projectguilt

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #15 - Meet the Characters

Many weeks after mentioning I had been working on the characters initial visual designs, I've finally spent some time adjusting and finalising the first batch.

I'd like to introduce to you the primary characters of Guilt: Year 1.

All of the characters above, spare the hidden ones, have already been introduced in Guilt, Term 1, which currently is well underway. The three remaining characters will be revealed after their appearance in early Term 2.

As you can see, no expense has been spared, using only the finest modelling software available, Sims 4 (with excessive amounts of character customisation mods).

Although not the best, Sims 4 is a somewhat comfortable sandbox to craft and tinker with the characters, mostly to help with physical dynamics and set everyone's aesthetic leanings. I'm not an artist at all, and I refuse to use AI to generate my work, so this is likely the best set of examples I can personally produce.

This weeks blog was more to share these visuals for my character visions so far, I will make use of the next handful of Friday blogs to introduce characters individually, and share a bit more about them personally, alongside some reference characters from different medias, to give some idea of how I picture their vibe.

I had considered sharing full names at this point, however feel it simpler to stick to first names for introductions, and I will likely share full working names in the individual profiles.

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #14 - Parallels and Rhymes

Having touched on my love of SKAM, and some of my musical influences of the project at large, I think it would be a good moment to share some of my other influences for the show, but leaning away from existing medias, and more towards the realms of artistic, stylized, or in some ways, theological influences.

When starting this project, I was very aware that my story, or more importantly, its characters, were based off of real people. Being originally a collection of events, scenarios and interactions I had during my time at university, I have always worked towards moving these various elements away from my personal experience, and more towards a fictionalised version of themselves, whilst retaining the core essence somewhere.

Paragons of Weather

I first led my research into themes towards the likes of paragons, or examples of quality, and in an extent from this, towards the likes of weather types. It was a weird start to moving characters into something so odd, but breaking down to the basics, it made sense. Different primary characters that would interact with Thomas, on a romantic level, would reflect a weather type, and in turn that weather type would reflect their type of relationship.

Rain being unpleasant, but cleansing, thunder being loud and sudden, snow being cold, but gentle.

I felt these perfectly reflected these main characters well, however at the same time, to me, it felt forced. A lot of these were based purely on exact scenarios I had. However poetic, kissing someone in the rain, is a good picture in mind, but not a great character as a whole.

Rhyming Beats

Next, beat rhyming was a focus for some of my more basic plot elements. Thomas, as a character, as a person, fits into two distinct lives, two separated social groups. They are relatively similar in size, but contrasting quite a lot in many ways, not just entirely due to the obvious contrasting LGBTQ+ vs. straight/heterosexual themes.

Each group, whilst not specifically, nor exactly, has a similar character to each other. A fun character, a larger than life personality, a quiet member, and an antagonist. Flicking between these groups, Thomas finds oddly structured friends groups, but friends nonetheless. Within them there are dynamics that rub and grate on each other, whilst also finding mutual comfort. To a larger extent, a lot of the stories and ideas that were originally written down as a chronological diary, have been shuffled to fit over-arching themes to each story.

Contrasting or resonating stories, in either social group, play out alongside each other, darting back and forth in Thomas's mind. The first few stories play heavily into the standard coming-out storyline that all LGBTQ+ coming of age stories typically follow, however, later stories touch on broader subjects that aim to only challenge Thomas, substance use, alcoholism, politics, abuse and racism, to name a few.

Through my time adapting my retrospective diary into a fiction, I have played with many more concepts, like paragons, and filtered them down into my characterisations and storylines, and these have helped steer me towards characters and stories that are more fleshed out, more leaning towards separated themes and topics, or simply flow as part of a story, and that leads me to the final typical influence.

Religion

Although I was raised religious, I no longer am. I am far from it. I don't even know what I would class myself as now. I say atheist for simplicity, but I am never sure if this is the case. I believe in the earth, in life, in people, and that there must be inherent good in everyone, however proven wrong I may be on that wish, most days.

I don't wish to come across religious, or seem preachy at all in any work I do, but I have always felt a grounding in some theological view, and it actually makes a lot of sense to use as an anchor for a show so LGBTQ+ themed. Maybe not as simple as this is God and this is Satan, or whatever similar contrasts there may be, but in a strictly perceived moral sense. It would be accurate to state that most negative attitudes towards LGBTQ+ peoples are regarding religion, because, quite frankly, they are.

Self righteous attitudes and biased views dictate the rule of morality, and for most LGBTQ+ people, morality is something they are judged by, on a daily basis. Tradition is the chains of the past, holding back progression, and the status quo is almost always the enemy, a weapon to those who are too set in their ways to accept otherwise, to want to move forward to the modern day.

So I have actually worked in some deeper message into the story-line, sometimes more obviously than desired, but also somehow without intending to. The entire nine-story arc that is plotted out does follow a story, based in religion as a flavour, and I feel the way it steers it does act a story glue, bringing all the pieces together. It is, however, entirely my intention to keep this plot-point under-wraps for the time being, as I explore its contribution to messages and topics more seriously.

This is the challenge that lays ahead, for Thomas: The pull from two sides. A struggle of two different trains of thought. Stay with what is known, what is comfortable, and continue on, or change, and be thrust into the unknown, for the hope of betterment.

Only through trial and error, will Thomas discover himself, and only through risk, will come reward.

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #13 - More Music

A 'brief' history of my music tastes

I was born in the end era of the music cassette tape, I grew up during the boom of CD's and eventually matured at the rise of the MP3, so for the most part of my early life, I was running on hand-me-down physical media.

Growing up, I feel it would be fair to say I didn't really have a musical identity, my access to music really was limited to the typical pop hits on either on the radio, a handful of CD's, or through a collection of older records that sat under an aged HiFi system in the corner of my sitting room.

From time to time, I'd sit there at the record player for hours sometimes and just listen to my mums old records. Elvis, Abba, Michael Jackson, for any matter, it was all music that was 10, 20, 30 years older than myself, but I made do, and found a fondness for it.

It wasn't until I was may early teens that I started developing a sense of music, and it was mostly formed in sentimental ways.

My first own-bought game, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 introduced me to my first ear worm, When Worlds Collide, by Powerman 5000, my first foray into Nu-Metal.

A favourite YouTube video introduced me to Nightwish, and as a large, Symphonic Metal.

I used to watch a friend play a lot of FIFA, and I got addicted to Augen Auf, by Oomph!

My older sister listened to a lot of gothic metal, and I kind of rolled with it.

So as a teen, I kind of floated around rock/metal tastes. A few other fleeting interests came and passed, though I felt a little out of place with it all, because I just felt it wasn't really my music, it was always listening to it because someone else liked it.

Then, came Eurovision. My friends would watch it every year and gossip about it for days to come, if not weeks. I mostly ignored it, I just did not get it, the whole concept. Bare in mind that I ended up being the only gay one of this group. Ironically, it wasn't until I was 18, 19, around the time when I started considering my sexuality, that I actually joined in a watch party for Eurovision, and immediately, my mind was blown. So many genres, so many artists, so much variety in music. It was what I always felt was missing, and finally my actual love of music started.

I found so many new artists, so many new styles, so many fresh feelings that I was like struggling to listen to everything I wanted to listen to. Pop, Rock, Electronic, Folk and so on, and so many international artists. Lyrically blind, I loved listening to the music, clueless to the meaning of the songs.

It was also about this time that I started taking a serious interest in film soundtracks and scores as a whole, which has ended up as a good solid 50% of my music tastes these days.

Now, over a 15 years later, music is an incredibly large part of my life. I am always listening to music, of every genre possible. I even studied sound, music and audio for about 8 years following school, earning a BSc Degree in Music and Audio Technology.

So history lesson done, every new track, artist or album has a piece of personal history attached to it. An event, a person, an emotion, I listen to them and its like a transport back to when I first listened to it.

Characterisation of Music, and Thomas.

When approaching Thomas as a character, I wanted to make him like me, obviously being based on my life, but also make him his own character. In some ways I have been able to lean into certain aspects of his musical interests, or lack there of, and have him be introduced to them gradually.

An early concept to visually grow Thomas was a corkboard of memories. The idea is that as he meets people, and his relations grow, he can physically grow and adapt this memory board into his own, like a photo album. This ended up seeming… tacky? Overused, Cliché. How to do this but not make it the same as everything else?

A core aspect of his characterisation is his growth into a musical world, and a growing hobby of my own is physical media, so it made sense to look into Thomas having a record player and a bunch of old records.

So where this leads is into is a secondary element, that being his attachments to older technology. As a modern day setting, his interest in technology remains in the past. Record players, retro consoles such as PS1 and GameCube, past gen-phones, even interest in older TV shows, it all fits into a retro aesthetic, but also core message of his character.

By this point in the story, its clear he has repressed feelings for his sexuality, and it dominates his mind, his thoughts, his life. He is stuck as his old self, and feels he has little ability to move into the modern day. Everything works as it is, why replace it? Why turn his back on things that he likes and knows?

He is comfortable with what he knows, what he likes, and to change these is to let go of the past, and the reasons for him to have these old technologies. Most of what he owns are hand-me-downs that is a small plot point throughout the series, so I can't go too into depth with it this early on, but it all actually, and symbolically, reflect on him as a person.

Thomas collects music as his music tastes grow.

He studies music to understand how music is made.

He socialises with music to develop relationships and bond with friends.

He makes music of his own to be a musical outlet to emotions.

So that kinda of wraps a long brain fart of my thoughts towards my approach to utilising music, as not only a soundtrack, but as a actual plot element and symbolic parallel to Thomas's adventures through a turbulent coming-of-age.

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #12 - Music

Continuing from last weeks mention of musical influences for Guilt, I'd like to be able to talk about how music is quite core to the project, before going into specific influence sources.

1

SKAM, already a strong influence of this screenwriting project, had simply a perfect soundtrack. A weaving complementary playlist of songs from all genres and artists, immaculately handpicked.

After starting work on my project, following my first complete watch through of SKAM, as I pieced together the story, I found mentions of music, artists, events, uni work, and at that time. Listening heavily to the SKAM soundtrack on repeat whilst I worked, and watching through more LGBTQ+ media such as Young Royals, Heartstopper and a plethora of queer movies, each with so many memorable soundtracks and songs, I had a spark. Make a soundtrack for this story I had plotted out. I spent a possibly a week or so forming a playlist of music that complemented my story, my individual scenes, characters and stories, using whole albums as a stories theme basis, artists as character outlines and the odd track here and there to complement a specific event. And that for the most part was it.

Whilst I continued work touching up stories, adding scenes, placing everything in order and fleshing out the plan of the work, I'd go on long walks, hour or two at a time, and listen to the soundtrack of the story or season I was working on, mentally plotting out interactions or dialogue and story beats to match up to the music.

It also helped me get my mind into a specific zone where I could consider the general vibe of the project.

2

Eurovision is a second influence. Being a large part of my yearly social activities, gay christmas as it were, has been incorporated as part of the story each year. Critical social bonding happened at each one, and Thomas, as a main character, being late to the game, is introduced to it in year one.

Personally, many songs and artists from Eurovision have been part of my musical tastes for ages, and coming around to Eurovision in the story, I lean into some of these songs or artists as flare, even using some as primary themes and outlines for emotional beats.

3

My studies are another influence. Through college and university, I was exposed to a few more Leftfield, EDM and experimental electronic genres and projects that stayed with me. These more darker and complex music styles contrast significantly from the more lively upbeat pop anthems that had by now dominated my tastes.

One of my focuses in the music side of the project is to thematically separate stories and story arcs, and using these as a foundation of themes of Thomas's study have seemed to be a good separation from the social side of his university life.

4

Individual artists too have been some major inspiration from me, bleeding in from multiple categories of influence.

For example, during college, the band Empire of the Sun, was my jam. It was to great surprise of my tutor when I bought along a reference track of We Are The People, the exact song he was about to introduce to the group as the track we were to be recreating for a final project. I have used a remix of this as introduction to the first episode, thus the series.

Kid Wise has been a favourite band of mine since hearing them in the credits of the film 'Giant Little Ones', and sets up a perfect feel for a gloomy emotional story that caps off Thomas's coming out arc.

Felsmann + Tiley provided an amazing highly atmospheric remix for a closing scene of Young Royals, which one of my stories is thematically similar to. I have found some amazing other references by the pair that feature in my themes for a story that is focussed on 'dirty politics' at its heart. The story, focussing on a strained relationship between the society and the university's upper management is one of the most pivotal and problematic moments of Guilt, and the artists music complements and grounds this story well.

Countless other artist influences come from the characters real-life counterparts, and represent my personal journey through life and relationships. Scouring these artists past music brings forward a perfect environment to blossom the diarised adaptions to fruition, and definitely diversifies the projects tone, helping to enforce my story-to-story separation.

More relevant to the current story, a close friend at university, who partially is used to the characterisation of Max, and I, had a shared love of Gwen Stefani. This has become a somewhat recurring theme for the Max and Thomas throughout Guilt, and which is introduced in the next upcoming published section of Guilt, Week 6 - Wednesday.

Next week, I delve into a personal history of my musical growth, and how it feeds back into the actual story of the show, how Thomas experiences music, and how I intend it to become a symbolic parallel to his character development.

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #11 - SKAM

(Another late 'Friday' blog, as I was dog sitting for friends yet again!)

This week, I get to talk about possibly the most seminal influence of GUILT, and how it help me shape my project.

SKAM is an absolutely phenomenal Norwegian teen-focussed drama from by the immaculately amazing Julie Andem, and most certainly my projects largest influence. It's high acclaim led to various other international variations of this show, to varying success.

Season 3 of SKAM, and a handful of other countries takes on the show, is an emotional rollercoaster of a gay storyline, LGBTQ+ drama at its peak, and deals with the issue in a realistic way, in an almost mourningful way, and leaves my life incomplete when I am not watching it. It is perfection. DRUCK, the German version of SKAM, is most certainly my next favourite season 3, and would list that and SKAM Season 3 as my top inspirations for Guilt.

Admittedly, the name of my project, Guilt, is a nod to the name SKAM, or Shame in English, though its key difference in being rather than using shame as a means to feel bad about who Thomas, the main character is, is or what he's done, Guilt is how Thomas processes his insecurities. Each of the 9 planned stories focus on Thomas's thoughts of something he should or shouldn't of said, or done, and in some ways, his feelings of inaction.

Each of the nine stories I have written for GUILT focus on a different topic, character, or scenario that Thomas feels some guilt in.

The first story focusses on a blossoming relationship between Thomas and Charlie, though soon causes strain between another friendship due to some, for now, future revelations.

Later stories of GUILT focus on more broad topics, such as family relationships, gender identity, bigotry, mental health and responsibility.

I have a handful of other inspirations for the project, and I have kind of assigned specific medias to each story, helping me to outline a tonal theme for each story arc, but also allowing me to pay homage to each one in a unique way through either actions, imaginary, dialogue, or my favourite, music.

Next week, I will share some of my outlines for my musical inspirations I have in mind for a soundtrack, and how this has adapted over the last two or so years of the project.

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #10

The final part of Episode One has been published, meaning the entire introduction section of Guilt published, and I feel quite relieved.

Something that had clouded my head for the last week heavily is the pacing of the first book, effectively as planned the first three episodes of Season 1.

With the introduction being so thorough of, well, introductions, of people and places, I have had the creeping feeling that this leaves less time to pad out Charlies story with Thomas as a whole, so I have spent the last week kind of revising the future.

I feel treating the current published part as a 'pilot' of sorts, setting up the primary theme of his first Year at uni, which is coming out, is the most appropriate step forward.

Thomas's primary mindset of keeping his social groups apart, in fear of another bad coming out experiences, is a key point to all 3 stories in Year one, and managing to keep a steady flow between the stories is somewhat important to me.

I am in the loose stages of splitting what would be the next two episodes of this first story into three. Luckily, the time span this covers is a handful of weeks, and a time-jump between the pilot and the next episode was already planned, this just helps me to figure out how to approach the start of the story better, rather than jumping past Thomas and Charlie's relationship starting to blossom, and rather address it more directly in the now episode one(two) of the story.

Planning released parts, episodes, pilots, terms and years seems, I guess, from an outside perspective, quite odd, and admittedly hyper focussed, however I must defend my almost granular methodology, by mentioning a hard interest of mine.

Norwegian teen-drama, SKAM, when it aired, followed a live scene scheduled release. Scenes would release as they happened in real life, as if you were watching the drama between the characters live, and an omnibus would drop at the end of a week. A different, and as it turns out, incredibly perfect release format for a show that is so focussed on a young modern audience. I only wish that I was able to watch it as it dropped like this, and not in the years following.

In my process of writing this project as a screenplay, I have attempted to segment the stories and plot out timeframes of the stories to the month, the week, the day, to the hour, all the stories only ever occurring during Thomas's university life, as part of one social group or another. This means, I am free to compile the story in so many different ways.

Starting out writing to the the rule of three was good, its a very solid goal to work towards but then, do I want 3 episodes per story? If I want episodes to cover a week, I could do that? That's possibly 9 shorter episodes a story. Do I want to want to plan for a complete story to be a single movie length production, or do I want to suggest every day, or every scene be its own separate release? The way I have planned, I guess, allows for all of the above.

Glancing over what I have, written and published at present, and fully planned in future, makes every option a possibility, though a part I do fear of this writing style is my ability to keep adding scenes as I see fit, and it becoming too wide at both sides. From my estimates, I may have enough first episode content for two hours, or more, so yes, that does seem excessive.

Will I continue writing like this for now? Absolutely. After all, the more the merrier. I have a set plan, of 27 episodes of content. It just jumped to 28, but necessary? Yes.

So ramble over. I have decided to start working on talking about the series and its topics more from next week, rather than the individual parts. Next week's Friday blog, I hope to share some topic and theme outlines for the entire project, starting with talking further about SKAM, and how it influences this project.

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday (Saturday!) Blog #9

I can never expect what's around the corner, finding myself away from home again on a Friday night, due to real life happenings, so rather than setting myself hard goals for the time being, I need dial back, and start being less strict on myself.

1 part published a week a good bare minimum for now. I make sure that each part is at bare minimum around 1K words, if not, merge them into another appropriate adjacent smaller part.

So this weeks part is a follow up to a coming-out event that Thomas attends. Last week dealt more with Thomas coming out verbally for the first time in the story, part 2 is a kind-of call back to being outside the back of the technology building on day one, when Felix introduces himself.

Both Felix and Max parallel each other in Thomas's respective social groups, so I wanted a moment between Thomas and Max only, to somewhat bookend the first episode.

This quiet moment between them allows for Thomas to elaborate a little more intimately about his quite recent coming out, sowing some of the important seeds for later down the line, without giving away everything but the who, when and where.

The how and why are somewhat more important later on in the season, during term 3, however some moments of contemplation and action take place throughout.

Wrapping the first episode soon, I hope to feel that the character has been laid out well enough to understand that he is conflicted.

Quiet, go-with-the-flow and always deep in thought, Thomas's repressed feelings towards a recent bad coming out experience dominate his social skills. He wants to enjoy be able to enjoy his freedom for the first time, but feels he must completely divide his social groups mentally, and physically, as to not initiate another bad coming out experience.

I hope episode one has been a coherent read at the front of all my wishes. There are some revisits I have planned to do, but for now, what is published, I feel, works well as the introduction to the characters and the setting of the project.

The final small section, Week 2 - Wednesday - Coming Out Pt. 3, will more act as a small cliff-hanger section to Episode 1 of 3 for this story, and lead into the story surrounding Thomas & Charlie.

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #8

Coming out is an important topic. We come out so many times in our lives, it's never ending. Friends, family, colleagues, strangers, all sorts of times, all sorts of situations. Then there are the times we don't come out. When we don't feel it necessary, if we don't feel we owe it to the company, if we are scared or worried for whatever reason.

This week's postings touch on the early experiences on starting to come out. If anything, the 3 weeks of previous content have already built up to this, and in some part if falls flat, and others it is embraced freely.

The first part published focuses on a casual night out with course friends, though it takes a sour tone briefly. An opportunity arises to bring it up, but the uncomfortable situation makes for difficulty in this attempt.

The second part published follows encouragement for Thomas to diversify his friends group and meet new people, so he takes the decision to try the LGBTQ+ society properly, and it happens to fall on National Coming Out day. It is a perfect opportunity for Thomas to openly share in an ultra safe space for the first time ever. I played with some concept of a group activity I undertook at university myself, and tried best to emulate the environment as I remember. Almost hollow at first, but an opening inclusive experience with a range of interesting, diverse characters. I stayed short of exploring and mentioning too many expanded offerings from the LGBTQ+ banner, as a means to replicate my personal year on year growth of understanding, and also as some identities and revealed topics actual play more into talking points in the series further down the line, in this first year, or following years.

I hoped to have gotten around to finishing the day off with the following 2 parts, however I now find myself on a put-up bed in my friends house, typing from my phome with awful autocorrect, as I was rallied for personal assistance by a friend at a needy time. Not all is bad however, as this involved sitting for the cutest puppy you ever did see, who loves me very much, so I hope you can forgive me for this broken promise of completing the weeks story by today!

The remaining parts of episode 1 will be out in due course, and then onwards to the meat of the story!

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #7

After a distracting two weeks, which was mostly spent revising the week, and shuffling things about, Week 2 has been completed! Hurrah. Swapping around the two social events of 'Week 1' made more sense logically, with the society themed event occurring Wednesday and clashing with LGBTQ+'s first meet, and the big freshers night on Friday night instead, as is more appropriate given logistic timings in real university life. Largest change, which actually makes a difference to the story, introducing the new character, Charlie, earlier. This helps give more time for his story to develop gradually, otherwise by the end of episode one, it would only be the second encounter with the primary interest of this story. It aided in creating and expanding the freshers night out with a chance re-encounter between him and Thomas.

One key point at stage of the published parts that is apparent, Thomas has issues. If it wasn't obvious until now, a basic trait of Thomas is that anxiety kind of rules over his life, and an unfortunate by-product of this is his habit of smoking when anxious. Consumption of cigarettes isn't a great look, and Thomas knows it, so retreats to be alone when he does. This however becomes almost a bonding moment for himself and Charlie, what starts out as a private ritual turns into a social activity with Charlie, and is an element of his life that will be addressed, not glamorised, in Story number 2, in a way that mirrors my own past with this habit that I am repulsed I ever had.

But back in Story 1, there are, as planned now, three parts remaining to this story. I estimate the final two parts may end up being some of the longer ones so far, with even more expansion having been done to them over the last two weeks. It may possibly be four parts by the end. We'll see.

The next week, focuses on Thomas's return to the LGBTQ+ society, a coming out themed event hosted by Max and co. in celebration of national coming out day, a session that highlighted some of the more serious, but bonding times, of my personal experiences as part of an LGBTQ+ society.

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #6

As mentioned last week, progress has been a little interrupted by some unavoidable real-life happenings, however I have managed to spend a small amount of time revising some of the first academic week storyline, and put this into place now.

The week consisted of two social outings with Thomas's core friends group, for a big freshers night out on the Wednesday, and to GameSoc on the Friday. I have decided for a few reasons to swap these about, and rather than wait for Friday to introduce the main 'romantic' interest, to instead do this Wednesday, and re-introduce them properly on the Friday. It should make for better flow in the story, and give for some gradual building. Most importantly though, alongside some future changes to the first couple of published parts, should help de-bulk some of the more step-by-step parts of Thomas's first-time-at-uni experience.

As it stands in the script at the moment, it is very literally. He goes to place, he does thing, he moves on to next place. I feel there is far too much logistical exposition, and looking at the estimate word count for what equates to episode one, as it stands, is far over-budget in time, so, the challenge to shuffle about and condense some parts, is actually quite helpful.

For now, I have unpublished the Bar-crawl chapter, however some minor rework and addition to this will not take long, and will be out in no time. For now however, this week has re-worked entirely the Wednesday night, so is worth a revisit, whilst Friday is worked on.

Being able to take some time away from this otherwise set-in-stone story is actually quite productive for unwinding and pondering some of these questionable elements of the script, so hopefully it shows in the flow of reading.

Plans for the week ahead include finalising the additions to Friday and publishing that, before moving straight on to Week 2, which concludes the first Episode of three of this book.

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #5

Bit of a short one this week unfortunately, as it has been a bit of a derailed week personally.

I have worked a little on the mid-week section of week one, which see's Thomas and co head out for the typical freshers experience of a bar crawl with course mates.

This general night out cycles over Thomas's feelings of flip-flopping on coming out in general, highlighting over his reluctance to be out because of the goings on over the last week, and doubts over joining the society.

Since writing these introductory parts of Thomas's story, I have always felt a bit of tangled threads around the freshers week and parts of week 1, and I feel since revising them, there is definitely a bit of work and alterations I can do to streamline them, and have spent some of the week gone jotting out the minor changes to character introductions and happenings that may help the story move in a bit more of a typical fashion.

I will likely finalise my plans on these changes soon and head back to re-write them once the full episode (Freshers week through to the end of Week 2) is published. They in theory shouldn't remove anything from the plot, just shuffle about when certain interactions happen.

The next big segment, introducing the final major character, although planned to be today's publish, will now likely be next Fridays, due to real-life happenings.

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #4

This week, I've amped up my publishing, with three new parts.

1 - Hangover - A prologue of sorts to the freshers week, wrapping up and putting into motion Thomas's immediate double-back on his fantastic first night out with the LGBTQ+ society.

2 - First Day - University starts, and Thomas aquaints a similarly socially awkward person.

3 - Full Gang - Thomas and his new friend join forces with a Will and his new friend and the addition of another to head to the Freshers night out together. These open up the second act of Episode one, introducing Thomas's friends group in its entirety, and starting to set into motion his struggle to balance his course friends and LGBTQ+ friend groups.

I'm starting to get acquainted also with the characters themselves, settling into how they talk and behave, so am starting to see them transform away from blank pages of conversations towards actual people with their own lives, not just a means to reinforce a topic. Some outlined conversations have seemingly doubled or tripled in length, moving away from short sharp talking points into actual trains of thought.

Productive week? Yes, absolutely. More to publish? Yes, absolutely.

Plans for the next 7 days include publishing the course groups venturing into town for the big Freshers night out, and later on, Thomas and Co. head over to GameSoc, where Thomas is sure to meet someone new, and somewhat important to Book 1 (wink wink)!

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #3

I still feel its early days, and my planning is erratic, not going to beat around the bush on that point, hands up, guilty as ever.

I am still darting back and forth between publishing formats, at least for now. It still being quite early into my public lens of operations, I am looking to possibly step back from my attempts to novelise GUILT as I work on the screenplay, focussing more on getting at least the first term out there in the open, before I revisit this idea. I would quite like to have all my key dialogue's outlined clearly in blank and white, before I am comfortable enough to look back at the efficacy of working into both complete script and novel. Next update. Instead of publishing as planned, the final part of day week one, and then looking towards publishing the start of week two, I infact reconsidered how I wanted the end point of week one to play out. I had it scripted to be largely glossed over, but upon getting ready to post this, felt it a little disservice to the potential plot.

If found myself questioning why my first introduction act to the book/season would I want to simply breeze past probably the defining point in starting university, that is plunging head deep into a social life of new interactions and experiences? So, what started as a 500 word montage of sorts has been expanded into a 4.5K word script, split nicely into two distinct chapters for publishing. First, Thomas's introduction to a small numbers of key characters, and secondly, Thomas experiencing his first taste of social night-life at university, both quite important happenings for a fresher, and both strongly ingrained in my head from my time at uni. Alas, this is not all I have worked on this week. My final update. On-top of the week ahead that is for the most part complete for publishing already, I have been working on my descriptive and visual characterisations for Year One, and a few beyond. 12 of the 16 notable named characters for season one are fleshed out, the only outliers being full series teaching staff and additional minor character (a regular drag queen).

I aim to have a post-format sorted to share these characters individually as they are introduced soon, to provide readers with a thorough written description of the characters, alongside an image of a concept for that character, that has been generated and carefully planned, rendered and detailed in a state of the art industry-standard character creator software *cough* Sims 4 *cough*.

Anyways, the entire first act is now released in its intended entirety, and now I can move onto Thomas's first week of study, hopefully with a little more gusto now I have some more groundwork behind me.

Thankyou again if you've been tuning in with this progress so far.

See you next week, with week one underway!

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #2

So, more success this week. I have managed to get considerably more work prepared for publishing, and started to figure out a work flow that will help me publish more often. I am starting to feel a little more comfortable in the style of writing I am settling into. Although still not perfect, I feel every time I sit down and just get to writing, its just getting a little bit better, I guess that's the meaning of practice makes perfect. This week, I have published the next chunk of the first day, and have the rest of the day nearly ready to publish, however have taken a step back to consider release format. Reading a few other samples of writing on Wattpad has made me realise that this is possibly not the right platform to be dumping out colossal chapters in one go, and rather smaller more controlled releases may be more suitable for short-form reading. This actually works quite well for me, as the entire project is laid out almost in a diary form, with events and dialogue already being written out in contained scenes, serialised in a script format much like SKAM.

One part of me however questions if it may be worth revising how I am adapting the script. I may attempt re-formatting my script into a more easy-to-read format that I had initially planned, as to save time on attempting novelisation, but may just publish this in parallel for a while, and get feedback on it before deciding. It would vastly increase my workflow, as writing script-ready dialogue is more natural to me. I'm not sure though, I'll think on it first. Researching into constraints on publishing on Wattpad, I am attempting to plan ahead and plan out how many 'parts' I can aim at publishing for each of the 9 planned books, and prior to fleshing out later seasons, it may look like around the 50-60 parts area, which adds up to a considerable amount of work to adapt, but I will hopefully be able to balance my scriptwriting into novelisation a little better in these smaller segments.

This mostly means, that when I post my third part of the story, I will likely look to move these smaller segments into their own 'part', and start labelling the parts as Days and scenes, rather than parts of a whole chapter. This will mean I can simply post once and not add to or adjust a published part (other than for minor spelling/grammatical errors)

The segment published today continues on Thomas's failed introduction to university life during 'Freshers Week', and attempts to introduce a few elements of both Thomas and Will's characters, whilst being thrust into the daunting but explorative fresher experience in UK university.

Hopefully I will have the final day-1 segment out very soon, and the start of Week 1 published by next week!

-C

[projectguilt]

GUILT - Friday Blog #1

Unfortunately this week, however initially planned to be quite productive, has been quite the opposite, all sorts of things interrupting my work-flow, so I have had to step back from adapting the remainder of chapter one and the whole of chapter two for the time being.

It will, assuming no further life happenings, be next week when I publish next.

It has however given me the opportunity to look ahead and start working in some smaller changes to a later story, The first story of year two, that I've been brainstorming some minor changes to recently, so luckily not all is lost.

As a short dive into what I have been working on for now, the first three books are essentially planned as the first season of screenplays, that covers Thomas's first year at university. It really is a story around Thomas's struggles with coming out, and a soon introduced character, Charlie, who acts as a primary 'romantic interest'. Books One and Three are entirely Thomas x Charlie, with the "slightly" smaller Book Two enclosed story with a different romantic focus.

Book Four, which takes place at the start of the following academic year, is more a footnote story to a lot of the themes and stories in the first trilogy, whilst setting up the future year and new challenges to Thomas that occur in him being adopted into and taking onboard responsibilities in the universities LGBTQ+ community. In particular, it almost entirely wraps up Thomas x Charlie, however I have been working off and on to revise Charlies story, making some minor decisions to both the characters attitudes and feelings towards each other, as I felt they were a little unbalanced and confusing, in light of the stories that precede them.

Charlie was meant to simply disappear from the story completely following the first three books, however I felt that this would be too unjust of a decision, and upon a complete rework of the first four stories over the last year, it become more apparent that they actually serve a part to play later down the line.

I now intend to have them transition towards a side character later on, and have been making minor story adjustments throughout stories three and four to accommodate this.

As things stand however, books one and two are, I'm 99.9% sure, set in stone, I have the vast majority of the pre-planned screenplay produced up to story four and beyond, I just need to finalise these and adapt for novel-based publishing on Wattpad as I can, and I intend to follow my Friday target each week, but getting off to a steady start has proved challenging. I do my best when I can focus on something in its entirely, and this last week has felt like a non-stop festival of focus-breaking spectacles.

Hopefully in the next week, I will be able to crack my fingers, power through a few chapters as intended, and have a few weeks worth of scheduled publishing in my wake, so I can split my work into a more varied pattern of screenwriting > adapting > complimentary content, and repeat.

Anyway, enough rambling, I guess this is my first proper blog entry,

See ya soon!

-C

[projectguilt]

A warm welcome to my blog for my screenwriting project,

Inspired by my own journey through university as a gay student in the UK, what started out as a retrospective diary, turned into something bigger.

Now, over two years of plotting, outlining, researching and adapting an entire journey from start to finish, I am finally ready to open the doors on the project, and start sharing these stories with you.

I have 9 stories to share, spanning Thomas's three years of study at the fictional 'Midlands University'.

At present, my work is screenplay based, though I am attempting to adapt this into novel-form fiction for Wattpad. Screenplay formatted readings will be made available on an external site in the near future, as will various collections of adjoining content.

Brief Synopsis of GUILT

Through the eyes of Thomas Marsh, a recently-out gay Music Tech student and fresh into adulthood, 'Guilt' follows the many events that define him, where he must learn to balance family, friends and relationships alongside the challenges and responsibilities of adult life.

Some basic rules for early days of the project, until I get it properly up and running,

No re-posting of any of my content used or posted in either the published project or accompanying work on this Tumblr blog, or other official channels I may set up in the future, without explicit permissions of, and credit to, myself. All content published is on an 'All rights reserved' license.

Fan-art and other creative embellishments, (should my project be blessed with the opportunity) are, as always have, and always will be, more than welcome.

Absolutely zero permissions for AI of any form to use or store my published content.

Only social medias, blogs or websites listed on either here or my Wattpad are legitimate.

Many thanks for taking your time to read, and thankyou for joining me on my journey.

-C

www.wattpad.com/user/ProjectGuilt

https://projectguilt.tumblr.com/

[projectguilt]

An early idea I have for my first works art cover, inspired by word clouds (I am a terrible artist, I used an online generator for the cloud, though made the logo myself at least!)

Word clouds were used during student society leadership sessions at my university, and they always stuck with me, in imagery at least. I like how it can bring a clear visualisations to thoughts, and how I can use it to surround the dominant theme of guilt with all of the aspects of university life that gave me it.