Had my first day of classes at VFS today. Sort of. Yesterday they basically just read sections of the student handbook out loud to us. Today we did "team building" all day. This is your basic set of improv games and psychological exercises designed to get us functioning as a group.

The group in question is 15 people, from a wide range of backgrounds. Five or six from the US, three from the UK, one from China, three from Vancouver and a handful from other parts of Canada, parts of the Caribbean, etc. We're about two-thirds male, and overwhelmingly white. At the moment we're doing a pretty good job of playing together. Of course this is what's supposed to happen in the early stages. We broke down the stranger walls pretty quickly. But eventually we'll start having conflicts and stuff. I guess this is designed to teach us how to deal with those situations without destroying the group.

We also got issued a bag o' books. Most of it was the kind of stuff you'd expect. McKee, Vogler's The Writer's Journey, both books I already had. No Syd Field which I would have expected, but there was Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, and Linda Seger's Making a Good Script Great. And the Cole/Haag guide to script formats, which looks like a really useful little bible even though I mostly know how to format my stuff.

And an unlabelled videotape. No idea what that is. Hopefully it doesn't kill you seven days later or anything.

So things are ramping up here. John Vorhaus, writer of The Comic Toolbox, is doing a comedy writing workshop here in a couple weeks and we apparently get in for free. So that'll be cool, even though it will eat my weekend. Basically, after a fair bit of time off to explore Vancouver and stuff, it's back to work.