The Baillie Bugle

Man, I used to hate writing pitches - I remember bitching at great length about how they killed all the timing I was taking great care to control in a story and left me with no tricks up my sleeve with which to impress anyone. Then I learned (or maybe read somewhere) two things.

• Writing a pitch is a completely different thing to writing a story.
• Try writing the pitch before you’ve figured out the minutia of the story.

These things were completely counter-intuitive for me and I fought them all the way (like something in software called Test Driven Development, which I was also quite reluctant to adopt, and changed the way I did things completely when I finally gave in). Anyway – the long and the short of it is I quite enjoy writing pitches now - not that it’s something I do an awful lot of, but there you go.

Had a great day yesterday – got lots of decent work done and ended up catching a free gig by guitarist Michael Berk at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the International Guitar Festival. He has some tunes at his myspace, and he said there was a video of him doing his guitar percussion thing up there but I can’t see it… (Oh wait – I think you have to be a member to see the video, and for once bugmenot.com is useless, because too many people have failed to follow the instructions and rendered all their accounts invalid!)

Wired has run a story about digital comics, which you can read here. I wrote a similar, if more verbose, article for the last issue of Redeye – which you’ll be able to pick up here from these guys.

Nick Abadzis has written a great blog post for firstsecond books (make sure you click on his sketchbook). I wonder what he looks like. Maybe I’ve sat next to him on the District Line…

Anyway – the sun’s just come out so I’m going to finish writing these pitches in the park.