A challenge...

It’s been a refreshingly busy start to the year - January and February are usually dead - and it’s been a good mixture of actual paid work and speculative script hopes and dreams. It’s funny how money and contracts always take longer to thrash out than the casual rejections that are quick to fill your in-box. OK, maybe not that funny.

Have had a couple of rejections to my new spec script, which is frustrating but fine, and one positive response which is going to physically manifest itself into a meeting over the next couple of weeks. Really excited about the script’s prospects and potential but even though I have a meeting to discuss, the rejections sting and burn.

Yesterday, I finished reading a batch of 15 scripts for the Irish Film Board and I’ve got until March 1st to hand in my reports. It should take me two/three days to do the coverage so I plan to do that on Monday and Tuesday. That leaves me with today, tomorrow and the weekend to do some proper writing.

So I’m going to set myself a challenge. I’m going to write a brand new script over the weekend. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to get done. The purpose of the exercise is to finish a rough draft so that I can polish it up at a more leisurely pace and present that as a ‘first draft’. This self-imposed challenge has come about partly because I’ve got two full working days to just write (my usual trip to London not necessary) but mainly because of the rejections I’ve received this week.

Rejections have this bizarre tendency to make me feel dizzy with disappointment for a couple of hours until I come out the other side fuelled with a feverish drive and determination. And so, my creative carburettor has turned my feelings of anger and disappointment into a grit and resolve to prove them all wrong.

For some strange and masochistic reason, every rejection makes me feel more positive that I’m going to succeed. Sure, I have to go through that dizzying spell of fraught despair but that bullish resolve soon surfaces (part-delusional, part-certainty) and I’m ready to go to the races again.

As this blog’s tagline is: “A place to pitch, moan and share”, I’ve realised that there’s been plenty of moaning and sharing but there hasn’t been any real pitching. And so, let me pitch to you the two ideas I’m going to wrestle with before I choose one to write over the weekend.

One: a new children’s series called ‘Doctors and Nurses’ where all the adult roles are played by children. Press Gang meets Bugsy Malone, but without the song and dance.

Two: a genre bending horror-thriller-adventure about four creatures of the night who are demoted into mere humans and unite to make an unlikely gang of vigilantes in their quest to regain their immortality.

I think I know already.

If you’re a producer and one or both of the ideas floats your boat, you know where I am.

See you on the other side.