http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog The website of technology writer, Peter Griffin Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:40:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My screenplay Doodlebug just won the Playmarket Live Screneplay competition in New Zealand. This is very exciting, as the prize is a public reading of the screenplay by professional actors and support from Playmarket in developing the script. Doodlebug is a script I wrote three years ago and actually just dusted ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2010/04/doodlebug-wins-live-screenplay-competition/ By now you've seen the black banners and the balcked-out Twitter and Facebook profiles. You may even have seen the pictures of the protestors who gathered outside parliament on Thursday with black tape over their mouths (ouch getting that off) and weilding the black signs. "Huh, what's all that about?" ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2009/02/black-out-campaign-will-it-be-enough/ I'm still a couple of thousand words shy of the finish line, but I'll knock them out this afternoon. It feels good to be hearly finished but oddly unsettling that I'll stop writing for now without finishing the story. As I said earlier, Junket is an 80,000 word novel, as ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2008/11/chapter-31-and-nanowrimo-draws-to-a-close/ Last week was one of the busiest I'd had since starting my new job so the Nanowrimo pace slipped somewhat. Still, 36,000 odd words down, I'm confident of hitting the 50,000 word target by November 30, even if my writing buddies have pulled well ahead of me and will likely ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2008/11/day-25-chapter-22-an-end-in-sight/ So I'm 24,000 words into Junket at the halfway point of Nanowrimo, a thousand words shy of the halfway mark in terms of wordcount. I'm pretty happy with this and estimate I'm just over a third of the way through the story. I was really firing last night, fuelled by a ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2008/11/day-15-halfway-and-feeling-strangely-fine/ The slog continues as Nanowrimo grinds on. Actually, it hasn't been too bad, but the famous sophomore slump definitely takes a bit of will power to get over. I'm about 15,500 words in and was about to knock off when I listened to a particularly inspiring podcast on the Naowrimo.org ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2008/11/day-10-chapter-15-the-sophomore-slump/ Slower progress today - it didn't help that the weather was stunning and my old man had come to visit for the weekend, but managed to grind out chapter 2 - just shy of 4000 words.But I'm feeling confident. I've got a pretty solid outline and I've already figured out ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2008/11/day-2-chapter-2-of-nanowrimo/ A UK-led group of climate researchers claim their research has demonstrated for the first time that human activity is responsible for significant warming in both polar regions. Rising Arctic temperatures and the accelerating retreat of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been widely reported in scientific journals and the ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2008/11/the-big-melt-is-our-fault/ The Science Media Centre asked the leaders of the political parties ACT, the Green Party, the Maori Party , the Progressive Party and United Future to answer a series of questions on big science-related issues facing the country. Only the Greens and United Future were able to respond to the deadline ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2008/11/the-minor-parties-on-science/ Boy, well we've begun and it wasn't quite as difficult as I expected it to be. Many times I've sat down at my computer over the last ten years to start writing a novel and never got further than a page in before giving in, deleting what I'd written and ... http://www.petergriffin.co.nz/blog/2008/11/novel-writing-month-day-1-and-chapter-1-of-junket/