The Winter of my content

Autumn in Canberra is spectacular. Crisp days and trees aflame with colour. Things finally seem set for the making of The Yowie in September. Yippee. I feel so tired of the whole process that it will be an anticlimax. At least that's how I feel now - probably when the camera finally rolls I'll feel great.

Was discussing the whole dreary voyage to realisation that most creatives have to go through with a friend yesterday: what we agreed on was this: in the old days (ah the good old days when everything was in fact pretty stinky) there was no barrier between creatives and the public - creatives did their thing and presented the result to the public - and got booed or cheered. These days the creative offers their pathetic scrap to a whole swag of middle-people: editors and script jockeys, government officials and various failed creatives turned bureaucrats. Look what happens next: the faceless comformists making up this middle earth then pull the work to pieces: is it politically correct? correctly formatted? recycled paper? tick the right boxes? does it offend any one of a huge number of aggrieved minorities? Etc. Assuming it gets the nod, the next step is called 'wearing down the artist.' After a depressing length of time a dismissive approach is made to the artist: Dear X, we have assessed your work "The pathetic scrap" and one of our junior editors would like to discuss it with you. She/He will shortly be writing at sometime in the future a 1000 page critique of your work and sending it to you. You then have fourteen seconds to reply with a new draft of your, ahem, work. Please bear in mind we receive 13 thousand similar such scraps every day and we may never actually proceed to the next stage, while reserving the right to plagiarise your work and, if not plagiarise, then bowlderize, homogenize, destroy, multilate, obfuscate, and other reduce your pathetic scrap to an even more pathetic scrap that may or may not ever get in front of an audience. Yrs, etc. PS, then there is the issue of funding. Ha Ha Ha.

And so it goes. Sigh. Nothing original about all this - I just had to have a rave.