Bite The Wax Tadpole Read Online Free

future that he didn’t quite get round to writing. Moving back and forth between Victorian London and modern day Victorian Melbourne. Up to the minute technology with Dickensian characters and dialogue. Rob had high hopes of it. Great Expectations, in fact. Great Enough Expectations to carry it through to a fifth draft. The fourth draft had garnered some slight interest from the production company that had cornered the market in Australian gangland drama. Interest but no money. Not quite what we’re after but go away and make some changes and we’ll talk again had been the message from the producer. He wasn’t, of course, specific as to what those changes might be.
    Rob looked down at the white space which is mostly what scripts are. Like polar explorers, scriptwriters have to learn to cope with this blankness or risk losing all sense of direction, of going word blind. A drop of blood fell from his chin onto one of the white spaces and he gingerly pressed the tiny plaster back into place. He had an answer to Randy’s question about shaving.
    The blood trickled slowly down the page, zigging and zagging between the speeches and big print. It was fascinating to watch. Drops of what kept you alive being absorbed by fibres that once grew in a Scandinavian forest. A bit of you drying out and dying... a part of you...
    Oh, bollocks, he shouldn’t be doing this. When the sun was in the ascendant he should be working on what he was paid for not on what he had high but remote hopes for. Only when the sun was slinking towards the western horizon or the moon rising over Hornsby should he be working on his own stuff. Which brought him to yesterday’s forward planning meeting and this week’s batch of scripts. They’d been hovering around his head, just out of sight since he’d woken up but now they suddenly jerked into sharp focus, minor demons swooping out of the sun.
    The meeting had been a muted disaster, the Twin Towers falling silently, the tsunami hitting the coast with a plink-plonk. Whereas most disasters require something to happen, a forward planning disaster requires nothing to happen. Three hours had passed like a Quaker prayer meeting. Long periods of silence interrupted by random, ill-thought out ideas that faded into the ether. Of course, he recognised the difficulty of coming up with new stories for a show after twenty years. They’d done fire, flood, car crashes, plane crashes, infected the characters with most diseases known to modern medicine and made their love lives as complicated as Byzantine inheritance law. Sometimes it seemed that the only storyline left was to have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gallop into town with the Seven Plagues of Egypt in their saddlebags. Only Adam had come prepared. A family of extra-terrestrials move into the abandoned abattoir. It was the most ridiculous storyline ever pitched to him but it did have the merit of covering three sides of closely typed A4.
    He knew it was his own fault. He shouldn’t have had the meeting so close to the Christmas production break. They were all tired, storied out. Then he thought back to last year when he’d held the forward planning meeting after the Christmas break and...yes, well...
    There were also the scripts for this week’s block, the block he should be over-editing right now, to consider. Dull as last week’s ditchwater, all of them. Scene after scene of talking heads saying the same bloody thing. Which wasn’t how he remembered the stories developing in the script conferences so whose fault was it? The writers? He’d like to think so but as Script Producer he’d be the one shouldering the blame, carrying the can and dodging the flak. Which, unless you were a weight-lifting contortionist, could make life a little uncomfortable.
    Oh, well, along with shouldering the blame, carrying the can and dodging the flak he’d have to bite the bullet. The week would have to be re-replotted. He should be fuming, raging and swearing like