PROFESSIONAL HEADACHE

As I was saying to a friend of mine yesterday, two years ago, even a year ago, I would never have thought I'd actually be involved in the publishing industry. I'm hardly Mr BigWig but every step's a progression towards a goal, or something like that anyway. And with this exciting new territory comes unexpected hurdles, such as contractual obligations (I'm sure 'obligments' is a word but Google Chrome spell-checker doesn't seem to think so), professional etiquette and things like that. It's all rather exciting though, even if there's the fear that what works for one person may not work for another, thereby souring the deal. I also tend to be pretty friendly via email (or as friendly as text can insinuate, without have to resort to littering correspondence with shitloads of smilies) but I'm also not afraid to be quite blunt, so I need to find a happy medium between the two, if such a thing is possible. Because as with any business, you become the face of it if you're dealing with customers, so you need to be as polite and courteous as possible (I think) whilst maintaining any standards or beliefs associated with that business. It's a tough balancing act, one that often precipitates a steep learning curve on the way to some blue sky thinking, in order to shift a lot of units. Indeed, in this hectic world there's no time to correctly format a block of text or waste time doin rporer spelchecks on something because we're all so busy trying to be professional and *KKRSSZZRTT*

Whoops, accidentally slipped into Office Worker Mentality there for a moment. There is no need to act like some self-obsessed twat when being nice and polite is just as effective, thank you very much. Let's all be nice to each other, without worrying about targets and deadlines for once. Seesh!

Which reminds me, I watched THE CHILDREN last night. That contains a self-obsessed twat as a main character, and a cool uncle. Cool uncle gets it first. He was the only character I actually cared about because he felt the most believable/real, so well done for getting rid of him and leaving us with a bunch of middle class idiots who spend 97% of their time shrieking. THE CHILDREN has to be one of the most hysterical films I've ever seen (as in overwrought, not funny).

Thankfully, it had decidedly glacial cinematography and pretty decent direction to stop it being annoying. Although the editing didn't help. Boy, did I got distracted/put off a few times whilst watching it, no thanks to weird pacing and inclusion of random violent inserts that may or may not have supposed to have been the inner workings of the kid's brains (the children in the film catch some sort of virus that turns them into killers). This might have been more evident if it had happened in more than just one scene, or better yet, not at all.

Ultimately, I didn't care about anyone in the film, which makes it difficult to pay attention. Not that my attention wandered off, I just hoped the idiots left would be killed off quickly so something worthwhile could happen. There are a couple of excellent kills/gags in THE CHILDREN, mind you, but I won't give them away here. Let's just say someone might not be quite as dead as you think, and that an infamous scene from a Fulci zombie film (I'm pretty sure it's one of his I'm thinking about) gets just about topped by a bit in this one, via a similar kill method.

And if those do count as spoilers, sue me for breach of contract why don'tcha? Oh wait, you don't have one! Ahh sucked in!