Professional jealousy

I don't suffer from professional jealousy. I don't think most fledgling writers do, really, even when another fledgling writer has a notable success. If they're good, you feel happy for them and look to see what aspects of their work you can emulate. If they're not so good, you say, 'well, I can write better than that' and you get cracking.

But bloody hell am I jealous of people who get to write full-time. Seething, green jealousy. I took a week off last year to work on a project and it was one of the best weeks of my life. The last couple of weeks have been the opposite experience, with work and family being so demanding as to leave me unable to devote any time to anything else. I have all kinds of strategies for balancing things out so that I can get at least an hour or two a day to work on stuff, but sometimes it just can't be done.

That said, I've managed a couple of thingsover the last few weeks, mainly based around my Creative Writing course. The short story "What's He Building In There?", a 2,500 word piece about time-travelling plumbers, is finished. Needs a bit of rework before being ready to send for submission, but it's got a good heart.

I've written the first five minutes of the sitcom pilot I'm doing for my final project. It's now called Pennycakes although that's likely to change again. Next couple of weeks will be spent exclusively on that (work & family permitting). I'll be approaching this in a more organised way than I usually do, in order to test drive some of the techniques I picked up at Screen Lab. So first step is a treatment, then a scene-by-scene, then the writing of the actual dialogue. Hopefully it might even be funny.

Speaking of sitcoms, myself and my writing partner did managed to do a patch-up job on the opening of Black Gate Tours. By cutting out half of the characters, we managed to make the opening 15 pages feel like the first half of a 30-minute piece (rather than the first quarter of a 60-minute piece) and ship it out to BBC Scotland's Write Here, Write Now competition. Not holding our breaths on that one, but it's good to be in the mix.

(Speaking of BBC, very proud of my friend Marianne who managed to blag a spot on the CBBC Screen Lab. She belongs in the category of "good writers that I would like to emulate")

The CW course has given me lots of things to work on, so once I've finished Pennycakes, I'll be on my own. I have an idea for a feature and I'm planning to spend the summer on that, with the ultimate aim of having a 30-minute, 60-minute and 90-minute script done before the end of the year.

Before that, I might just take a couple of weeks to read books, watch movies and catch up on telly. That might sound like skiving, but I haven't made time for these things over the last few months and it's actually really difficult to write when you're not engaging with the writing of others. Any recommendations, feel free to stick 'em in the comments.