Mush! Mush!

Roger Avary and I are writing the new draft of Beowulf. Getting computers to communicate is always interesting -- I can send files to his powerbook via bluetooth but he has to email them back to me, which seems vaguely silly when we're sitting across the table from each other. ("How did we get files back and forth back in 1998, when we did the first draft?" asked Roger, puzzled, the other day. "There were these things called floppy disks," I reminded him. "Oh yes," he said.)

It's going really well -- the writing was a bit slow and odd to begin with, but a couple of days ago it started to work: we did a scene that could only have been written by both of us, an opening that was different and (I think) better than anything we could have done on our own. (And the fortune cookie that I opened immediately after said "Good to begin well, better to end well." Which is very wise.)

Every now and again Robert Zemeckis phones us and asks how it's going, and we tell him, then he says, "Mush! Mush!" whereupon Roger and I put our heads down and go back to hauling this movie across the frozen tundra...

...

Several people wrote from Australia to tell me I should have taken the baggage-handler-being-fired-for-putting-on-the-camel-head news story more seriously as it may be the key to saving a woman's life (news story here). The woman is facing the death sentence for smuggling drugs that may have been placed in her bags by rogue baggage handlers -- on his blog Jonathan Strahan even suggests that it was the same baggage handler...

Which means that it's probably more than my job's worth to point to the latest news on Cane Toads.