Tag: film

The Sprint Mill Sessions

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

I love this: my friend Dom has been filming the grassroots Cumbrian folk scene. Last summer he gathered dozens of people for a campfire session at Sprint Mill, and this was the result – young musicians, sharing their songs by firelight. The sessions so far can be found right here, but I’ll leave you with Paddy Rogan and The Way You Used To Do…

A year in the life

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

I’ve just realised that my blog is one year old. I had no idea when I wrote my first post, about Quitting Writing, that I’d be blogging so often. It’s become the space in which I organise my thoughts, and rationalise this topsy-turvy journey to publication. A year ago, I had an agent and the first draft of a manuscript called Riptide Heart. A year later, the novel is called The Visitors. I’ve completed multiple marathon redrafts, worked myself into exhaustion on insane strings of 11pm finishes, and spent hundreds of hours thinking about the book. Looking back, finishing the first draft feels like one of the smallest steps on a road that doesn’t truly finish – once the book is out there, it will continue the journey without me.

The proof copies should be going out any day, which is terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Because my day job remains so frantic, my experience of publishing tends to occur to milestones. I’ve been incredibly lucky, but I sometimes wish I had more space to enjoy it. It feels like I lurch from one deadline to the next, and seldom savour the completion of a job. The blog has therefore become essential to me personally: in sharing and formalising the milestones, I’ve created my own map of the voyage. Thanks to everyone who’s visited.

I’ve really enjoyed sharing some of the sights along the way. Of all the things I’ve posted to the blog, I think this is the one that’s stuck with me the most. Enjoy:

In the belly of a whale

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

I’ve talked a lot about wanting to get back to my novella The Year Of The Whale, and I’ve just spotted this novella competition judged by the excellent writer Jenn Ashworth. The deadline is distant enough that I think I can get it finished in time, so that’s now a concrete target for me.

In the course of researching and writing The Year Of The Whale, I’ve come across a huge variety of whale material. I’ve seen Medieval whales, drawn as dragons and devils, and countless images of beached whales, spilling themselves in streaks onto the shingle. And then there’s much weirder stuff, like this profoundly sad, surreal animation. It’s about childhood betrayal, I suppose, but there’s a lot of other things going on in there at the same time. I would say ‘Enjoy’, but it’s not that sort of film.

Foxes

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

“A young couple trapped in a remote estate of empty houses and shrieking foxes are beckoned from their isolation into a twilight world…”

This is a haunting, excruciatingly tense short film, worth every frame of its fifteen minutes. Metamorphosis and the idea of threshold places – of things having twin natures, existing in two states at once – are becoming increasingly key to my work. A film like this gets my pulse racing and synapses snapping, hungry to write.