A great big Thank You goes out to all the artist’s involved and to those who helped with the DTP side of things. But especially to my girl Faye, for her support and hard work throughout the project. What follows is a straight cut and paste of a prepared press release.

PR: A girl trapped in a box, a boy chained to a rock and a friendship between a child and a flower. These are just a few of the themes that storyteller Fehed Said explores in this collection. Joining Fehed Said, the acclaimed writer behind SLG’s Clarence Principle, and Sonia Leong, the award winning artist behind SMH’s Romeo & Juliet is a sterling lineup of the UK’s best new talent. Featuring artwork from Nana Li, Wing Yun Man, Chloe Citrine and Faye Yong.

“It was such a varied mix of stories” says Said. “When I was trying to come up with the title for the book, I wanted to find a connection between them all. Evidently, the critical moments in each piece came up as the protagonist’s talked with strangers.”

Nana Li was the artist for ‘Box’, and sums up that story as: “It’s a short and dark story, but I think the ending will leave a tingling sensation in the spine.” The same could certainly be said about the reading experience of this title. From the morbid fairy-tale style ‘Malignant’ and the sweetness of ‘Flowers’; this anthology showcases a variety in storytelling and artistic talent.

Talking To Strangers is due for release on 24th October 2009 at the London MCM Expo and available to buy online from the Sweatdrop Studios website.

Just yesterday, I had finally completed the first draft script of a new book I’m putting together. I’ve never printed out my scripts before, and was excited to see how it would look on paper. Came out to about 91 pages in total. That’s about standard for a script, I believe. There is an artist attached to this since last January and work starts on the project in October. I’m afraid however, that nothing more will be aired until the first quarter of 2010.

I’d been talked into publishing it online while we shop it around. I normally shy away from putting full projects on the web, but the Pro’s outweighed the Con’s in this particular case. I’ve considered doing this using episodes, similar to Freakangels, primarily because this is not a webcomic and a page-a-day release just doesn’t pack enough punch, in my opinion, nor do the flow of the story justice. I do like this new episodic trend and hope more people pick it up!

Faye ran through half of the script last night proofing it for me and as I occasionally glanced over her shoulder, I realised some of the earlier dialogue may need tweaking. It never ends! The last scene was rewritten about 5 times in my head, then 3 times on paper. I found myself stuck at one point going forward because the moment I was on just read horribly wrong.

I had to take it in steps and literally reverse engineer the scene, almost like looking for bugs in programming code, until I found the dialogue that started the downward spiral in the first place. Once I made the cut from that point on, I was able to rewrite the scene and finish it.

It always feels really strange reaching the end of scripting out a story. It’s hard to explain. Really, it’s merely the beginning of the project, but to hold the full story in my hands, when just a mere 10 months ago it was all notes and pieces of dialogue inside my head, gives me a sense of pride. For now, this is the first goal on a long ‘to-do’ list. I’ll enjoy this moment while it lasts.

A few weeks back, I’d reached a critical moment in the script, on a scene that I had been planning to write for months. It’s a turning point in the character’s psyche, but a difficult one to capture and wasn’t at all sure how to tackle it. I punched out the scene, tweaked it a few times and believed that I’d executed it well enough to pass it on to the artist for feedback.

The artist felt the character was contradicting himself. Unsure what his motivation behind this sudden random act in the scenario, left her feeling unsettled.

I’d considered this myself in the past and had at one point intended on coming back to this moment in a scene later in the story and allow the character to explain himself, but after more thought, I felt it unnecessary.

I was ready to compromise, however, and had set aside some time to tackle the dialogue in that later scene to discuss the ‘random act’ situation.

Reading through my book one evening, I came across a rather insightful passage that I shared with the artist a week later. It read -

Generally, the more the writer nails motivation to specific causes, the more he diminishes the character in the audience’s mind. Rather, think through to a solid understanding of motive, but at the same time leave some mystery around the whys, a touch of the irrational perhaps, room for the audience to use its own life experience to enhance your character in its imagination.

# Robert McKee

So it seems I was on the right track after all. I was filled with a new found confidence that I do actually know what I’m doing. However, I was still in the wrong as well.

I had failed to explain my character’s motivations to the artist. Of course it all makes sense to me, I know all the intricate details of my character’s every thought. Failure to communicate that to the artist is an amateur mistake.

I usually convey these things verbally, rather than put them in the script. Obviously, it all might have made more sense if she had the full story from beginning to end, but as it is a work in progress, you should always bare the details. It falls under the same principle as a Director explaining the character’s motivation to an Actor.

The conflicts we put our characters through often rely on some form of life-experience. As the artist said to me, “that was a case where I didn’t have any real life experience of my own which I could superimpose on the situation, so it just didn’t make sense.”

I don’t like spoon-feeding the audience, but at the same time, I don’t want to be far too obscure. There lies the problem.

I believe the answer is to understand your audience. But that’s a discussion for another day.