Over the last couple of years I have submitted a number of scripts to a variety of competitions.
I've added the few I can find (I'd love to have found Hunt the Sausage, Badgers Minge and Puff the Politically Incorrect Dragon), but there's a lot more out there (including somewhere a complete pantomime).
This was the first one I did. I think it was a BBC competition for ideas for a science fiction short.
This was for SciFi Channel's SciFi Shorts competition. I got the idea from a piece encouraging people to write by Alfred Bester. He was commenting on the fact that people often say "Where do you get your crazy ideas?" As I remember it, Bester was saying that that wasn't the problem, everyone has at least one story in them, most people far more. He said the problem in writing was finding the the time to write and sticking with a project until it was done. He ended the piece by giving a couple of pages of ideas. These were at most half a dozen words long, but he finished the piece by saying "These ideas are yours, use them as you will" and basically said "What's your excuse for not writing?"
I have problems finishing thing, so here was a challenge. I'd got somewhere to send the finished product, a deadline and a challenge from Mr. Bester himself. I was vaguely pleased with myself for finishing it.
Among Bester's ideas were the two words "Smuggling Weather".
Brendon the Rubbish Weatherman
This was a for a Radio 4 competition called "Show Me the Funny". The underlying topic was media.
Sebastian Higginbottom and His Round The World Trip
This was for a radio competition called Moving Stories, which had to be tales about journeys.
This is part of a novel I'm writing called "The Truth About Cancer".
The books written in something I've heard of as "The Innis Mode" and the narrative first used by Jon Dos Passos in USA Trilogy, but used by a number of science fiction writers (John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, Joe Haldeman, Mindbridge) and the basic narrative unfolds through a series of scripts, letters, chapters, mock magazine stories and so on.
When I was in hospital, I spent some time in a ward populated by older gentlemen, largely with prostate problems. First thing in a morning, none of them would have their hearing aids in or spectacles on, let alone be able to find their teeth. This would result in long involved conversations that no-one was really up to participating in.
Also, while I was researching how to write a script (the internet is a wonderful thing) I found that it is normal for each scene to start with Fade In and end with Fade Out. It occurred to me that this is what it felt like. As I woke up, the conversations would fade in, and as time went on and I became more awake and more conscious of where I was, they would fade out of my consciousness and form part of the background noise.
The nurses did the same thing with Mr Green every morning.
I think it was just their joke.
