Other Work

Suburbia is kind of like my magnum opus.  It was the first thing I’d ever tried to write (properly) and it’s fair to say that it’s gone through more rewrites than anything I’ve ever done and am likely to.  It originally started life as a TV series.  I kind of had an idea to try my hand at writing the British Twin Peaks back in 2003 and managed to do a few scenes during my lunch hour while working at Freeserve.  I ended up scrawling forty episodes – roughly translated into four series of ten hour-long shows – but found I was left with one major problem.  Ninety per cent of it was mindlessly dull.

So, sometime last year I sellotaped all forty episodes together (courtesy of Microsoft Word) and begun to sort of write over the script, turning each scene into book-format.

It worked (sort of).  I got rid of tonnes of rubbish and irrelevant dialogue.  I was trying too hard to be something I wasn’t (perhaps David Lynch) and not concentrating on what I had.  Now it stands at a far healthier twenty-one chapters with a manageable cast list that doesn’t run into triple digits.

So, what is Suburbia?  It’s science-fiction, but only slightly.  I originally set it “only a few years in the future,” but that was back in 2003.  Suburbia’s “present” is rapidly catching up with our own and if I don’t get it out into the public domain, it’ll end up becoming some sort of historical epic!