Be Scene - February 2025
The second month of this year seemed to fly by. It was filled with some great bookish things and the usual mix of art and history as well as a lovely trip to Devon with friends. Here’s my second crack at the new roundup formula.
Things I did
The month started with a National Portrait Gallery visit followed by meeting a friend from my screenwriting course for a catch-up which was great.
On the tenth, I attended a great sort of careers day for filmmaking at the Depot in Lewes. It was a series of four fascinating talks with some breaks and a chance to chat afterwards. It was great hearing each person’s route into the variety of jobs in the industry (Emma Farrguia - Theatrical Sales Manager at MUBI; Eleanor Gwynne - Marketing Assistant at Depot cinema; Jake Abatan - Digital Communications Officer at Directors UK; Charlotte Ross - Assistant Film Curator in the Image & Film Licensing team at Imperial War Museums). I learnt a lot about exhibition and many useful titbits I won’t list, and left feeling uplifted and reassured about my journey.
A couple of days later I had a long day in London. I popped by Titan’s offices to meet Star Wars Insider’s graphic designer David Colderley for a coffee. It was great to meet David after how kind he’s been online and his amazing work bringing my traditional publishing debut articles (and more) to life - more on that later.
Then I headed to nearby Tate Modern to see more of the Electric Dreams exhibition now it’s all working, as well as some other galleries. Then I followed the City of London walking guide Roads to Rome, to see all those ancient sites, including the London stone and a plank of wood possibly from the Roman bridge over the Thames.
The museum in the crypt of the ancient All Hallows’ Church is a fantastic little freebie, definitely worth a visit if you’re interested in any era of London’s history. The once-ground-level mosaic and large model are some highlights. You can see some of this on my instagram post of the trip.
The walk continued past all the intact sections of Roman then mediaeval walls, in a variety of locations by a viewing platform of the Tower of London, in a hotel/restaurant courtyard, several parks, within the basement of a building. My favourite section was walking the high walk around the Barbican. It would make a great location for a thriller, with the long featureless walkways, following the line of the water, ancient Roman fort wall and tower, and with the illuminated church.
The day finished with another great signing at Gosh! Comics, for Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard’s The Power Fantasy. Highlights of the chat were talking about Kieron’s return to Star Wars (more at the end of this) and showing Caspar his art in my Rex & Roll Insider article. Plus I had a lovely chat with Titan Comics editor Phoebe Hedges.
A major highlight of the month, especially after meeting David, was getting my hands on the above cover which he designed! As I wrote on my insta, which features more photos of the mag:
I rarely post photos of myself but here I am looking suitably happy to hold the foil variant cover of Star Wars Insider 227, which featured my second traditionally published piece of writing (my second article in the magazine!). Rex & Roll broke down the clone's top ten moments, really a biography told through ten chapters. It was a good excuse to rewatch some of my favourite Star Wars animated episodes, charting Rex's incredible character growth across three shows. But I loved being able to include Rex's first chronological appearance, showcasing the beginning of his relationship with Anakin in a comic story, 501st Plus One.
I suppose I should mention that yes I do own a 2008 Rex helmet as I grew up with The Clone Wars, and Rex always represented that to me. Only now I'm older and they've done more with his character can I appreciate that he's more than just cool armour. So that's why I'm very grateful for David Colderley at Titan who designed and showed me this fantastic foil cover of issue 227, dedicated to my article. It's very special to finally be holding it, as the article came out in August last year!
The support in the comments from established writers was lovely, especially on such an overt expression of my fandom.
On the complete flipside, and a different sort of special to that foil cover, I then went away visiting family and then on that aforementioned trip to South Devon with friends. Here’s a few highlights, beach and moors.
The month culminated with the usual Forbidden Planet/British Museum trip, with their re-opened Africa gallery, which I’d never been to before. Lots of inspiring artefacts down there, despite their history of getting to the museum. I particularly liked some of the masquerade costumes and sculptures of all sorts from Benin.
To cap off the day, I attended a fantastic talk about Chris Kempshall’s fantastic fictional history book The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire at the Institute of Historical Research. Alongside Chris were academics Julia Ribeiro Thomaz (pictured above) and Ann-Marie Foster (not-pictured above in my sneaky photo before it started). And yes, that is a knitted Death Star. It was was great to finally meet Chris in person after connecting online and his guest post which kicked off this year’s A Long Time Ago….
Things I wrote
This newsletter…
The big writing news this month is that my words were directed, performed and recorded by professionals at LAMDA! Which is a sentence I couldn’t’ve imagined a month ago. I met Marion Githegi at that event at Ealing Studios last month, and she invited me to help with her podcast, Be Scene: Director’s Cut, which not only interviews professionals but records the directing process with the actors, shows the finished scene, then talks about the process afterwards.
Sadly, I couldn’t make it to this month’s recording due to the Devon trip, BUT I could help Marion by providing a two-page script to be used in the episode. So I wrote a scene to her specifications and she liked it enough to make me the podcast’s script writer. So next month I’ll be working on some choices for the next guest director! And I’ll be sharing everything to do with the first time my words have been properly brought to life and recorded since the first scene of my playwriting project in year nine!
Technically they’re scheduled in advance, but I wrote the intros for two more fantastic editions of A Long Time Ago…. I was very glad Lydia Kang featured last month’s so prominently on her newsletter. But this month’s featured the words of Nick, the tutor behind my playwriting project, as well as an author I met at Worldcon (you may remember the model tower from his book!). Yaroslav’s contributions, which included so many extras, is definitely the most humorous answers I’ve received so far.
A Long Time Ago… with Nick Fothergill
A Long Time Ago… with Yaroslav Barsukov
I also received another great contribution and wrote something for someone else’s newsletter. You should be able to put two and two together when April’s A Long Time Ago…s roll along!
Then I really launched into the video game project I’m writing (despite some dates being pushed back for it), editing the final draft for the script of the first two levels, fully outlining the fourth (the start of the potential second part of the game) and assembling everyone’s ideas and notes into level five. It’s kind of like taking lumps of clay from different people’s tables in the process of sculpting the same model, and ordering them into a rough single shape before blending together and finally actually carving the story to tell. Then there’s a decent bit of realising where to add and take away and sculpt something new on the side, etc.
I’m going to have to wet the clay when I return to it later this week and finish that level five outline. Still, it’s absolutely incredible to see concept art and 3D models of my words coming to life, finally feeling a different form of what Kieron Gillen talked about at MCM in 2023 about being the first audience for your ideas coming to life, which inspired my comics sidequesting.
I didn’t write it this month, but New York Public Library accepted my poem for their zine on ‘Progress is a Process’. I’ll be letting you know more about that in time, but it was a talk Ethan and Naomi Sacks did there which inspired me to submit after hearing about it from the hosts.
Hopefully the acceptances will continue! as I also entered Writers’ and Artists’ Short Story Competition and BSFA’s Fission #5 submission window. Plus, I’m nearing seventeen queries sent out to literary agents…
Things I gained
The month’s Star Wars comics. The last four of Alex Segura’s Battle of Jakku were a great read, and I treated myself to that beautiful Black History Month Mother Aniseya cover - magical coven leader with glowing colours and so many geometric symbols? I couldn’t resist.
I won’t clog this section with my full unboxing and thoughts on this wonderful anthology. Here’s my review on goodreads. All twenty-nine short stories are wonderful and I’m very thankful to Jendia for fulfilling my crowdfunding so well, sending this from America with double wrappings, a postcard and watercolour, all signed. And my name is fifth amongst the thanks at the back! Here’s my post with more photos.
This was another wonderful delivery this month. My name was drawn from the hat of Catriona’s newsletter subscribers to win this US ARC. I heard about this book at ESFF’s Worldcon party, so to own an early copy is fantastic.
The haul from the Gosh! signing, with the 1/100 signed bookplate! Plus I’d picked up earlier the first volume of The Wicked and the Divine and A New Legacy, a fantastic collection of three short stories celebrating ten years of the new Marvel Star Wars comics. There’s one from Charles Soule, a great return of the Empire’s SCAR Squadron from Jason Aaron and a story for the first time featuring all of the characters Kieron introduced (which Paul Cornell wrote about in December!) together in a free moment in the tight timeline of twenty-five Vader comics Kieron wrote. The comic marks ten years of my properly reading and collecting the medium. Hopefully I’ll get it signed by the other two influential writers someday.
And here’s the haul of other books, which sums me up pretty well with the mixture of history, art and fiction. After seeing a select few at the British Museum last November, I treated myself to a book with the whole of The Vollard Suite. The Iron Age book is pretty specialised, but eventually I will be writing about the Iron Age and I’d like to learn more about the few instruments I’ve seen on my travels. A trip to Rome is coming later this year!
I’ve been subscribed to George Saunder’s fantastic newsletter for a while now so when I saw two of his books they were an easy buy, as was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow after I’d seen it recommended a lot, especially by Dan Smith. Station Eleven is another name I’ve heard a lot, and may be another good comp for my novel.
Thanks very much for following along. See you next month!