Renowned writer Martha Polo gives her 5 good reasons to choose a different aspiration. [I’ve handed over the keyboard below to my good friend Martha Polo — Alexis] Number 1: You’re No Good You know it, the industry knows, the competition judges know it, and all your best friends know it. You’re basically no good…

Up-and-coming screenwriter and renowned haikuist Martha Polo shares her experience of why she writes bad screenplays. Alexis: Thanks for agreeing to another email interview. You’ve been quoted as saying that “writing good screenplays is too hard, don’t do it”. What do you mean by this? Martha: I mean what I…

Haikuist and Screenwriting Up-And-Comer Martha Polo explains why she doesn’t write believable characters. Alexis: Martha, thanks so much for agreeing to this email interview. I know how busy you are. You’ve developed quite a reputation as a Haikuist, even to the point of spending years studying under Fay Aoyagi during…

The UK and the US film and TV industries are very different, in size and structure. When UK professionals in — for example —TV ask wannabe British screenwriters what their favourite shows are, they become frustrated when a long list of US shows emerges from the writer’s mouth. But this…

This is the story of how I went from reading books on quarks and cosmology as a young teen to dueting with cosmic rays, and then with quantum computer AIs via teleportation. A journey that has taken me through the outer reaches of my own imagination, through performing for some…

The debate about screenwriting competitions and their usefulness to aspiring screenwriters still rages on. One thing is for certain: if you enter the top few competitions and place well, then managers and agents will often take notice. (Though that doesn’t guarantee a signing.) On the downside, many of these are…

There are a number of screenwriting contests online that provide free feedback to submitters. Such feedback can be extremely valuable. Sure, we all want to win. But if we don’t win, or don’t make the semis, we’d like to know why. That gives us the option to re-write, to improve…

I believe that enforced conscious interactivity between film and audience (e.g. pressing buttons) reduces the viewer’s sense of being drawn into a narrative — of experiencing the narrative from within. I’ll examine this from the point of view of database cinema, spectatorship and suture theory. Lev Manovich was the first…

So you’re a cutting-edge coder, sought by every company in Silicon Valley. You’ve read all the popular science stuff about quantum computing. But when you actually try to work out how to program qubits usefully, you get nowhere. Well don’t be surprised. …