Tax

The advent of supposed nu-media social networking sites like Twitter (which doesn’t really feel that nu-media anyway, it’s been around for so long and only really started being useful) means that blogging feels like such a chore. No good for you then if you want to know just what I think of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE; FROST/NIXON; WATCHMEN and IN THE LOOP. You’ll have to wait a little bit longer and accept that I’ll be providing vastly truncated reviews until I can get on top of things again.

As I’ve said before, Twitter is everything good about Facebook (the status updates) minus all of the bad (everything else). I’ve really taken a shine to it and have managed to inexplicably assemble a list of people worth following, shy of all the numerous celebrities and minor cult heroes littering the twittergeist with short 140 word reminders that you’re at work and they’re not. Every time I tap my TwitterFon button on my iPhone, I get all of the news that’s fit to print from a cabal of twenty-or-so like-minded thinkers. It’s where I’ve been, what I’m doing, where I’m going. I’ve always been a sucker for that, I like being in contact with my friends even when they’re not around.

Excuses, excuses, I know.

Another excuse then. When I was younger and had much more free time, I used to love the old writers’ adage that they would find the time to write no matter what. It was a romantic ideal, something I used to trot out to myself at 3.30am sitting in student halls waiting for the dustbin men to begin their rounds outside. I had other commitments, sure but I could always write. And then came work. Or specifically, the world of work and the cavalcade of trials and tribulations that it entails. And all of a sudden that romantic ideal fast disappeared in favour of spending a few precious hours away from a computer screen and allowing my eyes to recover from an onslaught of Citrix systems and court documents. I think we can safely chalk The Novel up as a casualty of this.

I have managed some writing though. As always, for The Void, the entertainment webgramme I remain a Contributing Editor for. So here then, a review of The Apprentice UK: Best of Series 1 – 4. I can nearly always rely on Canning to drag my penchant for the pen out of the doldrums. He’s a crafty news-guinea. I owe him more words, I don’t think anything’s changed in the last eight years.

I also wrote a review of something close to my heart: Street Fighter IV. This piece is a little controversial since I originally turned in two versions of the same piece. I’m not sure what made it up there in the end but I hope that the passion I have for the game shines through regardless of which copy finally made it.

In another minor-project update, I’ve storyboarded the first fifteen minutes of an old idea in the vain hope of getting all the beats lined up in a typical three-act structure so I can just sit down and write a pilot with everything cued up ready to go. Now all I need is the time.

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