Good Ghostwalk last night. You can never really tell how it's going to go down from night to night, but last night's crowd were a fun bunch, full of banter and making all the right noises. Last week, I went to see one of my colleagues (Julian) do the Walk, and was somewhat put out to see that he had about forty or fifty with him that night. The most I've had so far this year is about thirty. I mean, I know (at least I think I do) that the general public don't spend time poring over the Internet to check which particular Ghost Walker they're gonna get, but it's still somewhat disquieting, and indeed, far too easy too take it all far too personally. I was also (as was the purpose of the visit) comparing and contrasting Julian's delivery of the stories to my own, and was pleased to see that our styles were sufficiently unlike each other so as to make such comparisons pointless. I did, however, find myself thinking 'he's a bit too good' somewhat too often. I always flattered myself that I don't do jealousy. Maybe I'm getting old. Perhaps I should kill him, that'll solve it.

Anyway, tonight, I'm stopping off at the NVT for their night of Short Fiction. I shouldn't be there at all, because I have a dinner engagement in Hove to get to (get me, being all sociable. I'm sure it's not the sort of dinner party on Hove you might be expecting. There probably won't be any hummus, and we'll probably only discuss Caroline Lucas once). But I will make a brief stop at the New Venture Theatre, and it's entirely egotistical.

You see, I'm having a short story of mine being read at the theatre tonight. As impressive as that might be (and I am impressed) it pales in light of the fact that I've actually finished a short story. This is pretty much unheard of. Like many people who laughably call themselves writers, I have far more ideas than I actually finish, and there are rather a lot of ideas that are still sitting around there in the upper attics of my mind, waiting for a final resolution.

I seem to be in the early stages of a bit of a creative kick at the moment, which is truly lovely and exhilarating, and I suspect it has a great deal to do with the fact that I don't really have enough time for it. I've always assumed I could get a lot more writing done if I just had a lot more time to myself (in fact I still do, of course I do, just chuck me twenty grand for the next year or so and well see, shall we?), but it also seems true that I've been knocking out more writing in the past month than I have done for a while, and I've only really had sections of fifteen minutes at a time with which to do it. As you might imagine, I find deadlines concentrate the mind wonderfully. Although I'm still not convinced that I've managed to give my story a suitable ending. You can judge for yourself tonight and tomorrow at the NVT, and tickets can be booked here: www.ticketsource.co.uk/newventuretheatre
There's plenty of other excellent stories from local writers, so there's stories for every taste, and the curator of the evening, Sarah Charsley, is an exceptionally lovely host, so it promises to be a lovely evening.

In the spirit of me seemingly only finding time to write when I don't really have time to write, I will be writing (and directing, I guess) a ten minute piece for the Brighton And Hove Arts Council to commentate the passing of the Olympic Torch through Brighton. More news on that once I've actually gotten around to writing it.

Which I haven't yet.

But, as I've mentioned, deadlines can really focus you.

The Long Walk

I was late for work today. Not by a great deal, but enough to make me tetchy and nervous. That's the thing when you rock up late to your job, you imagine (at least, I do) that everybody else is sitting in judgement, darkly commenting on your inability to do basic things like know the time. No matter that when it happens to someone else, you really couldn't care less. But it makes no difference: I still assume that my work colleagues have less than flattering things to say about me when I'm late. Actually, I assume that they have plenty of stuff like that to say even when I'm early, which probably points at some underlying paranoia stemming from the fact that my parents didn't buy me a BMX bike when I was a kid, and is probably more a complicated series of neuroses than we really have space to get into here.

Actually, talking about bikes, it was a puncture that caused my lateness this morning. I cycle to Hove station, and then cycle from West Worthing station in, well, Worthing, to work. Both cycling bits of the journey take just under ten minutes each. However, if I find myself without a bike, and have to walk, both take about half a hour each. That's a hour added to my morning journey, which isn't the best way to start your working day.

The closer I got to work this morning, the more frustrating this became - to be so close to my destination, a route that usually takes only about eight minutes, but to know that it was now going to take the length of an episode of The Big Bang Theory to get there, was pretty annoying. I began to wish that I could be taller, so that I could take longer strides, and have at least an outside chance of arriving on time. This would have advantages and disadvantages. True, I would get to more places more quickly, but once I'd arrived, there would be more people asking me what the weather was like up there.

A few years ago, I knew an extraordinarily good looking woman who happened to be reasonably tall - around six feet. The combination of these two factors meant that men who were attempting to hit on her in night clubs were fairly unoriginal in their approach. 'You're really tall!' they'd declare happily as their opening gambit, presumably under the impression that she hadn't spotted this physical anomaly for herself. After a while, her reply ended up being equally unoriginal: 'I know!', she'd answer, in the tone of voice one normally reserves for conversations with toddlers and victims of recent head trauma. She's married now, and I'd be willing to bet that the man who won her fair heart did so by the simple expedient of managing to find something else to discuss when they first met other than her height.

If we're honest, however, a hour at both ends isn't the worst hardship that can be added to my working day. I'm pretty sure both my parents had to walk even longer to get to school each day. Of course, this was rural Ireland in the 1950s, and they didn't get to catch a train for the middle portion. While we're at it, the train can be a bit of a strain, too, when you're carrying a bike. Even when you restrict yourself to those sections of the train that are specifically designed to carry bikes. People seem to delight in standing directly in the doorways, thereby getting in the way of everyone else trying to get on or off the train. This is even more exasperating when you've got a bike in hand, since many people seem to think that, as a cyclist, you absolutely shouldn't be allowed on board.

But, anyway. I shouldn't moan. I need to save my energy: it's nearly home time, and I've got a long walk back.

More Books Than I'll Ever Read #2: Our Country's Good

I've suddenly realised now that I've decided to share with you, and upload a photo of, every book I own, along with an admission as to whether I've actually read it or not, I'm going to out myself as something of a fraud. Or, at the very least, an idiot. You see, I'm not sure that I've read enough 'important' books.

Whatever 'important' means. I'm not even sure I've read more than a couple of Dickens. Perhaps that's why I'm doing this; to embarrass myself into finally reading that copy of Wuthering Heights that's been sitting in my bathroom for the last few months. As opposed to the copy of Calvin And Hobbes that's on top of it.

Today's book, however, I have actually read. By coincidence, like the first book I uploaded, it's a play, but this time, it's a play I was in, as opposed to directing. This would be at least fifteen years ago now, and I was playing Wisehammer, a failed writer who was mournfully in love with a woman he had no chance of succeeding with. That's worth mentioning, since it's a role I seem to have found myself cast in with alarming regularity in recent years. It's probably best not to focus too much on the whys and wherefores.

This copy isn't the one I used in that original production, back with CYTO (that's the Croydon Youth Theatre Organisation to its friends, and I won't go into too much detail about it right now, since I'm fairly confident we'll get the chance to do that before too long).

I picked up this copy of OCG in a charity shop in Hove a couple of years ago, because I genuinely liked the play, and it has a number of good scenes in it. At the time, I hadn't acted for a while; I had completed a BA in Theatre, and that had almost entirely extinguished any desire to perform, and any belief that I was in any way talented.

However, I had heard that the NVT (the New Venture Theatre, and, again, we'll get into the details at a later date) were producing Our Country's Good, and I felt that I might have something of a head start on finding a character, having played it (albeit possibly weakly) years before.

In the event, however, I didn't really have the courage to audition, and so delayed my joining of the NVT by a couple of years (that theatre degree had really damaged my acting mojo) but what I did notice is how many really great parts there are, even the walk on, growl, and leave ones. Each character is written with such wit and economy that you'd be happy to play a part of just five lines. Each character seems real, and breathing. As a (always delaying) writer, it's a master class in how to create rich characters in just a few short strokes.

It's a good lesson to learn, no matter what type of story teller you are: writer, director, deviser (and I've had varying degrees of success as all three). In short, as many How To Write books - and a character in 'Spaced' - will tell you: "Skip to the end."

So I will.

More Books Than I'll Ever Read #1: Medea

In the last month or so, I've had to buy about three more bookcases. Almost an entire wall of a not unsizeable room in my flat is now covered with heavily stacked book shelves.

I've lost count of exactly how many books I have, although I will concede that there might be a few doubles there. What is now very likely is that I own more books than I will ever have the chance to read before I die, even of one of those books has within its pages the secret of time travel and enables me to keep jumping back a few years to keep up to date. However, over the next number of .... days? Months? Years? .... I am going to attempt to upload a photo of each book I own, tell a story behind it, and, of course, an admission as to whether I've read it or not, and why. So, clearly, I'm not only a hoarder, but someone who feels the need to clutter up the Internet with my clutter.

This first book, Medea, I have actually read. Not only that, I've read it several times, and made loads of notes over it. This is because I'm directing it for the NVT Brighton in June.

It's a good translaton, by Tom Paulin (of Late Review), and the cast seem to be having fun with it. The inside pages are all scrawled over with lots of notes and ideas that presumably made some sense to me at some point. What's particularly fun is how often I've scrawled a question mark at random moments in the text.

However, as this is my first entry on the subject of books (and those ones I'll never read) I feel I should point out that I don't normally write in my books. For play scripts, it's fairly expected (you can now guess the date of a script mainly due to the absence of a highlighter marker), but with most other books, with the exception of text books, I suppose, it's considered something of a no-no. Presumably it's looked upon as some kind of graffiti. However, there have been times when I've picked up a second hand copy of something or other, only to discover that someone before me has doodled notes in the margins.

It's almost always pleasantly conversational, and has led me to muse that had I ever met the person who had made the notes, we would have probably gotten on quite well (it's clear that we have at least had similar taste in books).

If books are a form of telepathy, with the writer speaking across time and space to the reader, then the notes in the margin are the chatty friend who always has something to say.