Monday 4th February 2013

I only had a couple of dates this month into which I could slot the auditions for the improvised play that I'm going to be directing at the NVT this May. Well, actually, I could have held some auditions on the Thursday after next, but I imagine that not that many people would have liked to have come out on Valentine's night. The first available date was February the 8th, and it was only this weekend that I realised that that was actually this week, and I hadn't done anything particular about the auditions - like actually telling anyone. This meant that there were lots of frantic typing out of audition notices that need to be printed out and delivered to the NVT, with the full knowledge that none of them will get delivered to members before the first audition. I remain confident that I will be at least this organised throughout the entire production.

In fact, I almost missed the deadline to knock up some kind of basic image for the fringe brochure, as it is meant to be all done and dusted by today (Monday). Since the whole idea for this production is that it's meant to be a completely different and entirely improvised play each night, it's not exactly as if there's a unifying image - or even theme - that we can sell the production on. My mind was a complete blank, which isn't exactly a great frame of mind for someone who's meant to be training up a group of improvisers for the next couple of months. Luckily, I was able to throw a panicked phone call to Tamsin Fraser, who has created a great many of the posters for New Venture Theatre productions (including the brilliant ones for Four Play and Medea). Given no time whatsoever, she was able to turn around a lovely image inspired by (read: in spite of) by incoherent ramblings.

Over the weekend, I was able to join in with a friends birthday celebrations, at a bar in Brighton called The Hope. It's a very popular and cool place, and as a consequence, I had never been before. As well as being slightly overwhelmed by just how good looking the birthday girl's friends all were (and, indeed, the birthday girl herself), I was very engaged by how friendly the bar was. I don't think I've ever really been to a bar or a pub where a complete stranger just strikes up a causal, friendly conversation. Admittedly, that may have more to do with the types of places I usually do my drinking (and definitely has something to do with the fact that I spent a couple of years working behind the bar of a Wetherspoons), but this was pretty much new to me. It was the kind of place that the opener 'Mate, are you looking at my girlfriend?' would be followed by 'Yes, she's gorgeous, you make a lovely couple,'

Having said that, I did find myself dancing with a girl because, seemingly, her boyfriend didn't want to. There's a couple of factors at play here, not least the minor issue that I have no idea how to dance (actually, there's also the issue that I have no idea how to respond when approached by an attractive woman, but we won't dwell for too long on that). The other factor is that the fact that this girl picked me up (at one point quite literally; it was some kind of jive, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the one leading) led to at least some degree of tension between her and her non-dancing boyfriend. I only know this anecdotally, since my back was to them when they were having their 'discussion'. I kept my back to them throughout this because, while I already knew that I can't really dance, it remains true that I thus far am able to use my legs for walking and stuff like that, and I was pretty keen to keep things that way. Things were apparently resolved, however, because the girl took me dancing once more (literally, out of approximately eighty men in the room, quite possibly the worst dance partner she could have gone for), and her boyfriend did a good show of applauding gamely at the end. And didn't give me a black eye, which I think we can put in the 'plus' column.

In the meantime, I'm still struggling to get 'Broom Handle', a short story I've been tinkering with for a few months, to quite work. It's sci-fi, or more accurately speculative fiction, a genre that I do t have a great deal of experience in writing, and there's far too much exposition going on at the moment. I think the emotional pay-off at the end still works, but the journey there is very baggy and saggy (in fact, 'baggy and saggy' is about the level of far too many paragraphs, and it's not even like I'm writing Bagpuss slash fiction). I think I've worked out the solution to give the story a bit more pace, but I've not yet quite worked out to apply that solution. As I've mentioned before, it would be easy and very tempting to just junk the whole thing in now - it's only 4,000 words or so - but the fact that there's an incoming deadline is a great leveller. That said, I'm glad that the deadline is not until the end of March, since I think it will take me roughly that long to wrestle the damn thing into some kind of legible prose.