All The Rage and Solo writing versus team writing

The new (and quite the best-looking so far, although maybe I'm just biased because it's got superheroes and daleks and stuff in it) All The Rage is out. I very nearly wrote a proper bit for this, it being about fantasy and adventure and stuff, but work has overwhelmed me at the moment (more below) so I kindly allowed the use of a couple of toy-fu pages for only one million pounds.

Also, Leila has a book out! (on October 7th, which is coincidentally PatrocIus' birthday) I had literally no idea, but it is a proper book, available in Waterstone's and Borders and other places and everything.

*is impressed*

And now, The Difference Between Solo-Writing and Team Writing, as Illustrated by Two Consecutive and Similarly-Themed but Very Different in Approach style Work Days.


Tuesday - Teen Drama Project, BBC

In the foyer, I realise I'm standing next to a comedy writer/performer I've seen around before, but never met. I introduce myself and we have a very sober discussion about the internal politics of one of the larger comedy-writer-representing agencies.

In the meeting room provided, glass walls decorated with quotes from classic literature, the BBC Producer, script editor, assistant producer, script editor and I discuss how downloading torrents or streaming video have changed audiences' viewing habits, and how best we can adapt to these changes to bring the proposed teen drama series to an audience once it has been made.

Halfway through an assistant brings us cups of tea. We thank him politely.

In the afternoon, we discuss character backgrounds, story arcs, what characters' emotional journeys will be over the course of the series and the storylines that will bring out these character moments to best effect.



Wednesday - Various, Team Writing, ex-Green Wing writers

In the corridor of the new Brick Lane office I realise the small green boxes placed at various points on the floor are not air fresheners, as I originally thought, but traps for rats.

This.

I sit down on a wheely office chair. Due to a slope in the floor, I slide very slowly backwards, eventually stopping with a bump against a wall decorated with pictures of characters from Prison Break torn out of Heat magazine. Apparently my new haircut reminds the other writers of a character from Prison Break called 'T-Bag'. Later research reveals 'T-Bag' to be a white supremacist muderer/rapist.

Producer asks if I'm forty yet (I'm thirty four).

Ori Fay takes out the 'Cock a Doodle' pad* (a small book with line drawings of men in Seventies style porn posings, but with the genital area left blank) and draws the genitals of all the men present as she imagines them. I am drawn with a vagina, although frankly, I'm more offended that she has chosen a bald man to represent me. I am allowed to draw some hair (on the head) before the picture is stuck up on the noticeboard under a polaroid of me looking confused.

I am told to go out and buy sweets for the group, with dark hints being made that my sweets-buying duties have been performed to a less than satisfactory standard in the past. When asked what kind of sweets I should get, the reply is 'nice ones'.

I decide to embrace the vitality and multiculturalness of the Brick Lane environs by buying some food from one of the street vendors. I eat my burger, surrounded by people who appear never to have seen Nathan Barley. That evening I have a brief and surprisingly emotional bout of food poisoning.

* I don't even want to think where these are available