Ben Paddon

Category: Writing

  • A pressing desire to save the world

    I’ve been neglecting this blog in favour of its Tumblr cousin, and that simply will not do. I’d like to use this blog to catalogue my creative endeavours – that’s what it’s for, after all – so I’m going to make an effort to do exactly that, right now.

    Firstly, I’ve been writing. Not just Jump Leads, but a couple of things. I’m working on an autobiographical book about growing up in a Pagan household. I wish I could say was my idea but it was actually my dad’s. He suggested I write a fictionalized account but I rather think that getting my actual thoughts, feelings and memories on the page will have more value – for me, at least. Once I vomit it all out I can work on reorganizing it and, if I think there’s a good narrative in there, maybe turning it into something less autobiographical.

    I also wrote a short sketch last week which I’ve been meaning to film for about a week. I’m hoping to actually do that this week. It’s on my Weekly Goal List, along with encouraging myself to use my Ficly account more. My aim is to write three Ficlies this week.

    There are also two Jump Leads scripts that need polishing – one by myself, the other by Andrew. I’m also writing a brief, ten-minute mini-pilot thing which, Glod-willing, someone important will be looking at later this year.

    I’m planning on recording a scratch track for my friend Tealin’s attempt to animate the hanging scene from the start of Terry Pratchett’s “Going Postal” – I’ll be voicing Moist von Lipwig, easily one of my favourite recent additions to the Discworld mythos. I’ve always enjoyed voice work, and I think it’s only my crippling fear of rejection and a worry of “feeling silly” that’s stopping me from pursuing it further. Dino reckons I’d be good at it, so who knows? I guess I just need to get over that insecurity.

    And I want to do more video stuff. And I want to do more acting. And I want to try writing a proper novel. And…

    …oh Glod, so much stuff I’d like to do that I can’t push forward on because of my own petty worries. Blimey, is that who I am now? Is that the guy I’ve become? I need to sort that out.

  • An accidental horror

    As much as I love horror – and when I say horror I mean actual horror, not “OH NOES HERE COMES A GUY WITH A KNIFE RUUNNNN” horror, or Saw-esque Torture Porn – I’ve never really considered myself any good at writing it. Nevertheless I accidentally found myself writing some horror this afternoon on Twitter after the sound of a yelling homeless man outside echoed through the building.

    Originally I just tweeted about that. Then, as a joke, I decided to tweet that I’d barricaded the door. But it didn’t stop there.

    Here’s the story in full:

    I hear the rambling and moaning of one of the local homeless people. But it sounds like it’s coming from inside the apartment building…

    I have locked and bolted the front door. A chair is propped under the door knob. I hear him salivating on the other side. Terror, panic.

    Scratching at the door. I peer through the peephole to see a creature, perhaps once human, covered in hair and tinfoil, looking back at me.

    He examines the door, the peephole, momentarily transfixed. An indecipherable cacophony of dead language shrieks from his maw.

    An eye, red like a ruby with a yellow dot-like iris, presses against the peep hole. It is sudden, unexpected, intimidating.

    I can almost smell his hatred seeping through the door, as no doubt he catches the scent of my fear.

    I am pressed up against the peep hole now, too terrified to move, too transfixed by the creature to look away.

    His head suddenly jerks away, looking elsewhere. He sniffs the air, eyes closed. A slight smile creeps out from under his beard.

    He skulks away down the hall, mumbling otherworldly nonsense. He has found better prey than I.

    It is only now I become aware of the sweat on my brow. I wipe it away, relieved – I have been freed. But a neighbor will not be so lucky.

    The building fills with the sounds of garbled screams, of crunching bones and gnashing teeth. A fleck of blood splatters across my window.

    I open the door and peak down the hall. The creature, its belly filled with flesh and its mouth filled with blood, cries out with joy.

    A singularly abhorrent sound that seems to penetrate the mind and reverberate through the bones.

    I slam the door shut, retreat to my bedroom, shut the door, hide under the duvet. I wasn’t spared at all. I was chosen to be witness.

    I think it loses something being transcribed in this nature – I got a few messages after I’d wrapped it up thanking me for a nice bit of a creepy suspense, and at least one from my friend Pascalle asking me if this was really happening) – and reading it back like this doesn’t feel anywhere near as exciting as it felt while I was writing it on-the-fly.

    Anyway, here it is. Archived for your pleasure. Or something.

  • Sexist loves Maria incompetently

    Following the fairly reasonable success of Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits, I’ve started two new Tumblrs. One is about game design, and I won’t be linking to that one just yet. The other is about endemic sexism in advertising, and is called If Your Product Were Any Good, You Wouldn’t Need Sexism To Sell It.

    My screenplay adaption of Rene Engström’s Anders Loves Maria sort-of died a terrible, horrible death during the Spring, but I’ve reinvested myself in the project with renewed candor. I haven’t touched my adaption of Rob Grant’s Incompetence in a while either but, to be fair, I know that story inside and out and I reckon I’ll just nudge it forward to next year instead. Right now I’m intent on re-reading ALM, taking notes, and basically doing what I did to the Buzz Lightyear action figure I had as a kid – dissembling it, putting it back together, and hoping the wings still pop out.

  • Recipe for Homeopathic Chocolate Milk

    Ingredients:

    • 2-3 tblsp. Chocolate milk mix (e.g. Nesquik)
    • 1 large glass’ worth of milk
    • Access to running water

    Instructions

    1. Add 2 tblsp. chocolate milk mix to drinking glass (3 if you’re using a larger glass).
    2. Add milk and stir.
    3. Place glass underneath tap faucet.
    4. Turn on tap. Leave for an hour.
    5. Return to find crystal-clear glass full of rich, delicious chocolate milk made the homeopathic way.

    As well as being deliciously chocolaty, Homeopathic Chocolate Milk will also cure Diabetes types 1 and 2.

    Enjoy!

  • Dinosaurs Direct

    A MARRIED COUPLE sit at a kitchen dining room table covered in pictures of dinosaurs – some of them printed with red letterhead. The couple look at the pictures. They’re stressed, tense.

    Husband
    Just look at all these dinosaurs.

    Wife
    There’s no way we can manage them all. What are we going to do?

    Voiceover
    Struggling to cope with all of those dinosaurs? Then call Dinosaurs Direct!

    OVERLAY: image of a TRICERATOPS and a TOROSAURUS.

    Voiceover (Cont.)
    Our team of experts can consolidate your dinosaurs into one easy-to-manage species!

    The TRICERATOPS and TOROSAURUS images slide into each other and blink into one TRICERATOPS.

    The MARRIED COUPLE sit at the kitchen table. There is only one picture now – a TRICERATOPS. They look at the picture, happy, relieved.

    Wife
    Life’s so much simpler now we only have one dinosaur to worry about!

    Husband
    Yes, and we even have enough dinosaurs left over to take the kids on holiday!

    Wife
    What?

    The “DINOSAURS DIRECT” logo quickly fades onto the screen.

    Voiceover
    Make YOUR dinosaurs easier to manage with Dinosaurs Direct. Call now!

  • Not Quite Life

    I stopped writing my slice-o’-life webcomic before my artist had even drawn the first strip because, frankly, I found the entire thing boring to write. I couldn’t engage with the characters I’d created, which is perhaps problematic because the central character is basically me. The premise was semi-autobiographical, dealing with a young man who gets out of a serious relationship and tries to reconnect with his former best friend, someone his ex had tried to push out of his life. That happened, and I wanted to tell that story.

    The problem is that I wanted to tell it three years ago. Now I feel like I’ve moved well beyond that point in my life, and revisiting it just to try and tell a not-quite-what-happened version of it for a webcomic doesn’t sit well, especially as I was trying to make it work in a gag-a-day format. So, no. Not interested. Pass.

    This presents an additional problem – I want to work on a gag-a-day comic again. Fried ended in 2006 when, after three years, I realized I was bored with it. Jump Leads exceeded Fried‘s lifespan at the start of this month, not just in duration but in quantity. Jump Leads remains fresh because by its nature it has to. We’re never in the same universe for more than a few months. It keeps things interesting.

    But in a weird sort-of way I want to do something a little more grounded, with characters I can drop into random scenarios and just have fun with. I think I’ve come up with a concept that is grounded enough to work as a gag-a-day, but quirky enough to keep me interested. And funnily enough, it’s based on a short film I wrote back in 2007.

    Last night, for the first time in three years, I sat down to sketch characters. I don’t know if I’ll be doing anything with those sketches – I’m no artist, by any stretch – but that’s also how Jump Leads started way back in 2006. I’d like to take that as a Good Sign.

  • Incompetent Love

    I started the year by re-reading Rob Grant’s “Incompetence” which, as a side-project, I’m adapting into a screenplay. I’ve already started typing up the dialogue for individual scenes but I’ve yet to sew anything together. I’m also trying to work out how to reorder the story – the prologue, for instance, happens between chapters four and five – and how to work the first-person perspective. Do I go for the typical Film Noiresque voiceover approach, or have Harry Salt talk directly to the camera, to the audience High Fidelity style?

    That’s not all, though – with my friend Rene Engström having recently wrapped up her webcomic, Anders Loves Maria, I mentioned on Twitter that I’d been fighting the desire over the last few days to adapt the story into a screenplay. And Rene, Glod bless the poor misguided fool, has given me her blessing. Yikes! I’ve already started making notes! Iv’e got two adaptations on the go at once, not to mention two Jump Leads scripts on the go and a website redesign in the works!

    Considering current events in my personal life, I welcome the distraction. I need it. It’s either work on stuff like this, or waste my day playing Star Trek Online, and that’s something I can easily do at night, when most of civilized society (well, most of American society at least) are asleep. If you play STO, come find me online – Paddon@Squirminator2k.

    Anyway, sigh and lament. I’m off to bed. Far too late, as usual.

  • 1. EXT. FLURRY – DAY

    So after months of work, the script for Jump Leads #10: The Voyage Home is more or less finished. It probably still need a little polishing, but the first collaboration between all four of the Jump Leads writers has been finished. The first Jump Leads script to have more than one writer work on it. The first… oh, I can do this all day. The point is that this script is done, and I feel like a weight has been taken off of my shoulders. This is the absolute closest we’ve come to the wire. Usually the next two or three stories have already been written up by the time the issue you’re reading is on the website, but as I mentioned at the end of last year, I decided to throw out the next two years’ worth of scripts to take the story in a new direction.

    With this script finished, and all the loose ends tied up together, I can’t wait to begin work on #11 (although considering we have a habit of slotting in four-page stories between the major ones, #10 may become #11, and #11 may become #13). It’s called Deus Ex Litterae. You know it’s going to be a good one because the title is in Latin.

    I also had an idea for a film a couple of nights ago – for a romantic comedy, no less – but I’ll probably start work on that next week. I’ve not been very productive the last few days, as my wonderful girlfriend Helen is going to be flying back to Ohio on Saturday and will be staying there indefinitely. My current plan: Find a day job, earn enough to rent a place, and bring her home.