A Bit of Good News

I'm happy to say that I've just sold a story to My Weekly magazine.

I've previously had a bit of story-selling success with The Weekly News, but this is the first magazine I've sold a story to. As soon as I got the e mail yesterday, I wrote another! Needs tweaking and all that, but I'll be sending that one soon, and hoping for a second hit. It all counts and it really fires me up, having some small success. Makes me want to keep on writing those stories. Short stories are brilliant for making you tighten up your story, with beginning, middle and end. Good practise for me now that my sights are set on radio or tv drama, or maybe even theatre.

Change Of Plan

I've done this before, changed my mind about what I'm going to work on. In the post below, I said I was going to work on a spec tv series, but I just wrote a short story, and it's given me an idea for either a radio play, or perhaps five fifteen minute related stories that might be suitable for radio.

Sigh...I just have to go with what feels more important, and the radio thing does for some reason.

Next Project: TV Spec Series

I have the idea, and have already written a brief first episode outline. I heard somewhere on the blogoshpere that it's best to write what you're passionate about, what fires you. I've always done that, really, though knowing why something fires you like it does, is another mystery. People say write what you know, which I think is correct, but it doesn't have to be know as in, you write about an alcoholic, so you should have had an experience of, or with an alcoholic. Not necessarily, say I.

We've (probably) all seen an alcoholic, so we know how they behave, even if we've only seen one on film. We know emotion like love and hate and greed and lust etc, so we put what we know of those experiences (and others) into everything we write, and that, to me, is writing what you know.

Anyway, I'm quite excited about this series idea. I'm going to get it all down, do some character studies, then write the first spec episode. If there's a comp out there, I'll send it in. if not, I'll send it to BBC Writersroom.

Age Matters?

Does it heck!

There are a few conversations happening at the moment on various Blogs, about this very subject. An editor has apparently said that she wouldn't take on a new writer over the age of thirty-five!!! What? Is she living in cloud cuckoo land my dears? There are more older people than there are young - and that's rising my friends.

Writing transcends age. I bet a good writer could write a piece and nobody would be able to tell if that person is twenty five or sixty five. Now I could begin to say that mature people have more life experience, more mulled maturity, therefore are richer writers, but I won't, because to me it don't matter a fig. And a great big SADDO to those to whom it does matter.