or as well as the sheer flow of story from brainstem to screen via
finger tips. All those rational things have their place in the process,
as does just turning up to do the work, day after day, week after week,
even if no work gets done, or the work is done and then nestles down in
the waste paper basket to raise dust-babies two days later.

Two weeks ago I had nothing. All those hours of typing, all that
plotting and replotting, all that "turning up" - and nothing. Nada. No
words. No story. Enough to make you want to throw the laptop off the
Jubilee Bridge then follow it.

Then from nowhere, 4 whole days when the whole thing, from A to B,
starts to unfurl in the mind, and there is no part of it you cannot look
at without seeing the through line, and the words to complete it.

It will come back (nothing is more certain) but I am still foxed as to
the circumstances in which it arose, and so how to go about recreating
the conditions which will make its return more likely.

Just got the script back to the state it was in at 4.30pm on Sunday

Every element of every section of the raw text version I had open on
Sunday has now been tagged, so now I have to let go, and start picking
up again where I left off.

Note: For anyone unfamiliar with screenplay format two days (i.e. 7
hours fitted around the "work that pays the bills") might seem a bit
epic, but every element - every scene location, scene description,
character name, "wryly", dialogue etc, has to be be tagged with the
correct format, margins etc. Screenplay software, like Celtx, Final
Draft, Movie Magic etc, adds this pretty much intuitively as you type -
although corrections still have to made manually.

But the tags aren't generally compatible between software packages, or
between the software and word.

Ironically, one of the reasons I swapped from Final Draft to Celtx in
the first place was that FD makes retagging so onerous - there are no
keyboard shortcuts for retagging - every line has to be selected, and
then an element tag selected for it by mouse. This is unbelievably
clunky, and bad news for anyone using a mouse - the only shortcut is the
one to RSI and wrist straps

So, the chastened return to Final Draft involved scrolling through 70
pages of pasted script, identifying and retagging 1000 separate
elements with 6 possible tags, and manually removing 3000 unwanted
carriage returns generated by the process.

I suppose I could have left it to do later - but without the tags it's
virtually impossible to navigate a 90 page script, find notes, swap
scenes, calculate time schemes etc.

Industry Standard Screenplay Software - Expensive and Neanderthal.

For example - lots of the features you and I might take for granted in
Word, like highlighting text you need to revise - well, go whistle for
it.

Which is all well and dandy when FD was first released back in the
1990s, but I'm using the most recent upgrade, at a horrendous cost -
and in the UK the price is double what the US pays, even for a
downloaded version - WTH! - I can only install it on two machines before
the key runs out, and in terms of usability it's like being flung in the
era of DOS and Locoscript. (Actually, I wrote my first script in
Locoscript on an Amstrad PCW in 1993, and the shortcuts were easier to use).

That's why I'm heartbroken that Celtx, my new squeeze, let me down.

Now, let's see if I can pick up where I left off.

What was this sodding story about again?

Anyone?

15 years on - but better late than never

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7894763.stm

At last - mobile phone makers have signed up to a universal re-charger
format.

How many obsolete chargers are lurking in your house?
How many different chargers do your family and visitors have to juggle?

Writer's Nightmare - Celtx? Are you out there?

There are few things that freeze the blood more than staring at a
screen, willing the errant pixels to appear as your stomach makes a
greasy slide down into the abyss and a mixture of bile and blind panic
rises in the throat.

Yes, at approx 5.40pm yesterday I lost a week's work. Not just any
week, but the most productive and satisfying 4 days work in over a year.

Scene 12 - 42. Gone. And apparently - despite CELTX's claim to be saving
my file every 5 minutes, and at least 3 manual saves and reboots in that
3 days - no retrievable copy.

Now, luckily, completely fortuitously 5 minutes earlier I had done a
word count, by copypasten in word.
Because when I hit the next 1000 words I had promised myself a biscuit.

So I had the whole raw text sitting in an unsaved open document.

But - what the hell CELTX? Guess whose software I will not be trusting
again?
How come you saved all my new characters names in the Master Catalogue,
all the new scene locations etc - but not the effing script itself?
Huh?

Back to Final Draft.

It will take *hours* to rebuild that sodding script.

I love weather

All of it. Sun, wind, snow, sleet, ice, rain, force 10 gales
(particularly when I'm the one at the helm at middle watch) and the
curiously oily swell of dead calm.

Just as well I live in the middle of this particular island on the edge
of the Atlantic, then. We might not get all the available weather
(although the odd tornado is not unknown) but we certainly great a
wonderful variety.
Every.
Day.

We should be grateful - moaning about the weather seems to have cheered
every one up. Forget the international credit drought and and worry
about the national salt shortage instead!

Today is sleety, my nose is runny and my shoes are full of icy slush.
The fat wet flakes hit the river with a constant hiss like a passing of
a swarm of stealth hornets.

Hand me a steaming coffee someone, I need to thaw!