Category Archive

Like Hamell on trial, Eds not Dead.

Apologies for the lack of fresh meat, stories and blood, on the site in recent months. I’ve currently been working on the screenplay to a short film to be shot in January/February time called (provisionally) ‘Home’, which I might put a few snippets of up just to give a taster and a flavour.

Also resurrected a few once dead projects, including what was once called ‘Positive Tension’ but hopefully shall now be known as ‘Running’, and is a half hour drama/comedy series about education, office blocks, the media, terrorism, london, bicycles and guitars, amongst other things. Think ‘This Life’ meets Coupland, and you’re somewhat approaching the terrain.

I still haven’t quite worked out how to showcase scripts and screenplay work up on the site, whether posting extracts in word files, or simply cutting and pasting them with all the technical formatting as a post. If anyone has any ideas let me know.

Book Update: Hit a technical snag with the books, so apologies to everyone who requested one, I’ve hopefully found a suitable source to use to print them, so I’ll try and rattle a test copy off before christmas, and put up some photos and scans of it.

Best of 2006: It’s approaching the inevitable time of list making and categorising. If there’s any records, movies, or books that people think deserve inclusion in the Holding Patterns ‘Best of’ list that should be up in a week or two, let me know and I’ll try to seek them out before the deadline for judging passes.

You can see the 2005 list here.

Cheers!

Tom

Looking at the date on the last story I posted, I realised yesterday that -whilst not always apparent by the more than erratic rate of submissions- Holding Patterns as a website has been in existence for over a year now. Somehow, like friends and siblings being remembered as always a certain age, i had imagined it always frozen and ageless as something new and recently started.

So, like a husband who has forgotten his wife’s birthday buying flowers from a motorway service station, I’m attempting to make up for my own memory lapse with another gesture, namely a present.

Partly because I want to give something to those who’ve supported and read and commented on this site, partly because I see it I suppose, in some way, as evolution, and partly because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do and there is nothing better than the feel of having created something physically - that you can hold and look at and give to people - I’m creating a book collecting some of the best stories here, with a treat or two thrown in.

You can think of it, I suppose, like a band putting out an EP from their bedroom, a hastily scrawled CD-R handed out free at gigs, really you can think anything you like.

I’m making these at home, and each book is both unique and totally free to whoever happens to want one, I’m hoping to put some of the following in each one.

• Anything from five, up to ten, stories, with requests taken for each copy.
• A mixture of typed and handwritten pages.
• Original photography and cover artwork by some smart artist types
• Unique contents and sequencing; each copy having an individual order and sequence of pictures and stories.
• Rewritten and edited versions of stories
• Unpublished stories not yet included on the website
• Script excerpts and other bits and pieces and rareities I can dig out.

Should anybody want one of these; then all you have to do is let me know your postal address. I’ll take care of any and all delivery and postage charges, and the book, once again, is free, as a thankyou for taking the time to find the site and keep me writing. Whilst I do this stuff for me, ultimately I think we all want to find an audience or someone who likes what we do.
Simply comment with your address, or email your details in if you fancy getting your hands on one.

Thanks again for reading, and giving me people to write for.

Hope you enjoyed the twenty minute stories.

Thanks to  Keith for his fantastic effort also (if you have not already (why not?) read all the Guest Stories)

If you still fancy writing a twenty minute story, I’d still love to see it and stick it up here, so have a go and send it in. It’s good for the soul I promise.

Just to let people know the Portfolio page is now somewhat alive and up. As well as some information on my screenplay Talking of Michelangelo. If you like what you see here, take a look.

I have a week off for half term, and the hard drive on my laptop with all my current stories has - for no real reason - died uncompromisingly on me.

So part to to kick creativity back into gear, part to give my very (very) few readers something to actually read I’ll be writing a twenty minute story every day this week.

Read them, enjoy them (I hope), send me your feedback.

Most importantly, I’d like anyone who reads one of the stories and either likes or hates them (hate is often better for this) who sits there thinking either “I wish I could do that” or “I could do that far better than this joker”. Give it a go yourself! It’s only twenty minutes, one third of an hour.

Any stories I recieve that I like, I’ll post on the main page. It’s open week at Holding Patterns basically.

Email your stories to lane dot tom at gmail dot com
(No spaces) and I’ll put them up.

Tom

You can now read my list of the records of the year, I didn’t quite realise how long it would take me until I started trying to whittle down a shortlist. A short, snappy, list turned into a bit of a marathon. Sorry about that.

If you love them, hate them, have any comments, then drop me a line.
I don’t seem to be able to get into the holding patterns mail at the moment, so you can get me at:
Lane.tom @ gmail.com,
unless you are writing about me not including Devendra Banhart, or one of his fifty two spin-off bands. Because he’s terrible.

Ben has a substantially better written, (and shorter) list up in the fishbowl. And if you are going to read Pitchfork’s list, do remember to take everything they say with a pinch of salt.

Also you might see the emergence of a portfolio on the sidebar. In a few days I’m hoping this’ll have a full CV of the screenplays and series I’ve written and created. Along with some excerpts, synopses, artwork, and anything else I can dredge out of my computer’s hard drive.

Hope everyone had a good christmas and a good past twelve months. Happy 2006!

Tom