Living Spirit's Hollywood Class

Hello you! May I say, you're looking horrendously attractive today?

Yesterday, I attended my first Living Spirit class, about making it in Hollywood from a UK perspective. The low attendance - roughly eleven people - was fine by me in terms of opportunities to ask questions and get a li'l one-on-one time, although Living Spirit had understandably expected much more from a one-off class hosted by film-makers Genevieve Jolliffe (UK) and Andrew Zinnes (US).

I'll post some specific notes in the fullness of time, if folks are interested. In the meantime, I'll say that it was definitely a worthwhile day. Genevieve and Andrew are an instantly likeable and engaging couple, willing to share pretty much every morsel of information - right down to Gen's personal circumstances and tactics when she made the big move to Los Angeles. They also detailed the loooooong development process of their screenplay Absolute Angels, which spent at least two years hopping from studio and studio and remains unproduced.

I would certainly attend another Living Spirit class: mainman Chris Jones' unstoppable forward-drive and extremely loud voice are infectious. For me, the information dished out was partly a kind of refresher course, which I needed in order to kickstart my Hollywood strategy, although I definitely learnt plenty of new things.

One thing I'm starting to really feel, though, from classes and events I'm attending lately: it's time for me to step it all up a gear, in terms of how much I'm writing. It's all too easy to settle back and (a) listen to other people talking about the process and (b) blog about the process yourself. Any successful writer will tell you how their fingers bled, their friends gave up on them and weekends just whizzed past, like they were any other day. That's the kind of joyous misery I need to start inflicting on myself...