Porcine Influenza

Swine flu then. Knocked me out for two weeks. Two weeks where I couldn't do much more than sit on the sofa gazing at the goggle box, sometimes raising the strength to use my Xbox controller. It was actually less fun than it sounds but it did give me a chance to watch a hell of a lot of films.

Had a bit of a John Carpenter retrospective, re-watching They Live and Assault on Precinct 13 and (incredibly) watching The Fog for the first time. Followed those up with some New York films, The Warriors and the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The Warriors is so stylish, so exciting, just a great film. Pelham One Two Three blew us away though. The characters were so real, and so quickly established. I loved that everyone looked like real people, no beautiful Hollywood faces. Why don't films look like that any more? And that ending! They're running trailers for the remake on TV that make me want to weep!

Finished the third draft of The Quiet Night Inn on Monday night (Tuesday morning) so that's good. Quite a lot of little changes made and a lot of pages cut. Course now I've had a brilliant idea which involves a massive change to the script so draft four starts as soon as I get my strength back.

Unfortunately returning to work after two weeks off is taking it's toll at the moment. I'm a zombie by five pm every day. Not in a cool way though. There's also some quite major real life stuff going on which I'll be able to mention soon. It's not directly related to my writing but will have a big impact on it, in a positive way I mean! More news soon.

Feeling very motivated at the moment, probably due to a combination of watching loads of films, revisiting James Moran's blog from the very beginning, and just being excited about what I'm working on again. Nice.