The internet has been abuzz in the last couple of weeks with all sorts of new and exciting projects.  We’ve seen the launch of the Lone Gun Manifesto, the Multi-Hyphenate “Don’t Make Sh*t” creative statement, some great new short films and the debut of The Production Office, the weekly live show from indie filmmaking guru Chris Jones (of Gone Fishing and The Guerilla Film Maker’s Handbook(s) fame).

The one thing that all these projects and ideas have in common is their creators’ willingness to take on board the views and opinions of other people.

That’s not to say that any of them are bowing to pressure from readers, viewers or supporters to change their visions, but they are seeking a broad range of ideas on what’s right and what’s amiss with their creations in order to better themselves and what they are trying to achieve.

It’s a lesson many writers and filmmakers would do well to learn.  Feedback isn’t about people blindly praising or harshly judging you or your script, film or show – it’s about learning what works and what doesn’t from someone else’s point of view.

You’re not always going to agree with what other people think of your work, the important thing is to acknowledge comments and take the time to really consider them.

Case in point: my new screenplay.  I’ve just finished a fourth draft of a screenplay that’s very close to my heart and sent it out to my loyal band of 3 readers who I send all my stuff to for feedback.  I’ve had another great set of notes from one of them that highlights some issues that I was aware of, some that I hadn’t noticed and some that I disagree with.

The significant point is that even those we disagree with are hugely valuable, because it forces us as writers or filmmakers to justify to ourselves why we don’t agree.  It’s no use just saying “No” and ignoring someone – you have to take the time to work out why you disagree and why you want it to stay the way it is.

Feedback can be hard to accept when it’s not the gushing praise you were expecting, but it’s vital to hep create the very best piece of work.  Don’t be afraid to offer your darling up and ask people what they think.  In the end, it’ll make your baby better.

Catch up with the rest of the story in Part I, Part II and Part III first.

Easter weekend, then, was a bit rubbish if we’re all honest about it.  Getting home on a stonking great 70mg dose of oral pred meant two things: MASSIVE appetite and MASSIVE lack of sleep.

In the first 72 hours of getting home (that’s all of Easter weekend, essentially) I slept around a total of 8 hours.  In the first 5 days at home I had two nights where I actually didn’t sleep at all.  Not a wink.

The great thing about insomnia is that it often makes me hugely creative.  Some of my best writing has been done in the middle of the night when my brain is whirring over-time and I’ve got up and hammered out some great stuff.

The problem with steroid-induced insomnia is that the longer you can’t sleep for, the more useless you get.  By Easter Monday I’d been without decent sleep for nearly 4 days and my brain had turned to utter mush.  I couldn’t do anything other than sit in a heap on the sofa and – after spending the last month in hard-core training in the gym – that really didn’t float my boat.

Worse than that, though – and please turn away if you’re of a nervous disposition – was that I wasn’t allowed ANY chocolate over Easter AT ALL.  Utter, utter rubbish.  The prednisolone had spiked my blood sugars higher than the flagpole at the summit of Everest and I was reduced to a low-GI diet of wholly unsatisfactory wholemeal products to keep my sugars as in-balance as I can.

Because I’m not a “real” diabetic, the dietary control was vital as I didn’t have any insulin to use if things go too bad, necessitating late-night A&E trips if I lost control.

To be honest, though, after the stresses and strains of the past week, it didn’t seem like a hugely big deal to miss out on a few chocolate eggs and the last of the Cadbury’s Cream Egg McFlurries.

Thursday was D-Day of last week, heading back in to see the docs and find out what the score was.  As far as we can tell, we finished up at Oli 1-0 Rejection.  Which is, conclusively, A Good Thing.

There’s still a bit more of a waiting game to play as there may be other problems that the rejection was masking, including whether or not it’s hammered my pancreas so much I may become a fully committed member of the diabetes squad, but these issues are – frankly – little niggles compared to the threat of the last week.

The docs are happy, I’m happy and I can finally re-focus myself on the next few months which, all being well, contain some very, very exciting times indeed.

Watch this space: the show’s not over ’til the bloke with the fat, steroid-rounded face sings.  And I haven’t even warmed up my vocal chords yet…

Read Part I and Part II first.

I hadn’t even had time to cut the medical wristbands off my arms, nor the nurses any time to clean my room out, by the time I’d got back to the hospital.  The plus-side being a lot less paperwork than my admission the previous morning.

The docs arrived and inserted a new cannula into my hand to start me on a course of methal-prednisolone, a high-dose steroid treatment that would blitz my immune system into the equivalent of a small koala with a chesty cough and hay fever.

There are two things that should be noted about methal-pred (look away anyone who may be introduced to this wonder drug at any stage) – 1) It hurts like hell going into the back of your hand.  It’s only a one-hour infusion once a day, but boy is that hour the most uncomfortable you’re going to be all day. 2) Steroids stop you sleeping.  Especially when they first dose is administered at 6pm at night.

The next three days were something of a blur, not through a drugged-up haze of weird psychotropic experiences, but rather because I was just really quite bored.  The high doses, which can really wrangle with your blood sugars, meant I had to be monitored quite closely, the pain in my hand and the bandage to protect it meant typing was almost impossible and being moved to a downstairs room midway through Thursday meant my dongle couldn’t get decent signal and the internet was out.  I did, however, managed to watch all of Season Four of House on DVD, which was nice.

By Friday I was itching to get home.  And just plain itching at the back of my hand, too.  My blood sugars had been all over the place, hitting high points unheard of for me and even managing to creep higher even after a rapid injection of fast-working insulin, which I though was quite impressive myself.  All of which had me convinced they weren’t about to kick me out, Good Friday or no Good Friday.

To my surprise, then, the docs did indeed come around and discharge me.  To be sure I wasn’t being royally stitched up again, I actually made the Sister on the ward watch me cut off my wristbands and told her straight out that if they brought me back I was making her to ALL the paperwork again.   Every single sheet.  Which, I like to think, is why they didn’t call me back.

Instead, my three days of methal-pred over with, they sent me packing with new, much higher doses of oral prednisolone, a steroid I take as part of my regular regime, only increased by a monstrous 700%.  Nice.

Only once I got home did I discover that oral pred is worse than methal-pred in one key aspect: it’s even worse at letting your sleep.

To be concluded…

Read Part 1 here first.

Although not entirely rectified, the issues with my throat had at least dampened down enough overnight to allow me to talk. I still had the odd issue with my gag reflex, though.

Having rested and dressed in the morning, I was surprised to find the docs still willing to go along with their pronouncement that I could go home.  By now Wednesday, I hadn’t planned on having this much time away from my desk, so it was nice to think I could go home, sleep a little in my own bed and rest up properly.

K arrived to shuttle me back and we made our break for it.  Unfortunately, too soon.

Halfway through the hour-and-a-bit drive home, my phone rang with a call from the HeadDoc again.  Apparently, they hadn’t waited for my biopsy results from the previous day before kicking me out.  Which is when I heard the five words you definitely, definitely don’t want to hear as a post-transplant patient:

“You’ve got some acute rejection.”

For those unversed in all things transplant, here’s the skinny:

When organs (or tissue) are transplanted into your body you discover just how clever your body really is.  It’s doesn’t realise that you’re doing it a favour, but rather notices that a large piece of itself has gone missing and been replaced by, well, a large piece of someone else.  Not knowing what that large piece is (nor that it’s actually very good for you), any body will start to attack that foreign invader.

Hence the most important part of any post-transplant medical routine: immuno-suppressant drugs specifically designed to dampen your immune system to a point where your body can still fight off the everyday coughs and colds we all come into contact with, but where it won’t recognise the new additions to your system.

Sooner or later, though, the body won’t be fooled any more.  At some point in the future – and it can be days, weeks, months or many, many years – the body will recognise the foreign objects and it will start to attack them.  This is called rejection.

The Big R is something every transplant patient knows will happen to them sooner or later, but we all try to hide from.  We all know we’ll face it, but none of us is actually willing to, you know, face it.

There are two types of rejection and, in that regard, I’ve got the good one.  Acute rejection can be equated to a sudden flare up of an old injury, like when a pulled back gets “put out” on over exertion.  It doesn’t mean the beginning of the end, but it does need to be treated swiftly and decisively to make sure it doesn’t escalate and your backbone doesn’t fall out entirely.  OK, maybe that’s analogy’s a little stretched.

So, halfway home to a nice cup of tea and some chill time in front of the TV, I’m ordering K to turn around and racing back to Harefield with one single word bouncing around my head.  I’ve had more enjoyable journeys, I have to admit.

To be continued…Part III tomorrow.

Monday 29th March started like any normal transplant clinic visit.  About 10.30am I heard the words you never really want to hear from a techie doing your lung function:

“It’s gone down a bit.”

Sure, ‘a bit’ isn’t the most worrisome of phrases, but after over two years of steadily increasing function, hugely increased physical capability and a life coming together and wandering off into new & exciting worlds, it’s not what you want to hear.  Then again, neither is that horribly mixed and mangled metaphor in the previous sentence…

Regardless, I hung around to chat to my docs in the afternoon, as is their wont.  The system at Harefield works by running you through a battery of tests in the mornings, then shipping all the results to the docs for the afternoon session where they can get them instantly and take action.

The action my doctor took was to go and talk to another doctor.  Never an encouraging sign.  When he returned, HeadDoc MC had decreed (he doesn’t decide, he decrees, he’s that kind of fella) that I should come in the following morning for a bronchoscopy – otherwise known outside the medical world as shoving a camera down your throat to have a look at what’s in your lungs.

It seems that over the last few months, although my lung function hadn’t been dropping alarmingly my mid-expiratory flow (the amount of air I’m pushing out in the middle of my breathing test) has been slowly decreasing and was now starting to fall to a point that raises alarm bells.

The following morning, after a rather rude 5.55am alarm call, I rocked up onto the ward for my bronch and got myself all gowned up.  About 10.30 I was whisked (well, leisurely wheeled) to theatre and knocked out.  Thankfully with a nice little cocktail of drugs and not something hard and blunt.

When I woke up my throat hurt and I couldn’t see straight.  I remembered hurriedly that that was OK and not the repercussions of a heavy Monday night out.  Throughout the rest of the day I laid in bed and felt awful. And tired.  Then awful again for a bit.  Then threw up.  Twice.

In the middle of all of this as I became more conscious, I noticed that I was having trouble swallowing, talking and breathing (the latter only a little, thankfully), due to an inflamed uvula at the back of my throat. It’s that dangly bit you can see when you look into someone’s mouth that people always think is the tonsils.  It was inflamed and enlarged and causing all kinds of problems, bouncing against my gag reflex and trying to pull the roof of my mouth off every time I swallowed.  Not pleasant.

The docs shot me up with a barrage o drugs – hydrocortisone being the most exciting – to try to bring the swelling down, but they eventually gave up after nothing made it better and it wasn’t getting worse.  Most popular diagnosis on the ward was “trauma” which is doctor-speak for “we must have battered it with the ‘scope when we were fishing in your lungs”.

Encouragingly, though, they told me I could go home on Wednesday.  Which I did.

To be continued…

A friend on Twitter (rapidly rising Danny Lacey (@dannylaceyfilm)) yesterday pointed me in the direction of this video of KICK-ASS director Matthew Vaughn talking about all things moving image on the Film4 website. It’s a fascinating and illuminating piece, not least for his comments on the British film industry.

In the video he says:

“The only movies that we finance [in the UK] are normally small little arthouse films or the films that Hollywood won’t make and therefore there’s no sort of commercial justification for making the movies.”

Which got me thinking: is it a bad thing that British filmmakers are making movies that Hollywood can’t, won’t or don’t want to? I’m not sure.

I’m not going to deny that the industry in the UK is chock full of mediocre kitchen-sink dramas and over-the-top, over-the-hill gangster flicks, nor that it would be refreshing to see some diversification (see: KICK-ASS).

But can the same not be said for the USA? For every over-inflated, blockbusting cash-cow made with American dollars, is there not a host of low-to-no-budget remakes, rip-offs and trashy wannabes?

Around the world from the USA to the UK, France to Korea, each territory has its own niche; types of film that are consistently funded across the board. Does that make all the money men wrong? Mathematical algorithms are the single biggest driving force behind all of Relativity Media’s silver screen investments and they seem to be doing pretty well by it, so it makes sense for film financiers to stick with what they know. Doesn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong, the UK film industry is in dire need of a boost. Not just financially, but in self-confidence, too. In the interview, Vaughn sums up my patriotism perfectly when he analyses things like the Harry Potter and James Bond franchises, saying that we Brits make them but we don’t profit from them:

“I just think the talent base we have we could be the biggest film industry in the world, we could beat the Americans at their own game – if we had the money the Americans have, we could be far more successful.”

What do you think? Are the Brits the best at what they do, just drastically underfunded? Or is our lack of confidence, lack of innovation within our own market and apparent unwillingness to take Hollywood on the biggest issue?

Thursday 1 April not only saw far too many people sucked in by (and irrationally annoyed by) Philip Bloom‘s masterful April Fool on Canon DSLRs, but also the launch of the month-long Twitter-based #scriptfrenzy.

In essence, the plan for Script Frenzy is to churn out 100 pages of an original screenplay in the 30 days of April.  But just how useful is it to hammer out a first draft in a frenzy?  I took some time to weigh up my own personal pros and cons:

PROs

We all like a deadline.  Actually, most writers hate deadlines, but it can’t be denied that setting one focuses the mind.  And by sharing that deadline with all the other “frenziers” out there, not to mention all of your other Twitter followers, you’re binding yourself into a loose contract to say you’ll at least have something on paper at the beginning of May.

Sometimes it’s good just to write.  Far too many writers – especially those just starting out who are struggling to find the time for wordsmithing alongside busy and demanding day-jobs – put off starting that new piece because there are “other things” in the way.  By forcing yourself to sit down and hammer out an average of just 4 pages a day for a 1st draft, you get those creative juices flowing.

CONs

Thinking time. Former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies talks about the majority of his writing time being time spent in “the Maybe” – that etheral neverland of thoughts, shapes and possibilities where stories solidify and conform in the brain before you actually sit down to hammer out the pages on Final Draft.  Similarly, Paul Schrader, writer of modern classics like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, has a Maybe that exists in his meticulous outlining and documenting of the entire story prior to the 1st draft.  How do you account for thinking time in a frenzied rush to hammer out your 100 pages? Do you need to have put that all in place before April 1st, or do you build that into your month-of-crazy?

Arbitrary page counts. Yes, a feature film script should come in somewhere around 100 pages, but – more importantly – a script needs to be the right length to tell the story, whether that be 75 pages or, God forbid, 150 pages.  100 is a good guideline, but is it an appropriate target?

Forcing the words out. All screenplays need a little time to digest as you go.  Undoubtedly, sometimes you do just need to sit down and hammer your way through a stumbling block, but other times you need to be free to step back and recognise when simply bashing the keys is wasted time until you’ve worked out why the scene isn’t working for you.

I don’t have anything against #scriptfrenzy and certainly not against those taking part. But I know that it’s not the way that I can sit and hammer out a first draft of anything. I need the time to consider it, the time to plan it and then to set myself a deadline that’s reachable at a daily page count that works for me, my working time and my goals for the script.

How about you? Are you a frenzier, a plodder or a somewhere-in-the-middle?

I’m intrigued after reading this piece about famous writers’ working methods.

Now, I know we’re all individuals and we all do things our way, but it kind of bothered me that all these writers are said – or intimated – to have done these things everyday.

My writing methods vary almost as much as these guys’ apparently didn’t.  One day I’ll sit and right reams on my MacPro – technically my editing machine, but Final Draft doesn’t exactly swamp the disc space.  The next I’ll be making amendments to script at my dining table in the lounge (oh for a bigger house!).  Another day I may curl myself up on the sofa with my MacBook Pro and hammer out some solid revisions or exciting new treatments.

Are we supposed to be habitual animals who can only do what we do in one place? Or can we – do we – write wherever and however we can?

Russell T Davis, showrunner of the original relaunch of Dr Who says in the brilliant book on the series “The Writer’s Tale” that he can’t carry a story from one city to another – if he starts writing in Cardiff he can’t continue in Manchester.

Is your muse specific to your location, or does it follow you around?  Would love to find out just how abnormal I am.

I made my Multi-Hyphenate debut today with an article about the advantages of using long-hand writing alongside the usual keyboard-bashing techniques familiar to all writers, bloggers and, well, anyone who uses a computer for work.

“Like most people under the age of 60 today, with the exception of my mum, I can type a lot faster than I can write long-hand.  In fact, I can type faster than I can think.  And therein, as the Bard would put it, lies the rub.”

Read the rest of the article here.

My friend Jess would have been 21 today. Instead, we are all celebrating without her. After 4 years of waiting when she should only have survived for 2, Jess’s transplant came too late for her massively weakened body and she died in January, just days after receiving the gift that should have given her a second chance.

You can help make sure this doesn’t happen. Wherever in the world you’re reading this, register your wishes to be an organ donor. It takes 2 minutes – 2 minutes out of your day to ensure you can give the gift of life when you have lived yours.

When you’ve signed up, talk to you family and your loved ones about it. In the UK there is a 40% refusal rate among families when they are asked if their loved one’s organs can be donated. That falls to just 10% (a 75% decrease in refusals) when the donor coordinator can demonstrate to the family that their loved one wanted to donate.

Don’t put this off until tomorrow, go and do it now. Right now.

In the UK: http://www.organdonation.co.uk
In Australia: http://www.medicareaustralia.gov.au
In the USA: http://www.donatelife.net
In Canada: http://www.organdonations.ca
In South Africa: http://www.odf.org.za