I had a very positive meeting yesterday with Max and Ijaz, the two young film-makers hoping to adapt The Demonata into a TV show. We spent three and a half hours chatting and batting around ideas. They're keen to have me closely involved in the process moving forwards, and were encouraging when I came at them with some ideas they weren't expecting! That could well change as things develop, but for the time being we're going to work on this as a team -- the three Musketeers! Hmm... given the darkness of the books, maybe that should be the three Dusketeers!!!!!

We're going to try and move ahead now with structuring how a first season might be set up, and then write a pilot script. Max and Ijaz will be doing the bulk of the writing initially, but I might end up pitching in as well, depending on how closely our visions for it align. It's always been an unfulfilled dream of mine to have a go at writing for a movie or TV show, so perhaps this is where I unfurl my wings and sail beautifully... or sink like a stone and slink back to the book-writing ASAP!!!!

As I keep stressing, we're still at a VERY early stage. The aim is to produce a solid first season plan and a pilot script which we can then start shopping around, in the hope of attracting a backer (for instance, one of the big streaming companies, or perhaps a more traditional TV production company) with the funds to help make the dream a reality, or at least take it further forward than we can on our own. Max and Ijaz are young and very enthusiastic, but they don't have a whole lot of experience -- as they themselves admitted, they imagined it would be several years down the road before they got a chance at tackling something as ambitious as The Demonata. That lack of experience (coupled with my own) could end up working against us.

But on the flip side, I've never seen a lack of experience as a negative. For instance, Takahiro Arai was the most inexperienced of the handful of artists who pitched for the job of adapting Cirque Du Freak into a manga, but even though his sample chapters were a bit on the rough side, his story-telling skills shone through, and I chose him as my preferred artist. And, of course, I had absolutely no experience of writing children's books when I wrote Cirque Du Freak, but those books turned out alright, didn't they?!?

For me, the most important thing when it comes to a project like this is the passion that the creators have for it. If you're approaching a complex, multi-layered work like The Demonata as a work-for-hire writer, I think you're going to struggle to do much with it, no matter how experienced you might be. But if you love the books and have a passion to see them work on the screen the way they did on the page... I think that's the key.

Max, Ijaz and myself all have that passion, so we'll see how things go from here. The odds are very much against us, I think, but the odds were very much against Grubbs, Kernel and Bec as well, right?!? The best stories are always the ones where the biggest odds have to be overcome! As long as they ARE overcome, and you don't just get squished by the powers-that-be!!!!!!! GULP!!!!

Anyway, we're off to the drawing board now. More updates to follow as and when things progress from here... but it could be a while!!