How much have I told you?

A lot of my life could be summed up as 'a history of obsessive scribbling' - I've been dabbling in various fictional worlds of my own invention since the year dot.  Some have been bigger, better and/or longer-lived than others, and while some have been shared, others have been kept private.  Some are co-created with other people, while the rest are mine all mine.

Now, I've thought up a little research project which I'd like to conduct, but it'll need some help from outside - specifically, from you, if you can spare a minute (you're obviously not that busy, judging by the fact you're reading this blog right now, right?): it's basically a scientific(ish) attempt to work out mathematically how much of my creative output I've shared with people.  The 'test' is very simple: I’ve compiled a list of fifty names from my various films, comic strips, artwork etc (arranged alphabetically, because I like alphabetic-ness), and you can score up to two points per name – one for recognising it, the other for knowing who or what it refers to.  (If you only knew a character by the short version of their name, you still get the points – the longer versions in brackets are for clarification only.)  After you’ve counted your way to the end of the list, stick a % sign after your number, and report it back to me.  That’s all I need you to do.

There's a bit of a special exception for name #40, because a lot more people will know what a Rhugestian Swamp Dog looks like compared to how many will know what it's called.

There aren't any categories for you to fall into - this isn't about classifying some people as good friends and others as not-so-good.  It's about how talkative I've been, more than anything else.  If your score is low, that doesn’t mean I don’t like you; more likely, I either haven’t known you for very long and/or just haven’t spent very long rambling on at you about the bizarre stuff inside my head, and/or you haven’t spent much time watching my YouTube channel and reading the other weird stuff I put on the internet.  I'll just say that if you score 80% or higher, there's a decent chance that your name is Tim; if you score 99%, you win a packet of Maltesers; and nobody will score 100%, because there are at least a couple of trick questions in the list, i.e. things that have never been published, and nobody knows about yet except for me.

So, having got the explanation off my chest, here's the list:

1. Acid Gulps
2. Albert S. Broccoli (not to be confused with James Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli)
3. Alex Lanning
4. Arthur the Pensioner
5. The Blue Danube, with Walnuts
6. The Binary Triumvirate
7. Black Antarctic Cryogenics
8. Bradley Stanton Park
9. Cylinder the Cylinder
10. Distant Prayer – Fragment III
11. Deep Glass
12. Doctor Murkum
13. Dyngaria
14. Edwin (full name Edwin Leonard Hall)
15. The Essence of Fandom
16. Emily Arkley
17. Empire Theatre, Mars City
18. Establisher II
19. The Fifty-Seven Meme
20. First Dabox
21. Forkley
22. Fort Paradox
23. Gastropo Thrush
24. Gavin the Head
25. Greenchester
26. Harry Dixon
27. Hooper (full name James Richard Boris Montgomery Hooper)
28. The iKon Cinema
29. I See the Light at the End
30. Jason Meddings
31. Lost in Minehead 2006
32. Mark Coleridge
33. Matilda Ferguson
34. Metaphysical Violation Drive
35. Mike Half-Left
36. Pascal Davis
37. The Prayers of Thousands
38. Quantum Shampoo
39. Redwood 257
40. Rhugestian Swamp Dog (if you don't recognise this name, you can still score one point for recognising the critter in this drawing)
41. Ron Haggard
42. The Square
43. The Suitcase
44. Tarberford
45. Tasmin (full name Anna-Beth Tasmin Linden)
46. Tharryk
47. Tom (full name Tom Thomason)
48. Turbo Gran
49. TW-A42
50. West Spottlington

I shall look forward to hearing your answers, and for the sake of not leaving you in the dark, I shall post an explanation later of where some of these things come from.

Thanks in advance for your help =]


- The Colclough

Verbosity for a Good Cause

I've ended up taking an unplanned break from the Root Hill video edit over the last couple of days.  I was away from home yesterday (as per the blog post about demolishing Godalming), and today I ended up writing my monster movie script instead.

If you've been reading this here blog for any length of time, you'll have come across my ramblings about Megastropulodon Attacks! - and some of you might also have gotten wind of my plans to write a TV mini-series using a hugely expanded version of the same story.  By 'hugely expanded', I mean that the events shown in the existing short film will be stretched out across the whole 6-part series, to become the ongoing narrative arc which ties the different episodes together, rather than being condensed into a single lump as per the current form.  The existing characters all appear, with a few new additions - some who stick around for the whole series, others who only appear in one or two episodes.

I've got the basic ideas planned out for what will happen in each episode, and I'm currently working on first drafts for three of them.  I'm hoping to rope in other writers to do some of the mid-series episodes, but I'm doing at least the first one and the last two myself.  So I've completed the first draft of Episode 1 (29 pages, 6700-and-something words), and I'm currently beavering away on Episode 5.  For several days, if not weeks, it got stuck around page 11, and I thought I'd written myself into a cul-de-sac, and would have to scrap half of what I'd got and write something different.  But yesterday, I suddenly had a few minor epiphanies, and added together they pretty much got the storyline back on track.  After having one more spark of inspiration shortly after breakfast this morning, I spent a lot of today writing, and came up with over 2000 words - 8 or so script pages, or more than quarter of an episode.

The evening has gone downhill a bit, and the successful-writing-spree euphoria is already wearing off, but at least now that I've blogged about it I'll be able to look back later and bask in the retroactive smugness of having made so much progress before the day soured.

And if you're one of the Root Hill crowd, don't worry - I'm sure I'll get back to the digital scissors soon.


- The Colclough