How Soon Is Now?

If you've ever been in front of me in a line, you'll know that I'm no good at waiting. In fact, while we're here, if you're an Easyjet employee, I apologise for Rome Airport 2006.

I might be British, but I lack the skill or patience required for queuing, in the same way that I'm missing the gene that makes men like the internal combustion engine. Which, in a roundabout way, gets me to my point. When you start this writing lark, nobody tells you how much waiting is involved. Surely, you finish a script on Monday, Spielberg likes it and you're on the DreamWorks lot by the next Friday?

Currently, I'm waiting for feedback for something at the BBC, something my agent passed to a production company and a treatment I gave to my agent. Not forgetting Red Planet, of course. I know a lot of you out there in the ether feel my pain on that one. Combined, that's several man months of waiting.

Perversely, the better the script, the longer you have to wait. If you've (and when I say "you", I mean "I") written a pile of crap, it'll come straight back at you without time for you to duck. But if someone likes it, they pass it to someone else, who passes it to someone else... No news is good news and all that.

So, while I wait for the big brown envelope of death from the Beeb, I'm going to have to stop procrastinating. That just makes it worse. I'm actually going to have to start writing something new. Yeah. It'll be big and have flying saucers and ghosts and witches in it. Yeah. Jim Carrey will star in it. Yeah.

Now, I'll just fire up Google and do some research...