What Kind of Year Has it Been: 2009 Special Edition...

It's been a pretty damn fine year, that's what kind of year it's been. First of all, and I won't bore you with personal stuff for too long as this is ostensibly a writing site (I said ostensibly, it must be a writing site)... but anyway, I got married. So that's even if the rest of the year had sucked donkey balls, I would have still chalked it up as a win.

But the rest of the year did not suck donkey balls. Not at all. For it was my first year as a professional writer. I use professional in the loose term of "have been paid for writing" but I also think I've managed to polite and keep my primadonna tendencies in check when dealing with people - I just save them all up for this blog. Aren't you lucky?

Now, I am not pretending that I am Shane Black. I will not be retiring on what I made this year, to swan around Hollywood parties and get fat and bitter, fun as that sounds. I've had two commisions, one option, and I've done a bunch of other development work which has been unpaid. But that's still an infinite amount more money than I made from writing last year, or any other year of my life for that matter, so again, win.

I've had a bunch of meetings, which are tremendously fun and exciting (wait till next year if you want the jaded version) and 9 times out 10 have ended up with me being able to fairly successfully pitch a project to someone. I had one meeting cancelled, so I went to the Natural History Museum instead and looked at dinosaurs. I'm finding it very hard to find a downside here.

I've been with my agent for just over a year as well, and in a very belated answer to Phill Barron*, yeah, it's totally worth it. This blog post would likely be a lot shorter and duller without his always skillful intervention, though I probably would still have got married. A new shiny website should be launching at http://www.berlinassociates.com soonish.

2010 threatens to be a good year too. I've got a good few projects and pitches with various people, currently in a rather lovely Schrödinger's Cat state: I certainly hope that come the end of the year I shan't just have a bunch of dead cats in a box. I'd never get the dustmen to pick that up.

I'm also working on my first spec in over a year, and my first feature screenplay in over two. I shall keep you all informed of its progress over the next couple of months. My ludicrously optimistic calculations have it that I should finish a first draft by mid-March, though currently it's just three scribbled pages of jokes and a plot that exists only in my head, so we shall see...

And finally, two amendums to my last post: Sherlock Holmes and I are just good friends, whereas I have embarked on a passionate relationship with Avatar. If you have any interest in cinema, I cannot recomend that you see it enough, and see it now, in the cinema and in 3D, because I suspect that on DVD it will be thoroughly mediocre. But then, The Who could never record an album that was as good as they were live**. Avatar is not meant to be watched on a small screen, so see it, see it now, and ignore the fact that the magic mineral might as well be called Hardtofindium.

Oh, this was my 200th blog post, by the way. Hurrah.

* Phill also wrote up a review of his year here, but strangely it stops at January. Weird.

** Apparently. I'm 29, but Lady Gaga references don't have the same gravitas. I did meet Roger Daltry once though.