originally posted 6th May 2004
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First, the good news:

I’ve got a read.

An agent has agreed to read my spec scripts.

From a cold call.

To say this is extremely lucky is to understate things by at least an order of magnitude. You don’t get reads from cold calls. You get reads from friends-of-friends, from calling in favours, from knowing people, from living in this town for several years. And now a WGA-registered agent has agreed to read my scripts.

This is quite extraordinary. People with much better industry contacts than I are unable to get agents to read their work.

So I sent the scripts off. They stand on their own now. It’s all down to whether the writing is good enough. I think it is, but I don’t know. I can’t be sure. Until this agent gets back to me and says whether she likes it or not.

So.

I’ve emailed her the scripts – I’d already put them in the post, but that wasn’t soon enough, she wanted to read them Right Now, and who am I to disappoint her? – and after hitting send I happened to glance across my local copy.

Page One.

And somehow – somehow, despite checking this a hundred times – I’ve managed in my final revision to put the wrong location in THE VERY FIRST SLUGLINE.

So the crew of the Enterprise start their adventure in COMPLETELY THE WRONG FUCKING PLACE.

So the question is, which makes me look more like a total idiot – calling up and saying “Don’t read my script, PAGE ONE IS FUCKED UP,” or hoping that she’s so caught up in the story that she doesn’t notice?

I’m keeping quiet.

Wish me luck.