Malcolm's crossed a line in The Feed
All right, luvvies? How's your Pride Month? I'm still feeling a bit post-viral, but I got some tests done and the results were very reassuring (no sign of lasting damage from the rona), which immediately made me feel better.
Also in misc news, I'm back on tumblr. Twitter is an increasingly unpleasant place to spend time scrolling these days, and I saw how wholeheartedly tumblr was embracing Dracula Daily and thought ok, maybe it's time to give the ol' hellsite another go around. Say hi if ever you find yourself there too.
Coming right up
The Feed
Trickledown City (né Project Tallneck)
A button for the new underground
The Feed
is our slow-burn horror mystery about housemates stuck in a Big Brother house that's got something very wrong with it.
For my latest video, the thing I'd been hoping would happen happened: my character Malcolm crossed the threshold from 'aware of weird things happening, but in denial about them having a weird cause' to 'aware and fully convinced something weird is happening (just doesn't fully understand what yet)'. Between Ellen's previous video (where she had her character fill the house with social hand grenades) and the prompts the cards gave me (including 'someone or something goes missing for a while, maybe you'), I took the excuse to go full 'I've seen some shit'.
For at least part of this video I'm imagining that instead of talking to Big Brother, I'm giving a statement to the Archivist at the Magnus Institute. But this is still supposed to be Big Brother, so I'm doing it wearing oven gloves. (Look, there's no way to say for certain no one in The Magnus Archives is wearing oven gloves.)
Minor spoiler: after this 'round' of the game, we'll have no non-player housemates left, which means your good friends Jake, Henry and Malcolm are all in real danger of being evicted - or consumed by the weirdness...
Trickledown City
is my current favourite working title for the audio drama I have spent way too long calling 'Project Tallneck'. I don't know if Trickledown City will survive to be the actual name of the show (assuming I get it made) - I'm still nursing some other ideas around the idea of anchorage or ballast, the city being the thing holding the station (and its inhabitants) down to Earth, and some more around the idea of letting a hammer fly or releasing a safety catch.
But Trickledown City gets a couple of the key points across nice and efficiently:
it's about the city - as opposed to an individual main character, and as opposed to the station at the other end of the space elevator. (That's a really important point for me - there's a space elevator, but this story is mainly about the people in its shadow, not the people using it to launch their grand visions.)
said city is in the grip of some crap capitalist thinking.
I spent a lot of the long bank holiday weekend working on the pilot in local coffee shops. It's been a long time since I did any serious writing outside my flat. It doesn't feel the same as it used to (of course), but it does still feel different to writing at home. It's a way of saying this is writing time, I left the flat specifically to write so I should probably do that. And it made me feel like a member of my local community again. A local, rather than someone whose flat is in the neighbourhood but who doesn't interact with anyone else nearby. I'd been pining for that.
Anyway, the pilot's just two scenes and a polish off being finished now. I had hoped to finish it over the long weekend, but it's okay that I didn't - the goal probably led to me writing more than I would if I'd been less ambitious.
I'm sort of learning what a pilot script needs to be as I go. I'm pretty sure that if and when I get to make this show, I'm going to have to rework this one pilot script into two episodes. Separating some of the storylines will mean fewer characters for the audience to try to get to know all at once, and I can already see how moving one thread to episode two will let me set up a status quo in episode one that I can then destabilise in an exciting way. But the job of a pilot is to show others the premise of the show. The whole premise. I need this script to set up all the major plot threads I see powering the first season, even if in reality, it wouldn't be the best idea to do that all in one episode.
Which is great! Any time I trip into the trough of disillusionment and accidentally swallow a bit of 'why is this taking so long' juice, I can tell myself I've nearly written two whole episodes.
On any project that takes more than a week to draft, I have to actively resist extrapolating in my head. The intrusive thought is along the lines of if it's taken me this many months to do this much, or if I carry on only writing this much a week, how old am I going to be by the time it's finished? It's poisonous, and no less so because it's me generating it. But I think I've got it at bay enough to do one bit of maths at least: this pilot script is going to be finished by the time the next one of these goes out.
Underground signs
Left: A black button badge with the London Underground logo, because Crossrail/the Elizabeth Line finally opened and I've confirmed its existence by going on it multiple times. I never thought I'd see the day!
Right: A white button badge with an illustration of a cassette tape on it, by Joe Decie. What do you have on repeat at the moment? This week I'm cycling between Penfriend's Exotic Monsters (discovered when she played the Weather on Welcome to Night Vale), Let's Eat Grandma's Two Ribbons and G Flip's About You.
Play on,
Matt x