Publications

I've had two publications of quite a different sort in the last few months. The first was my first piece for Film Forums. It was an article about the hugely popular show, Squid Game. You can read it here. I looked at how the structure of the series matched the Hero's Journey fairly closely. I also went further and allocated each of the main characters to a classic archetype. It was a good experience writing again for someone else. In particular, I got to learn a lot about how to format articles for the internet, in particular making them attractive to Google's search behaviours. The key is to have blocks of text with bold titles. Also pictures and links to other sites can help but not having the same text elsewhere. We did try to get genuine Squid Game pictures but we couldn't get a Netflix press pass and didn't want to take the risk of using those we found through IMDB.

The second publication is Pieces Plays:1, my first collection of plays. It has half a dozen shorts and two full length. It was enjoyable to bring the collection together. I had help with the design from James Pople and Claire Diston did the proof reading. It was satisfying getting the plays into a collection and seeing it complete. The main challenging elements were creating the ebook from James's pdf. Most of the 'auto' software doesn't do a great job so I had to do a lot of editing. In addition, after you edit (in Word in my case) you then need to preview it to check how your formatting behaved. I tried using Vellum but the live preview just didn't work. Brad in support did fix it for me but by then I used Draft to Digital's system to view each draft. It's not perfect but it will be up soon. The other sticking point was including my website's address in my author description.

My next publication will likely be my novella, The Carpenter and The Goat Herder. The text is complete and it's being proof read. The next step is to find an illustrator. The first I approached wasn't taking commissions and the second stopped responding. If not the novella, then it will be The Proving, my detective novel. I will probably go with Cornerstone again to help me get it publication ready.