Today is a momentous one. After two years and countless trips – since if I’m honest it took far more than the 33 listed here – finally I’m launching The Devil’s Plantation website. For anyone reading, especially those who subscribe to this blog, I want you to be the first to see it. Naturally I’m quite nervous from several angles – whether the site actually works, or if anyone will look at it and if they do, will they…

Tonight it was announced that my love-labour, The Devil’s Plantation is nominated in the Interactive Category for the 2010 BAFTA New Talent Awards. Needless to say I’m delighted. But I’m also very pleased for my only competitor, a wonderful woman, Helen Jackson, from Binary Fiction whose website The Lost Book, I actually stumbled on last year. And a very good site it is too. I reckon she’ll win, and I mean it sincerely because her work is…

As Jason Bourne hits 95kph on the M10 from Sheremetyevo Airport to Central Moscow, I’m on the back seat of his VW Passat wondering if I’ll reach my destination in one piece. This is stunt driving like I’ve never known in a city that already feels familiar. Under heavy skies, wide highways are fringed with tower blocks, toothstumps in the mouth of the Moscow suburbs, all the more prominent on this vast, flat terrain. This is cityscape on a…

On Saturday 23rd February,The Devil’s Plantation finally screened at the Glasgow Film Festival. Billed as an eagerly-awaited world premiere, it was only completed last Wednesday, the day I learned it had sold out. To say I was surprised is an understatement.

On the morning of the screening, I rush to the GFT to check that the film is glitch-free. Here I meet Barney McCue, their legendary chief projectionist, who tells…

Like most things connected with this project, chance plays a large part. Enter Arild Tveito – a Norwegian artist who has spent five months in residence at the CCA, Glasgow. A couple of weeks ago Arild contacted me to ask if I would screen The Devil’s Plantation to accompany the launch of his publication, Elucidations. This will take place on Friday June 20th – which also happens to be my wedding anniversary.

Arild told me he had caught the…

To mark a decade since work began on The Devil’s Plantation I’m writing this post as a coda to sum up my feelings about the project and how for the last four years events have conspired to keep me involved.

Made with the support of the Scottish Arts Council’s Creative Scotland Awards in 2007, the project was originally proposed as a film until the SAC informed me that as a filmmaker I couldn’t practice in my own field (unlike writers,…