Wednesday, May 09, 2012

HELLO

I got a phone call the other week from someone I knew of but had never spoken to personally. Nothing strange or special in that you might think, unless you consider how the phone call came about.

In March 2011 after the birth of my second son I found myself too busy to write and too tired to concentrate, but with enough time to sit down for short periods and do little things. I decided to make the most of that precious time and email people I had met over the years at various events, online, or who were in my LinkedIn contacts. The idea was to say hello and see what everyone was working on, just to be friendly. I can't remember exactly how many emails I sent, but it was in the hundreds.

The response I got was magnificent and on the whole positive until two self important people decided to take offence to me emailing them, accusing me of trying to worm my way into their little incestuous group for the purposes of furthering my career by sending out cut and paste emails. The emails I received from them were rather nasty and spiteful and at some point one of two was ringing up others I know and checking what I had emailed them...all very childish and very unprofessional. What was meant to be something positive was turned sour by the actions of those two cruel bullies. The experience left me a little deflated to say the least. But I eventually got over it and forgot about the incident.

Then last week I got a phone call out of the blue from someone on my LinkedIn contact list who apologised for not replying when I sent him an email last year. He told me he was busy at the time and had simply forgotten about the email, but had meant to reply. He was very impressed I had taken the time to email him and enquire what he was working on and laughed off the incident with the two little bullies after reading about it in one of my previous blog posts (now deleted). He went out of his way to let me know he appreciated what I had done, even if the two bullies hadn't, and we continued chatting on the phone for over an hour about what we were both working on. At no point did we discuss how we could help each other, or how we could get work via our respective contacts, it was just two people talking about their love of TV and movies. It was a lovely, heart warming phone call and it really made my day :-)

If you feel like me and if you're happy to share with the world what you're working on please do so in the comments, after all we are a community of film and TV lovers and I personally would love to hear about everyone's projects.

5 comments:

David P Perlmutter said...

Hello....

Loved the post and the ones before...now following you..

Check me out, my blog contains details of a true story that I am writing, well just the last chapter to go, which I am doing now..

Anyway the link is http://thewrongplaceatthewrongtime.blogspot.pt/

I hope you enjoy if you visit.

I will keep checking you out.

Cheers

Rosie Claverton said...

I'm having a pretty good month, actually.

My arc for Persona (the little app drama) started on Monday, my co-written play opens in Brighton on Friday, and my script's being made by the Welsh short film scheme It's My Shout.

I'm also trying to bash this novel into shape, but that's a really hard slog.

Dominic Carver said...

Thanks David, I will certainly have a look.

Sounds exciting Unknown. Well done on the short film. Let me know when it's out?

Unknown said...

It's odd, but whenever I'm feeling a little down on this whole writing palaver then reading this blog always gees me up. It's the same with Jason Arnopp's and Danny Stack's.

Good for you, Dom. There's a little known saying about bastards and not letting let them get you down, and that certainly seems to be your attitude.

I've recently (in the last few days) sent off an initial version of a 90-page screenplay that I was invited to write, for two UK-based producers. They've got industry influence in Eastern Europe (where the story is set) and - assuming that they're good to their word - have a lot of production and post-production facilities in place.

A friend of mine has just posted a picture on FB which says 'Just f*cking do it and fix it in the rewrite'. Sound words, sound words.

Dominic Carver said...

Sound words indeed :-)

Good luck with the feature.