I took the above photo on a flight recently from London to Reykjavik, in Iceland. I wish I had thought to get the girl’s parents email so I could send them the shot. Although the girl started licking the window just after I took the photo so not quite as spellbinding as it may seem.
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My big, impressive, ambitious plan to increase the quantity and quality of my writing, that I wrote about in my last post, failed me this week. Not because of the plan (the plan is good, the plan is golden, I won’t hear a bad word said about it, okay?), but because of me. Or more specifically, my work. Pesky full time job, always getting in the way of valuable writing time. What does it even get me anyway? Oh! Right. Money. Damn.
Basically my responsibilities at work have changed slightly and with them my schedule. Which means my day starts earlier, I’m more tired at the end of it, and they actually expect me to work for my money. It’s so unfair. Luckily my two favourite traits are persistence and adaptability, so we push on.
One thing I have achieved this week is more cementation of all my ideas. Each has been categorised and written out into an actual coherent breakdown rather than a jumble of words on my evernote that I wrote when half asleep. It feels like progress, although part of me feels like that’s debatable. Either way it’s left me with five TV screenwriting concepts, two short story concepts, and two novel concepts. Ambitious, especially as I’ve never really written much prose before, but hey, why the hell not. The worst I’m going to do is write a crappy story, and writing crappy stories is how you progress to writing not-crappy stories.
My next step will be breaking the whole thing down into it’s parts. Working out what each project needs before I start it then succinctly listing each of those steps. Things like what I need to research, what the themes are, ideas for characters, ideas for major story beats, etc.
In other words I’ve got plenty of work to do, now I just need to figure out how I get around work in order to find the time to do it. I’ll do it, I’m sneaky like that.
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Now it must be about time for COOL THINGS FROM THE INTERNET!
First up is a TED talk given by a guy called Harald Hass. Man I do love a good TED talk. If you ever need a healthy dose of inspiration, learning, wonderment, or just to realise that there are amazing people out there who just might make our world a better place, then visit the TED website and chose a talk at random.
Harald is one of these people. He and his team have done something amazing, they’ve developed a form of data transfer they call li-fi. What’s amazing about this is that it uses light to transfer the data (the data being the internet), and it uses regular LED lights that can be found in all homes and street lights. Amazing, right? But it gets better. The light is emitted onto a solar panel, again, a fairly regular, go to the right shop and buy, type of solar panel, and works through slight variations in the light intensity that get picked up by the solar panel, translated into binary, and then sent into the computer as data. Amazing. What’s more is that this data transfer is a number of times faster than most current broadband systems. Amazing! Also the light variations are so small that the human eye can’t pick them up. AMAzing! And the solar panel can use the light to charge the device it’s emitting the data to. AMAZING!
Basically I think it’s amazing. Watch the video below to get your mind blown by possibly the most boring voice you’ve ever heard.
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Next cool thing is a documentary about the movie Zootopia. If you haven’t seen it, why not? It is a brilliant film with well thought out characters, fun scenes, and manages to sneak in a pretty important theme. You can see how well thought out the characters are in the documentary as the team worked on the script for years, and even changed who the protagonist was basically at the last minute, and then rewrote it all. It shows how much work and dedication it takes to write a quality screenplay. And all the animation stuff is simply mind blowing too, and beautiful.
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That will probably do us for today I think.
Remember, things just keep going on until they don’t. So enjoy yourself and make the most of them.
Talk soon.
Damian
Damian Robb 
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