Stormhouse Trailer

This looks damn SCARY!!

From Den of Geek

Heading to cinemas later this year, take a look at the first trailer for upcoming British horror flick, Stormhouse, right here….

"In 2002 the military captured and imprisoned a supernatural entity..."

Now, here's a project that's worth your support. Made in Britain, and set for release later this year, Stormhouse is a brand new horror movie. It's been written by Jason Arnopp (who needs no introduction to fans of Doctor Who audio work), and directed by Dan Turner, who cut his teeth on the award-nominated web series, Girl Number 9, amongst other projects.

The film will be premiering at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2011, and is set for cinematic release later in the year. And you can get an exclusive first glimpse at it right now, courtesy of this first look trailer.

Do give it a click, and do support a welcome introduction into the world of big-screen British horror movies. And when we have a release date, we'll be sure to let you know.

In the meantime, you can find out more about the film via its Twitter feed, here.

Finally finished another draft of the family feature musical "Jessica Little and the Manor House Spy"
New goal: submit to BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. Deadline is May 15th for the new year which begins in September.
From their website:

Librettists
The skills of bookwriting for the musical theatre are developed through ongoing presentations of members' scripts in development, and by discussion of the structural elements of produced shows—the hits and the flops. To encourage new projects and new collaborations, bookwriters are given opportunities to network with Workshop composers and lyricists.

Oh, Give it a Go.

Pop Up Princess

Great news: Pop Up Princess book illustrations are now underway by the talented Tom Mead in Edinburgh! I'll be sure to post a preview when they're done :-)

The best advice for query letter writing: "Don't be weird"

I do so much of my research online and was at it again, this time for info on query letters, when I came across this article about writing QLs to literary agents. The recommended structure is very much like film pitch and treatment documents that I'm used to but with a writer's bio attached. Here's a link to the article:
How to Write a Query


It's got great advice for new writers and I laughed out loud when I read this line:

Don't be weird. Phhhhlease.

Very funny. You've been warned!

London Screenwriters' Festival

A Festivus for the Restivus.

An article on writing in the Wall Street Journal?

Believe it or not, here are a few excerpts from a WSJ article on how several famous authors tackle the task:

Most agree on common hurdles: procrastination, writer's block, the terror of failure that looms over a new project and the attention-sucking power of the Internet.
"Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you'll get a plot," Margaret Atwood says when asked where her ideas come from. When questioned about whether she's ever used that approach, she adds, "No, I don't have to." Ms. Atwood, who has written 13 novels, as well as poetry, short stories and nonfiction works, rarely gets writer's block. When ideas hit her, she scribbles phrases and notes on napkins, restaurant menus, in the margins of newspapers.

Kate Christensen was two years and 150 pages into her first novel, "In the Drink," about a boozy ghostwriter, before she discovered what the book was really about—so she dismantled the draft, threw out a bunch of pages and started over.

When she was working on her first novel, "Interview With a Vampire," in the early 1970s, Anne Rice revised each typed page before moving on to the next. These days, she writes on a computer rather than a typewriter, and revisions are constant and more fluid. She writes a chapter a day to make sure each section is consistent in its tone and style, and often works for eight or nine hours straight when she's in the middle of a novel.
Mystery writer Laura Lippman, who writes a popular series featuring detective Tess Monaghan, creates elaborate, color-coded plot charts, using index cards, sketchbook pages, colored ribbon and magic markers.