Back to the well...

I've been quiet of late and, barring this short update, I may be quiet a little longer.

Here's what the past month or so has looked like:

• I finished up and sent out a spec feature script.
• I re-drafted a TV pilot ready to be looked at by networks and streamers.
• I'm currently working on the pitch for that TV show, which we'll start delivering in the next couple of weeks. (Essentially this is in the order of prepping and delivering a twenty-minute TED talk, but designed to convince risk-averse people who are scared for their jobs to gamble tens of millions of dollars of their company's money on a project.)
• Richard Maclean Smith and I have written two, nearly three, episodes of Crowley (which records the first week of December).
• I've worked with David Thomas and Tim Elsenburg to remix and re-release the original three episodes of Mythos, with brand new music (If you didn't know about this, you need to be following https://www.pleasantgreen.co.uk/)
• I've brainstormed Mythos 4 (which records in January).
• I've starting outlining another movie idea.
• I've had production meetings on a movie that may or may not happen next year.
• I've done multiple pitches, in person and written, for a job writing a sci-fi movie.
• I've done the usual round of in-person and zoom general meetings and catch-ups.
• I've had something resembling flu twice.

This is probably not the full list (it doesn't include the fact that I am running the back end of the Kickstarter campaign, from admin through physical delivery of all items, single-handed) and it's about average for the time period, and I would expect that anyone working freelance in this industry would be able to generate a similar list over a similar period. It's how we maintain enough balls in the air to keep going.

And here's the kicker: Aside from taking a tiny salary on Crowley (less than minimum wage), not a single item on that list is paid work. While any one of them MIGHT deliver in the future, nothing that I'm currently doing earns a single cent.

And here's the other kicker: I'm OK with that. Kickstarter admin aside, which is no kind of fun, I have thoroughly enjoyed everything I have been doing. Yes, it would be preferable to be rolling in cash but, as Charles Foster Kane says, "It's no great trick to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money." I enjoy the work, regardless of how well it pays.

But what the past few weeks have represented is a lot of output and very little input. I haven't properly sat down with a book or visited a gallery or wandered around with a camera in my hand. The well is running dry.

And that's why it has been a little quiet around here; banging out a couple of thousand words about the creative life has seemed like too much of a stretch at the end of these kinds of weeks.

So I'm going back to the well. I'm going to carve out some time as these nights draw in to read and listen and watch and absorb (and shake cold number 3) and I'll be back in the saddle in a week or so.