Benjamin Read

Ah, yes, I’d forgotten that when you’re doing really interesting stuff you generally forget to blog. That month just flew by. Damn it. This will be resolved, honest.

Quick catch up then – in the last couple of weeks I’ve…

- had an enormously entertaining lunch meeting with the awesome Gayle Cooper from Maverick FX to talk prosthetics and blood pumps

- been to London to talk future of television, sci-fi, webcomics, publishing  and just about every other type of media with the heavy hitters that are @sizemore and @walkley (I’m just going to presume if you’re reading this you’re at least aware of Twitter and we shall say no more about it)

- Stayed in London to concoct cunning plans for our next publishing imprints. All progresses well there, but no announcements just yet.

- Spent weeks agonising over the figures of businesses which I eventually didn’t buy and still can’t discuss because of the NDAs. (they were quite exciting though, trust me)

- Went to the screening of Joseph Morgan and Matt Ryan’s short film ‘WITH THESE HANDS’ which my creative partner Luke Massey (@lukemassey) D.O.P.ed. Good stuff. (shame about the all-night drinking in Camden that ensued afterward.

- Met the fantastically talented young artist, Chris Wildgoose, who’s doing all our concept work for the film (Warhouse – full explanation in the next blog post)

- Came back home to find our location for the film had gone south. Bad.

- Got news that Joseph Morgan (our lead for the film) had just got the title role in the ABC remake of BEN HUR. Good.

- Spent a 50 hour week with Luke finishing the goddamn script so we could send it off to all the relevant parties. Nearly. Killed. Us.

- collapsed in a heap for a few days before digging back into the publishing to-do pile.

- Had the absolute pleasure of having Joe up to stay for a few days. We did a day with Gayle getting lifecasts done for both him and William Troughton (one of the other actors) to use for  prosthetics. Great fun (as long as you weren’t claustrophobic). He then stayed for two days of read-throughs, rehearsals, script analysis and drinking. Good stuff all round and most entertaining watching the poor man struggle to get through the monster mound of calories and protein he needed to eat for his training diet for Ben Hur .

…and that’s sort of up-to-date. A proper film post next, I think, to talk about exactly what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

TTFN

…With a shaven head.  Actually that’s not true. It is, in fact, a House Of Pain lyric. Although I have in the past spent a year dead for tax reasons, I have not recently returned from a post-mortem status nor, god knows, do I have a shaven head (much as it would delight my mother if I were to lose this shaggy mop I’m currently rocking). It is, in fact, no more than a feeble attempt to bury the lede and get myself typing again as I have been away from the blog-fields for quite some time now (couple of years, by my reckoning) and can’t quite remember how it all works. I packed it in originally for various reasons (privacy concerns, business went mental, couldn’t generate enough snark) and haven’t missed it if I’m honest. Any autobiographical urges I might have had have been slaked by Twitter (I’m @Bookpirate if y’all want to say hello) up until now.  I’m dragging myself back to it now because… well, because life got too interesting not to talk about, I guess and sometimes you can’t say everything in 140 characters.

This coming year is shaping up to be interesting times (in the full Chinese sense of the phrase) and I’d like to document it (and remorselessly pimp upcoming projects and my own undoubted genius of course).

In the next 12 months I’m, in no particular order, making an independent feature (with, y’know, proper actors and a budget), launching a webcomic or two, adapting some classics, setting up a new publishing imprint or three, helping to save Bletchley Park, founding a charity, attempting to be a parent to a rather noisy 12 year-old girl and trying very, very hard not to undergo complete mental and physical collapse while doing all of the above (important one, that last one).  It will, if nothing else, not be boring.

Frankly, reading that back to myself, I’m rather concerned that the whole plan might be some awful manifestation of bi-polar disorder and I’ll be a quivering, catatonic wreck by the end of the year. We shall see. I can only hope that the unholy art of GTFD will carry me through, sanity intact.

Erm.. so that’s it really. A pin in the board. Expect much on film making, lots of comic art, some writing stuff, snippets on publishing and occasional sobbing about everything else.

TTFN