I've decided on a new addition to the site. I've decided to put up details about the scripts I'm currently working on.
These are pretty much the one-page pitches I send out to agents and producers who are interested in my work, but each now with its own page on the site.
The one-page pitch is pretty much what it says on the tin: selling your script on a sheet of A4. Adrian Mead has brought it to the attention of UK writers through his workshops, and is set to write more about it in his forthcoming ebook.
I interviewed Adrian at Cheltenham this year for my Shooting Screenwriters Show (coming soon), and he turned out to be a passionate filmmaker with a great sense of humour and a great deal of wisdom to impart when it comes to how screenwriters can market themselves.
The beauty of the one-page pitch is that it allows very busy people to get a feel for your script in order to decide if they want to read it, rather than leave it sitting there in a slush pile because they've no idea what the story is and they'd have to read the lot to find out.
Having said that, what I've put on this site are not strictly the one-page pitches I send out to producers. They're more like half-page pitches, just to give a flavour of the thing (so no blaming Adrian if you think they're rubbish).
Many of you might worry that putting your ideas out in the open like this is tantamount to sticking a Burglars Welcome sign in your window.
But as Charles Harris of Euroscript said at Cheltenham last year: 'New writers get far more worried about protecting their ideas than professional writers. Professionals understand that you have to bat your ideas out' (see him say that and more in my video).
Well, I'm not worried about people stealing my ideas. I'm sure there are screenwriters all over the world working on similar things (I talked to a writer at Cheltenham this year who has written something similar to Players and had recently seen two student scripts on the same topic).
No matter what great idea you have, there is always someone else having that same stroke of genius.
And I've recently started getting involved in Trigger Street and Inktip, communities where it doesn't make any kind of sense to be secretive about your work.
So I don't mind sharing. I don't mind putting my ideas out there. If nothing else it lets people know what kind of writer I am.
Naturally, I have a few other projects I'm working on that are at far too early a stage to talk about. It's no good pitching your script till you've actually written it, I think. Largely because, until you've wrestled with that first draft, you often don't know what your story is. Which sounds like a total screenwriting cliche, but I've found it to be true through experience.
So here are my projects, always there with a click on the Scripts button above. I will update the pages whenever something happens.
I might even put up the actual scripts as well.
I'm thinking about it.