In my favourite Stephen King novel Bag of Bones, fictional crime writer Mike Noonan suffers from such an intense writer's block that when he enters the room housing his computer screen, his stomach churns so violently with fear that he can only crawl pathetically to his desk and barely manages to turn on his word processor without dying from suffocation. But once it's turned on, he still can't write anything. Not a damn word. It almost killed him just thinking about writing, let alone actually doing it. I've suffered from a form of that this weekend. For a while on Saturday night, I was petrified by my macbook. I literally wanted to smash it into a hundred pieces for the way it would stare at me, with it's constant flashing white dot telling me it was asleep, but not really asleep, just bored that I had nothing to say. At one point and I'm not stretching the truth here... I had to hide it away in my big wardrobe and watch Taxi Driver really loud on my tv, just to try and stop that flashing white dot from making my life a living hell (there's no bigger picture in choosing Taxi Driver, I was just in the mood for it when I read some of the reviews for Observe and Report). For a writer, there is nothing more fearful than that unrelenting, unmovable flashing cursor, judging you as you think about what to write. It teases and haunts you, constantly barraging your brain with the fear that you are just not good enough to fill the blank space with anything worth a damn. My macbook does this to me everyday, clearly pissed off that he (I've never thought of my macbook as a girl, I could never have this close a relationship with a woman spewing out my thoughts everyday) was lumbered with myself as a companion and not a film writer from AICN or CHUD. But a miracle happened yesterday and this is why you didn't really see any articles from me over the weekend. I began to beat it. That flashing cursor could barely keep up with my rapid firing of the keys. I finally started to write and not just write but write and write and write. Four hours straight, with no breaks. No checking my e-mails, no downloading more songs from iTunes, delving further into the back catalogues on whichever artist is taking my fancy at that point in time, no break to binge on fast food or DVD buying. Just pure writing. I've started on a film script. Now yeah, I've "started" on film scripts at least a hundred times before and yes, I've got some PDF drafts of half finished films dating back at least four or five years on various hard drives here and there and hell I've even got a well recieved 25 minute short script in one folder which was deemed to be of "promising talent' from my university lecturer. Not that I would show it to anyone now, I wrote it in 2 hours the night before it was due to be handed in, but without even trying to hard, I know I am capable of writing something good. I can just never stick to it for a full length course of a script. But this time I have a plan, a resemblance of an outline which before today I hadn't realised was so vital when beginning to write a movie. This time, I have real ideas, I have something I actually want to say which is half the battle anyways for a writer, right? I'm co-writing it with Simon Gallagher, it's going to be a romantic comedy, probably set in the mid to late 90's (when the world was a happier place, I dare say) and will probably be semi-autobiographical. It will revolve around three or four early 20 something guys, luckless with women, life and work. We have a title, but I won't tell you it yet and we have agreed to work in 7 day periods separately on different characters, then swap our notes and maybe even swap our scenes to let the other re-write what the other wrote the week before. That's the plan anyway, I'm sure I won't be able to keep it up as well as yesterday for long but we'll see. My writing went well. I'd call what I wrote, High Fidliety meets Dawson's Creek. Take that to mean whatever you will.