Comic Strip Script

The last comic script I wrote, without a clue as to what I was doing, was three or four years ago: Cookie was interested in illustrating a comic, so while the girl I was stayingg with was away for two weeks, I proceeded to drink as much Jack Daniels as humanly possible and write.

The result of this drunken binge was that I visited some dark places, sometime waking to find the flat trashed (ahem), and wrote a completely fucked up story about an under cover cop who had infiltrated some Colombian drug cartel, screwed all the women, had an affair with a female DEA agent sent to bring him in, then went on a rampage and killed the entire Cartel. Cookie was looking for a children's story, and a look at his site will explain why he (correctly) passed on my incoherent script. Slight difference in styles...

Anyways, last Thursday Bertrand casually mentioned he was interested in doing a comic script while we at the pub, and after too many too strong beers (Leffe is lethal, more so when it's free at a leaving do), I stumbled home pissed as a newt. Then woke at 3am, hungover. After downing anti acids and pints of water, I was still awake an hour later with an idea for a strip that wouldn't sleep. Four hours later I was rushing to complete the script and not be late for work.

It's darker* than I intended, and probably a lot more than Bertrand wanted to take on - even if he is too polite to say so - but at least it has a coherent plot this time (if a little simplistic). But I followed the sample script in the back of the excellent "30 Days of Night", so at least it is a script this time, rather than drunken scrawl and diagrams indicating how I viewed a scene of someone being thrown from a helicopter. I also did away with any speech, for no other reason than the story wrote itself that way.

So, maybe this will see the light of day. Or Bertrand will decide it's just not his style. If he does, I think I'll turn it into a novel for NaNoWriMo.

*one day I'll accept I can only do dark or funny, but have no control as to which way a story will go when I start writing.

WaOhWnisD prize

WaOhWnisD prize

Again, congrats to Tom Sears for winning the WaOhWnisD competition.

He wins seven days worth of alcohol to help inspire his next novel.

For some reason the perspective on the picture above is a bit messed up, and the bottles look a lot smaller than they actually are. Just thought I'd mention that in case there any problems with Funt's £126.93 expense claim at the end of the month...


Funt

Write A Novel In A Week and a bit : Winner!

And the winner was...

We have a winner! Congrats to Tom Sears whose novel is reprinted below. And could everyone who voted for him chuck me a quid and I'll pop down the off licence tonight. His prize is your hands. ;)

Thanks to everyone else who entered. Don't forget November is NaNoWriMo - it should be a walkover after this.

Though his dialect remained crude, Tim understood from the chief’s broad grin that today was ‘important day’. His initiation as tribesman?

Up in the tree hut, he thumbed his journal: memories of how he’d taught them to use handkerchiefs and play bridge. They’d been reticent; but now they wanted to thank him!

A happy chorus rose from below. Tim donned his headdress and started climbing down. The whooping crowd caught him on their shoulders and carried him like a king. If National Geographic could see him now!

Then the tribespeople rubbed sweet marinade on Tim’s thighs. And roasted the motherfucker.

Write A Novel In A Week : Vote for a winner

There's always one...

And a late entry...

“Its these damn fingays.”

Stunned, Jazz Fusion’s Lance Mincen began to trimble like tender mutton.

His form was free from freeform.

He arrived in Tibet, donned a robe and began to slip into a trance.

Vivid images of Jazz Fusion flickered around the room and through the haze of the 4/3 signature swing beat Old Man Fingers Syndrome appeared.

He pronounced “Sheeet blaaaads, it’s da man dem puritay o lough’ve that’s gotsta flow tru dem fingays. You see blaaad?”

He paused… “Sheeeeeeeeeeeet.” And with that the vision was over.

Mincen came too, lit a joss stick and made love to his oboe in an improvised A minor.

Write A Novel In A Week : Vote for a winner

Well, *you* can't vote, but people did...

Here are the entries to the 'Write A Novel In A Week' competition.

If you thought it would be dominated by the copywriters amongst us, you'd be wrong. A designer and account manager took part. Who knew so many would rise to the Herculean task set before them? Nietzsche would weep at the supermen that walk amongst us.

So take a couple of minutes out of your hectic schedules to read what a week of furious creativity has produced, and then vote for your favourite. And feel free to vote for your own entry - you deserve some some recognition. And I'm voting for mine (might save me having to buy a prize).

Funt - practicing dentistry on gift horses in a kennel full of sleeping dogs




Entry 1

Derek the daddy-long legs was the most frustrated creature of all. He desperately wanted to make an impact on the household like the others - Matthew and Michaela the mice who had wreaked havoc in the larder, Elaine the earwig who had scuttling down to a tee and Walter the wasp who’s buzzing irritated the hell out of the human residents. But Derek was just too wimpy, and when he changed his name to Dirk to try and sound harder, the others just laughed. One day Poppy the dog swallowed him by mistake. And that was the end of that.

Entry 2

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam tempus. Nunc sit amet dui. Suspendisse nonummy augue at nunc. Donec consectetuer, tellus eu mattis pretium, mauris tortor sollicitudin est, euismod malesuada ligula ipsum vel massa. Morbi sapien tortor, fringilla eget, sagittis nec, varius quis, massa. Phasellus et neque. Curabitur lacus. Duis convallis ipsum. Sed sed massa. Nam nec urna eget erat dictum lacinia. Aenean ipsum. Integer lobortis diam a nibh. Mauris placerat urna sit amet arcu. Aliquam nonummy magna non dui. Mauris congue nisi eget purus. Curabitur elit magna, tristique sed, pretium in, sagittis nec, neque. Ut risus. Sed eu.

Entry 3

Though his dialect remained crude, Tim understood from the chief’s broad grin that today was ‘important day’. His initiation as tribesman?


Up in the tree hut, he thumbed his journal: memories of how he’d taught them to use handkerchiefs and play bridge. They’d been reticent; but now they wanted to thank him!


A happy chorus rose from below. Tim donned his headdress and started climbing down. The whooping crowd caught him on their shoulders and carried him like a king. If National Geographic could see him now!


Then the tribespeople rubbed sweet marinade on Tim’s thighs. And roasted the motherfucker.


Entry 4

In the bowels of the government headquarters, Faitherful-Servant-1 eyed the Funster suspiciously, his eye bulging like a worm squeezed through the eye of a needle.



“Fun is ruining the order of our perfectly oiled city,” FS1 barked. “It’s war. On fun, silliness and pointlessness. Surrender, or the missile launches.”



“Never. Life without fun is like a donut with no jam, like a…-“



“RIGHT. The Pointless War begins!” he screeched, pressing the silver button.



The Faithful Servant burst into flames, rules erupted and regulation briefcases exploded. The Funster grinned unharmed. The government had realised too late - sensibleness would eat itself.


Entry 5

I spat sandwich into my hand.

'Go back?' I asked. 'Why would we go back?'

'We have no choice,’ she said. ‘Everything is there for people to find. We have to go back.'

I flicked away the sandwich. Nothing to say.

Off we went.



Place deserted, doors open. Our sculpture started on ground and rose up through the floors we had knocked through. We grabbed up tools, wiped down door handles, gathered up dust sheets.

'Wait.' She dashed back, and took a shot of our work with her phone.

'Not our best...'

'True.'

'Now?'

'I'm thinking a carrot. KFC.'

'Cool.'

write a novel in a week and a bit

People* begging for an extension of the deadline, so I rushed this out while distracted (how come client amends come through after 6.00? Since when are clients at work after 5.00?).

Entries so far are high quality. Well, we're guessing they were written when high.

Anyways, we're extending the 'Write A Novel in a Week' competition to give you a chance to write one, and hopefully lower the quality so that my entry has a chance, otherwise it will look too much like a fix when I win. If. If I win.

Anyways, here's some space within which to write to write your novel:

[
















].

Funt - putting the fun back into something

*person

Day 12 : write a 100 word novel in a week!

Sent on Wednesday (I didn't write one for Tuesday)

Day 12.

As we near to the end of our write a '100 Word Novel In A Week' competition and you consider the pages of your manuscript before you, many of you are probably surprised that you had it in you.

Don't be.

Republic attracts some of the most creative minds around, and a 100 word novel was probably a walk in the park. 100 words? You've written longer emails to clients before 9.00am, you've written longer creative briefs before a conference call, and you've justified outrageous expense claims with more words (and more creativity).

But spare a thought for those who haven't written a word. Spare a thought for those who thought it was some arty creative competition that they couldn't enter, spare a thought for those who thought the 16 hour days they do meant that taking 20 minutes out to write a soaring soirée on solitude was unjustified. Spare a thought for Jeff.

These people, these colleagues you casually call your friends and have lunch with (if they take a lunch break at all), these people are the ones who need your help now. Your tale has been told.

Explain to them that their story is as important as yours, that they have the words to tell it, and you would like to hear it. Hug them, caress them, kiss their minds. Let them shine in the light of the love that is Republic, and together we'll write more new age hippy crap than we know know what to do with.

One day we'll look back on this moment and say "Yeah, I wrote a novel, but you know what? So did Jeff. And Jeff was just a goldfish by then. But we were there for him. We were a Republic. We were Republic."

[cue "Eye Of The Tiger" by Survivor, dissolve to the unicorn, fade to black]


Funt - it may be a drop in the ocean, but it's our ocean, so we'll drop what we like and we'll drop it like it's hot

Day 3 : Write a 100 word novel in a week!

Continuing the 'Write a 100 word novel in a week' competition at work.

Day 3.

Funt is running a 'Write a 100 word novel in a week' competition. Imagine if everyone in Republic wrote a novel - perhaps we'd end being famous for having more unpublished novelists in one place than anywhere else. So if you've always harboured a secret desire to get in the Guinness Book of Records, open up word and get typing. It's only a 100 words.

If you're worrying whether 100 words even count as a novel, well, author Umberto Eco considers El Dinosaurio ('The Dinosaur') a novel, and it's only got a rather pitiful word count of seven:

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
("When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.")

If that counts, we think we're safe with a hundred. And with a decent editor, who knows; maybe they can cut it back to a publishable length.

Those of you struggling with writers block should take heart from Hu Wenliang from China, who wrote nothing but five lines of punctuation and is waiting to hear whether it is the shortest novel ever. So if you've drawn a creative blank, try resting your forehead on your keyboard and you might come up with something on a par with Hu Wenliang. Just don't expect to be swanning off to Ibiza* on us: we'll be using Microsoft Word to check word counts, and it might object.


Funt - not waving, crowd surfing

*a holiday in Ibiza is a provisional prize and is subject to change. We're sure Jane will be fine with it, but, well, we haven't asked her yet, and we might have to fall back on something we can buy from the Red Shop for a fiver. But how much is a place in the Guinness Book Of Records worth? You can't buy that sort of publicity. Personally, I think you should save some of your holiday allocation. Maybe not the full 25 days, but a long weekend is probably a dead cert.

**Who knew: Roy Castle, famous for presenting the 'Record Breakers', used to have a wicker basket off camera into which he would dive and take refuge while presenting the program because he suffered from agoraphobia, and they filmed the program in one of the BBC's larger studios.

Day 2 : Write a 100 word novel in a week!

My heart wasn't quite in this 'Day 2' of the competition email (band rehearsal the night before and three hours broken sleep) but you do what you can...

Day 2.

We're going to keep this email short, because if you followed yesterday's advice you have words in the bank and can afford to take today off.

If you've yet to start your hundred word novel, then there's still time to join the competition - closing date is next Friday!

And it should go without saying that we'll be accepting entries written in any language you're happy writing in. Don't worry that we can only read English and will run your novel through Google translate a few times (your language to Flemish, Flemish to Spanish, Spanish to French, French to German, German to Italian, Italian to English ). It'll be fine.


Funt - 12 steps behind the program, but with you all the way

Day 1 : Write a 100 word novel in a week!

My first inspirational email for the competition...

Day 1.

Like me, you've probably sat down and done the maths, and realized that today you need to write 15 words of your 100 word novel today if you're going to finish it in seven days (and have the weekend off). That may seem a daunting task given that you've also been worrying a plot, theme, and whether there are too many slides in your O2 segmentation presentation, but honestly: 15 words aren't really that many.

Instead of obsessing about the words, you might want to decide what to do with them, and a useful trick is to use them to introduce your protagonist.

Here is an opening line from entirely fictitious novel to inspire you:

"Ugly as sin, and with breath bad enough to turn a bus blue, Frank wasn't the first person that sprang to mind when she needed as shoulder to cry on."

See? Easy. We've introduced two characters for the price of one, and while our heroine may need fleshing out a bit, we now have Frank on board. And we've burnt through thirty words of our novel as well, which means we can slack off on Day 2 and hit the Westbridge.

If you'd rather leave the whole character thing for later, how about setting the scene?

"It was a bed sit fit only for the lowest of trailer trash looking to move up in the world on the cheap, and she knew she would have to work fast when she discovered the corpse in the dirt black bed."

Scene set, forty words in the bag, and fourteen hours and fifty-three minutes of the day left to do some real work.

So get the coffee on, remember not to spend too long sat at the keyboard (RSI and back pain and all that), bang out 15 words, and tomorrow we'll tackle Day 2.



Funt - it ain't easy, but then freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

Write a 100 word novel in a week!

Launched a competition at work today: Write a 100 word novel in a week. I was going to whip a frenzy for a group NaNoWriMo effort, but the consensus was that turnout might be a bit low, so:

In November there is a competition to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. But that's November.

What we would like you to do now is write a 100 word novel in a week. Entries in by Friday 12th October.

So dig out your hundred favouritest words, and bash them out.

There's a prize, obviously, and while we can't tell you what it is, think a weeks holiday in Ibiza, then scale back a bit (massively).

Start writing. 100 words - it's less than this email (101 words)!


Funt - we love you like your mother, and your mother too!


small print (that doesn't count in the word count of the email above because I've only just thought to mention it):
We might stick the novels up on a website (if we get more than none), so sending your plot synopsis for a TV series you plan to sell to TV and retire on might not be the cleverest thing in the world. But then again, maybe you're cool with that :)

Tomorrow: my first inspirational email to keep things moving.

Writing blunders

Gearing up for NaNoWriMo this year, I love stuff like this article on writing blunders (c/o boingboing).