2025-05-31

I'm stuck on a bit of a movie script (too many moving pieces, too much story to tell in too few pages - it's a good problem to have because the solution, when it arrives, may well be very elegant), so I'm here instead. Just typing words.

The Kickstarter is nearly over. It ends in around an hour. It feels like it has been going forever. And of course, when it closes, the real work starts - we have to get five episodes written over the summer to record in the Autumn, then I have to do an episode of Mythos ("have to" being a figure of speech; I'm really looking forward to it).

You wouldn't be able to tell from the last two paragraphs, but I have been reading Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. It's a series of brilliant bite-sized tips on everything from punctuation to structure to best practices for writers. As you can tell, it doesn't work, but it's a really good book to dip in and out of.

I've also been thinking a little more seriously about a Cartoon Gravity podcast (maybe a series of conversations with collaborators?) and about transforming the Development Hell subscription into something likely called Cartoon Gravity Pro. I'm still not sure what that looks like.

I think these things are occurring to me at the moment because I'm not sure how much I want to rely on the TV and film industries going forward. There's been a lull recently, as previously discussed, and that lull has led to me crowdfunding a podcast series, writing a novel (not yet finished), focusing more on the Pleasant Green site etc.

What I have realised over these past few months is that I REALLY like telling stories, but I am pretty agnostic as to the medium. Previously, I thought of myself as a "writer-director working in film and TV". That's a self-limiting label, though, and I latterly realise that I am in fact someone who likes making up stories and doesn't much care how they get out into the world, so long as it pays the rent. TV and film cover a lot more of the rent than other media, but they also come with a LOT of free work and a LOT of interference.

The experience of interacting directly with the audience, via these websites, the Cartoon Gravity Club, and via the Kickstarter, has reassured me that my instinct for story, while not always flawless, hits home more often than not. And so I'm increasingly interested in ways to cut out the middle-person and get stuff out direct to readers/listeners, and even viewers.

The "broadest possible audience" idea has a huge amount of homogeneity and, dare one say, dumbing-down built into it. While I'm more than willing to write a big, dumb movie for a big, dumb cheque, it's really not my happy place creatively.

"Over-delivering" is something people talk about in Hollywood. It means going above and beyond the baseline, doing more than was necessary. Most people have a tendency to do exactly enough to fulfil their contract and get paid. I have always tried to go the extra mile, to make that first draft way better and tighter than anyone was expecting it to be. I like people to be pleasantly surprised.

Now I'm turning that attitude onto the stuff that does not immediately pay a lot of money. I'm hoping that the people who receive their Kickstarter rewards early next year will be pleasantly surprised, not just by the quality of the shows themselves, but by the accompanying merch and bits and pieces. I want to over-deliver on all of that stuff. And I want to over-deliver to the subscribers on the Pleasant Green site (the new De Kliek storyline is shaping up to do that, for starters), and on whatever Cartoon Gravity Pro turns out to be.

And this is all in service of building an audience that is also a community; something big enough to be self-sustaining, but small enough to remain somewhat personal. I don't want to be CostCo, I want to be the little local shop with the quirky, hand-crafted stuff that always has something interesting going on.

Anyway, that was my break from working, and I think I may have just figured out how my hero steals John Dee's codex, so I should go attend to that. Have a good weekend.