Thursday 29th May 2014

Have just got back from being a few days writing in a converted barn in the middle of the woods, which is either the most middle-class I'll ever get, or it's the prelude to a particularly nasty movie in which my dismembered remains are discovered nailed to a wall by country folk in a ill-advised attempt to make sure that the crops don't fail again this year. Either way, it's been gorgeous. 

I've spoken before about how tough it can be to get any writing done, how it can be a challenge to get stuff down on the page when you've already done a full day at work, and there's only fifty minutes before you've got to get out for a rehearsal / performance / workshop / whatever, and that's not even taking into any account any time you might want to set aside for eating and basic social interaction. And, yes, you might want to argue that the level of time poverty I put up with is somewhat self-inflicted, and I hear y', but, rest assured - it will be an argument. I mean, I get what you'd be saying - something has to give, right? I can't be rushing from here to there, constantly spinning plates. And, yes, that's true. But I rather suspect that if I put one thing aside - directing that play, or delivering those workshops, for instance - then I would simply be feeling quite twitchy at home, wondering if I wasn't wasting my time just a little. While watching Young Sherlock Holmes for, like, the twentieth time. What? Shut up. Young Sherlock Holmes is Harry Potter for the eighties generation. The arch enemy kid is even a posh boy with blonde hair. 

What I've really enjoyed about these last couple of days is the ability, the elbow room, to be able to spend as much time not writing as actually writing. Being able to circle the story before ripping it up and changing the order of the scenes. Being suddenly inspired by a completely irrelevant idea, that's enabled me to go back and fix a previously abandoned short story still sitting on my USB. At some point, spending slightly too much time on a app that allows me to create funky book covers for the kindle editions of my short stories - short stories that I haven't actually finished yet. Just having the time to stare into space - occasionally literally stare into space (we identified two planets), while thinking of the next plot point. 

And through it all, a minor note of disquiet. The usual minor note that I get, that's always laced in my feeling of yes-I-can-do-this when my writing is going well. That warning note that reminds me that my timetable won't always be like this - from next week, it will be back to normal - an average of - what? twelve hours a day given over to the day job and commuting to and from it. Look, I'm not complaining (note: obviously I'm complaining), but it's occurred to me a couple of times this week that I should definitely ensure that I'm managing a good block of writing EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. No matter what else is going on, no matter how tired / uninspired / comprehensively untalented I feel. But, yes, I already knew that. I've already told myself that. I've probably already told myself that on this blog. 

So, yes, I'm just telling myself that again. And reminding myself that there will still be days when I don't feel like writing, when I just don't want to do it. But it's worth reminding myself that if I only have half a hour to write then - well. Then I can do what the hell I want in that half hour. And that includes not writing, and not having to feel guilty about it. 

But the main thing is: I have an entire play to write this summer. And in the past three days, I managed to hack out a fairly decent first draft. For just this moment in time - I'm feeling pretty hopeful.  

Methods Of Work Avoidance # 2365

In between writing re-drafts (no, really), I have also found the time to create a avatar of myself via the website BitStrips.I'm fully aware I may have created  a generously attractive   version of myself, but screw it, it's my cartoon,and so I'll do what the hell I like.  

Friday 12 July 2013

Last night I managed to finish writing a play that I’d been working on. OK, it was only a ten minute play, but I still have a pretty keen sense of achievement – even more so, since I’d managed to finish it (final draft, an’ all) a full two days before the actual deadline. Normally, I find myself hacking out the third or fourth draft just a few hours before the final submissions are being accepted. And while I do refer to myself as a ‘writer’ on various websites and twitter feeds, this is why I’m somewhat wary of describing myself as such in real life. 

You see, writers actually write things. They get things done. I can’t always claim that great honour. Sure, I have ideas. Some of them are pretty good ideas. Some of those pretty good ideas would make well received books and TV programmes; because I’ve seen other people have the same ideas, and write the books and TV programmes before I did. And that’s the point, of course: anybody can have ideas. Ideas are cheap currency; ideas are all around us, over-laden fruit on trees. I sincerely believe that writers who complain that they can never come up with ideas are simply not recognising that at least half of the thoughts they’ve had that day are in fact ideas that could potentially make a good story. But that’s a blog entry for another day.

This blog entry, however, is about the ideas that I do have, but never actually develop into a full script. Most writers will recognise this: a new and shiny, sexy and exciting idea that’s fun to write for the first thousand words or so, and then – well, then, it feels too much like hard work. Particularly if  writing isn’t actually your day job, and you have to fit in between shifts of your actual hard work. And then, horror of horrors, you end up having another new and shiny, sexy and exciting, brand new idea that suddenly seems a helluva lot more alluring that the crappy old idea that isn’t cooperating with you right now. So you drop that idea, and move onto the new – until the cycle repeats itself, again and again. I’d argue that, even if you’re writing two thousand words a day, if you’re not actually finishing anything – if there’s nothing produced at the end of the day that has a beginning, middle and an end – well, then: you don’t actually get to call yourself a writer. I say this, and yet I’m still figuring it out for myself.

Even that’s being overly romantic about it. That line about it seeming too much like hard work? That’s uncomfortably near the truth. A lot of us so-called writers don’t actually write (or, more specifically, re-write, edit and finish) our work because of sheer laziness. That’s it, nothing more noble or mysterious than that. Oh, yeah, sure, there’s other stuff , like fear of success (not fear of failure, you’ll notice. But the crippling fear that somebody will like what you’ve produced, and expect that you can come up with more of the same). But there’s only one way to get past that: just get the stuff written. Now, some of you might have a sneaking suspicion that I’m writing this much more for my benefit than yours, and in that you would be entirely correct (let’s face it, the only reader who bumps up the hit counter on this blog is me myself when I’m trying to check if anyone else has wandered past).

And stuff gets in the way of your writing. I mean, literally. I started this blog on my way to work, and had to break off from writing when real life got in the way. I had a whole eloquent point to end on, that I could write up in my lunch break. Well, it’s now my lunch break, and the eloquent point has entirely vanished. No idea what the hell I wanted to talk about. Now, the other option would have been to junk this blog altogether. But, what exactly would have been the point of that? Now you, who have invested two minutes in reading this might have something to say about that. If I hadn’t committed to  actually writing and completing this blog, then right now, you’d be two minutes in credit. But let’s face it, what would you have done with those two minutes? (Don’t answer that. If anything you’re thinking of right now could be completed within two minutes, you probably don’t want to advertise the fact)

Sometimes – often, in fact – you’re going to have to write the crap in order to get to the good stuff. Maybe a hell of a lot of crap. But maybe, just maybe: you end up writing something decent. As long as you understand that it will almost always in that order. 

Saturday 29 June 2013

So, this time last week (God, has it been a week already? How the hell did that happen?) I tried to organise a picnic/barbecue thing on the beach. Of course, I know, and you know, that as soon as you say those sort of things out loud, then the weather will be against you. And so it came to pass that there were pretty healthy winds all day long, which effectively (very effectively, in fact) put paid to any chances of spending time whatsoever outside. This Saturday, things are different. This Saturday, there was a full day rehearsal with the youth theatre, so it was pretty much inevitable that today would be the first day of 2013 where there would be more than two hours of uninterrupted warm sunlight (please don't message me to tell you that, actually,  you've had loads of days of brilliant sunshine: we're talking about my experience here. My experience may admittedly be significantly a lot more boring than yours, but we happen to be on my blog, and not yours. Of course, you could argue - very successfully - that the reason that you don't have a blog is precisely because your experience is less boring than mine, and I'm really not going to argue with you on that point). 

Like most people who write a blog (with the honorable exception of Richard Herring) I've let it go a bit fallow without updates this month. This is mainly because of the festival fringe production I was directing (which I really, really will chat about in more detail in a couple of posts time), but a few other things have happened in the meantime. I guess the main thing most recently was turning forty. This, in fact, was the main reason for attempting a beach picnic/barbecue type of thing. Many people have been asking me - quite intensely, in fact - if I've bothered by this milestone. They ask with such intensity, in fact, that I've begun to wonder if it isn't to facilitate their own sense of glee at a fellow human being falling apart and crumbling to dust before them than any actual concern they might have for my well-being. But the fact is, I feel like I was born at the age of forty, so getting to the actual physical age is no great hardship. Of course, traditionally, this is the point in time when a man is supposed to have a  mid-life crisis, but since I'm not exactly adverse to the idea of suddenly having a classic car and a girlfriend who's all sorts of wrong for me, I'm not exactly sure that it will be any kind of crisis at all. 

There are probably lots of things that did or didn't happen while I was far-too-busy to keep the blog updated, but the thing that springs to mind was getting to the long list for a writing competition. Now, I'm hopelessly naive about these sort of things. I wasn't even aware that there was such a thing as a long list. I know, logically, that there must be - that would make a lot more sense of the phrase 'short list', but it wasn't really something that I gave much thought. So when I originally got the email telling me that I hadn't made the short list, I took that as a standard rejection, and thought no further about it, other than to redraft the story (for what was probably about the tenth time, now). I rewrote it with the critical eye of a story that had, in fact, been rejected. I think the changes that I made were actually pretty important, and vital - indeed, how had I missed them the first nine times? - and made the story a helluva lot better. That done, I sent the story off again (to its third chance). 

I hadn't really read the rejection email until weeks later, and it was only then that I discovered that my name was on the long list. Sure, it was still a 'rejected' entry, but I wasn't exactly sure what long list actually meant, believe it or not. For a moment there, I did wonder if it was simply a list of all the stories that had been entered - literally, a long list. Turns out, not. Apparently, there was over a thousand entries, and the long list was under 100 stories. As 'rejections' go, that's pretty good odds. As I say, I have already redrafted the story and improved it. The long list (now that I actually know what that phrase means) gets announced at the end of next week. It might not be third time lucky. 

But, then again .. 

Sunday 6th January 2012

This is it, then, my last real day off for the first section of 2013. Well, I have the first in a new series of improv workshops starting tonight at 7.00 (http://thisisandrewallen.weebly.com/ironclad-improv.html), but you get the idea. Ideas have been kicking around successfully for a week or so now, I've had lots of alluring conversations with various people about just how possible, how reasonable, it would be to sign up to casting agencies and the like, and I fully have faith in work tomorrow having the ability to kick those ideas in the teeth, and steal its wallet. And possibly write something rude on the toilet wall. I'm no longer sure that I'm still talking metaphorically.

The reason I'm choosing to openly moan about it is an attempt, perversely, to keep it at bay. This blog has so far been updated daily (we'll see how long that lasts, shall we?), and that's only because it's an attempt to keep some kind of writing going on every single day. That doesn't mean that the writing is necessarily going to be any good, but it does enable me to sharpen my pencil, so to speak. It's so easy, otherwise, particularly if the main thrust of your physical and emotional energy goes into the day job, to allow two, three days to go by without actually doing anything creative. You just don't have the energy. And if three days go by, it may as well be five - the full working week. By that time, you've got to the weekend, and you feel that you deserve a rest. Then, of course, you're back to work. Before you know it, a year has gone, and that script you keep telling everybody that you're going to finish still hasn't been started.

Of course, a blog is simply a much more public way of doing that. Much more embarrassing, and deliberately so. I don't kid myself that a great many people read this blog (although the number goes up slightly when I'm doing a Doctor Who feature), but I'm always slightly startled when people I know mention to me, in person, that they actually read my blog. There's the old joke about the guy talking to everybody about the novel that he's writing ... year after year, after year. Eventually, people stop listening, since it's obvious to all (with the possible exception of the writer themselves) that they're never actually going to write the damn thing. They become - deservedly so - an object of derision.

Is that what I'm trying to do, then, with this blog? Set myself up as an object of ridicule? You wouldn't have thought that I would have had to look that hard for such opportunities. But I rather think I am. Or at least, give myself less wriggle room to avoid finishing that script/short story/theatre project/whatever. I always argue that I'm not quite where I want to be because my job doesn't quite let me be where I need to be, and I don't have enough of a financial cushion to simply jump ship. Now, that's all true; it's not simply a self-blinkering excuse. But, however inarguable it is - I mean, when it comes down to the harsh facts, I'm right - it doesn't change the facts that - well, that the facts aren't going to change. You have to work within the boundaries you're given, up to the point when you discover (or, more likely, are able to engineer) the way to break those boundaries.

Of course,it's the new year vibe making me think this way, and I sincerely hope I can continue the momentum throughout the next couple of months. But the other thing that's focussing me is the undeniable fact of me hitting 40 this year. I'm not much of a one for birthdays, and rarely draw attention to them. I feel so strongly about this that I made a point of removing my birthday details from Facebook a couple of years ago: I remember being startled one year by a stream of people putting birthday greetings on my wall. I had at least two minutes of honestly believing that people had remembered my birthday before realising that it had come up automatically on their news feed, and that others had merely seen them post Happy Birthday on my wall. While the sentiment was lovely and appreciated, it was essentially meaningless: for my money, I'd be more taken by someone who, in mid conversation in late October, suddenly went 'Oh, hang on, did I forget your birthday?'. I'd consider that more a more genuine and heartfelt birthday greeting than twenty people who simply jabbed in two words onto my Facebook wall just because they saw someone else do it. Maybe I'm just reading too much into things, being too grumpy. This is why I don't have too much of a problem about turning forty, basically because I appear to have been born at the age of 43.

But a couple of people have already said that I should mark the passing of time this birthday, particularly as I generally avoid doing so at every other one. But, it's not like 40 is even a 'special' birthday in any way; it's only of merit in the way that it's a neat rounding up of a number. I'm not even sure what 40 year olds are meant to do these days. When I was a kid, a 40 year old had a mid life crisis and worried about what sort of lad their daughter was marrying. Now, it seems, more and more 40 year olds haven't actually left home yet.

I'll Get Around To It

Something odd happened with my Facebook last night. I'm not sure why, but each time I left a comment, or updated my status, the little image that appeared next to whatever I'd written - in theory, my profile pic - showed an image of a different woman. The first picture was that of Ariana Huffington (of the Huffington Post, obviously), and I wondered initially if something had got into my system meaning that anyone that I was friends with, or whose pages I subscribed to, would now show as my profile picture.

It didn't seem to be the case, though, as the picture changed each time I refreshed the page, and the next few people I didn't recognise at all, but they all seemed to be the kinds of photos that you occasionally get on an unsolicited follower on twitter; the kind that follows 95,3977 other people, has never tweeted, has a disturbing sounding web address, and a photo where they're pouting from behind a tangle of tousled hair. And I don't actually know anyone like that. Well, no more than six.

Clearly something had infected my Facebook profile, but it was odd that all the images being touted as me were all female. I've never before picked up a virus from a variety of different women (oh, please; you should be ashamed of yourselves) and I didn't really know what to do. Well, actually, I did; I reacted to this problem in the way that I react to rather too many: I didn't really do anything, in the assumption that everything would probably sort itself out. You'd be surprised how often this is successful. Although if you've received a email from me in the last 24 hours claiming that I've got video footage of you doing something obscene, I'd imagine you can probably dismiss and delete it without too much concern about your personal liberty.

I guess there's one major reason why I put off doing anything about those things sent to try me, and it's the old demon procrastination. There are many theories as to why people procrastinate, but it does seem to be deeply ingrained into a great many of us. It's one of the reasons why I'm writing this blog; so that my writing becomes more habit than chore. I missed writing yesterday's blog simply because I couldn't think of a damn thing to talk about; and even just that single one-day pause was a real scattering of tacks in the road: it became stupidly difficult to get the groove going again to begin writing today's entry.

In order to further combat this continual threat of artistic lethargy, in November, I'm going to be taking part in NaNoWriMo. This is an annual event, which takes place each November, in which thousands of people across the world who don't know any better attempt to hack out an entire novel in a month (the name stands for National Novel Writing Month, see?). The main logic behind this is that many people who consider themselves writers speak at great length about this book that they're going to write, while never actually writing it, because life, jobs, family and love gets in the way. But of course, they'll always be in the way, and NaNoWriMo serves as a catalyst to actually stop coming up with excuses and get the damn thing done.

There are two particularly brilliant conceits with the success of NaNoWriMo, one somewhat unavoidable, but the second ingenious. The first simply comes from the fact that everyone is attempting to write a novel in a month; the same month. No matter that such an undertaking is insane, it combats the usual problem that most writers have to deal with at some point, insomuch that writing is a particularly solitary activity, there's not really anyone else around to feel your pain. In November, however, there are potentially millions of people online, all cheerfully ready to acknowledge that their efforts are worse than yours.

Which brings us to the second point of success: it's written into the rules of NaNoWriMo that you should consider it unimportant how good your novel is. This is one competition where quantity truly is more important that quality: all that matters is that you get those 50,000 words down in some sort of coherent narrative order. The polishing, detailing - many authors would say the actual hard work of the real writing - can come after November, once you've got past that first, almost always insurmountable hurdle of actually getting a story written. For a serial procrastinator like me, it means that all the usual excuses and logical reasons of why I don't get round to findings hong such and such a play, or completing that 20 minutes of stand up, have been ruthlessly swept away. There are no excuses to not write: you simply write.

I should point out, I have tried NaNoWriMo before, about four years ago. I lasted one day, and 600 words.

I'll let you know if I do any better this time round.

Bye Bye Baby, Sci-Fi

A couple of hundred words today on 'Broom Handle'. Not many, but they feel like important words, because I'm starting on the actual background details of the story, the whys and wherefores of the world I've created, rather than the narrative and plot. There's a problem, though: this story is sci-fi. And sci-fi sucks.

The thing is, I don't actually like sci-fi all that much. I mean, to watch, in film and TV, then great, but I've rarely come across sci-fi book (or speculative fiction, as it's increasingly being called) that I've really been blown over by. Of course, you could argue that that's simply because I'm not looking hard enough, and that would be largely true. I've not read any Phillip K Dick, for instance, and very little Ray Bradbury (although it was a collection of Bradbury short stories that first inspired this story). No Asimov, no Arthur C Clarke, very little John Wyndham (which I really should rectify at some point). I seem, rather, to have gotten trapped in reading, or trying to read, very poor sci-fi, stories that spend far too much time setting up this strange new world that's entirely normal to its inhabitants, but needs to be described in exposition heavy detail to the audience. I remember going to a couple of writers groups in Worthing, when I still lived there. Authors were invited to read extracts from whatever they were working on. On one particular session, a chap spent forty minutes describing in loving detail a post apocalyptic world in which women ruled, and men didn't wear the trousers. He wasn't talking figuratively. He literally meant that all the menfolk were banned from wearing anything below the waist. In the end, the person running the evening had to guide him off the stage.

It's not always like that, I should point out. I only managed two writers groups in Worthing, but at the second, the mood was somewhat grim. Everyone who had read had exhubrent confidence that was in direct inverse proportion to the talent that they displayed. More tension filled the room as everyone realised that no matter how much they hated everyone else's work, it was still better than anything they could produce. Eventually, an overly serious looking teenage girl stood up. She told us she was going to read us her poem. The room tensed even more; poetry is challenging enough even when it's in a book that you bought yourself. Then, as a final aperitif, she informed us that it was about her best friend who had died in a car crash a few months before. The tension felt quivering enough to snap: most of the stuff already read that night had been between mediocre and terrible, but it hadn't been introduced with the baggage of a dead best friend. She began to speak. It was, of course, beautiful. Simple, elegant, unfussy. Just a regretful goodbye to a young woman who had died far too soon. Somehow, she kept her composure throughout. The same couldn't be said of her audience.

Partially it was because that grieving teenager was a skilled writer, tapping into simple emotions and reactions, that brought out the best in her words, but it's also true that there's something about sci-fi that seems to bring out the worst in people, full of exposition and explanation by characters who don't need to explain the universe they live in, because they live in it. It's what I'm struggling with slightly in Broom Handle: there's a few details I need to explain, but I don't want to go overboard; just because we, the readers, don't know what's going on, doesn't mean that the characters are in the dark as well. That said, I'm a great fan of trusting an audience's intelligence: even if they don't exactly know what's going on, they're quite happy to play catch up. For instance, George Orwell's 1984 drops you right into another world without explanation from, literally, the first sentence, and trusts that you'll work out what's going on. It's about finding the balance.

Broom Handle is only a short story, of course - it's probably going to come in at about 4000 words - but I'm fond of it already because it's really the first story where I've had the initial idea, and actually managed to get it down on paper, before it fell apart like a badly mixed cake (or, indeed, like an ill-chosen metaphor). Quite often, I'll come across the first three pages of a story that I began writing some years previously. And the first three pages are pretty good. And the only ones that have been written. And here's the crunch: I have absolutely no idea what to do with the story. The white heat of the initial idea has long since faded, leaving only a dull, uninspired blank.

This blog, of course, helps. Obviously, it gets in the way (I'm writing this paragraph when I could be writing the opening paragraph of my next story), but I find that it's begun to focus me, if only to remind me that jotting down a few words in the evening could easily be a few hundred. And not be that much of a chore.

Fear Of Peers

Good, but strenuous, rehearsal tonight. I don't think I was communicating my intentions or wants as a director particularly well, which meant that my cast (of one woman) spent a lot of time feeling her way in the dark, trying to work out what I was on about. Not literally feeling her way in the dark, of course. I'm not like Werner Herzog. Although, that might be a good warm up exercise for another time.

The other thing that was interesting for me was that while I was directing my leading lady (Sarah), we were visited by my last leading lady (Sarah). It shouldn't rattle me. But it did, slightly. Whilst we get on well, and while I think she enjoyed her time on Medea, I was very aware that she herself is a director, and one who speaks with straight-to-the-point clarity, whereas I can sometimes be guilty of chatting around a subject in order to get to the point, rather than taking a direct route. Both ways have their value, but it's easy to get very self conscious.

We all know of, and in some cases, have worked with poor directors ( I've noticed that I started that sentence with 'we', somehow assuming that anyone reading this blog is definitely involved in some way with theatre. While that's certainly very likely, it's by no means guaranteed.) These are the directors who passively offer no opinion (or, indeed, direction), or at the other end of the scale, stamp their opinion on absolutely every aspect of the production, meaning anything about the actual script is pulverised. I would give examples, but that would mean, you know, giving examples.

I like to think that I'm a pretty good director. I talk slightly too much in the early stages, but in context, I think it's a forgivable sin. Interestingly, even now I can feel myself channelling a director I used to know almost twenty years ago, when I worked at a theatre in South London: CYTO, or the Croydon Youth Theatre Organisation. I can't ever remember him sitting down to direct, he was almost always on his feet. Quite a few directors do direct from a seated position, and insomuch as I've thought about it at all, it's always disquieted me somewhat. Certainly, I've never felt comfortable staying seated while directing. Maybe it's nervous energy; and that's certainly how I remember this director from twenty years ago, right down to the habit of clicking the fingers on both hands while trying to get his head around a concept or narrative problem. In recent years, I've begun to wonder if I've imagined, or invented that tic. It doesn't really matter, I suppose, even if I seem to have adopted that tic for myself.

So, most of the time, I think I've got a pretty good handle on what it is to be a director. I've got a certain style and approach that I return to, but that gets altered and shifted depending on what the project is. A knockabout farce with just four people is going to have different demands than a drug survival play with twenty five young people all aged under 18. But that's the thing, I know all that. But, if someone I know and respect is in the room, I suddenly feel like a fool and an idiot. Well, more so than usual. I feel like an amateur, like a snake oil salesman who's one paragraph away from being unmasked as the liar everyone has suspected him of being.

It's ridiculous, of course: both the women in the room have elected to work with me on a number of occasions, and both have asked my advice on creative and artistic matters. I have to be logical about this: they wouldn't do that just to be nice (actually, if we're going to be logical, it's entirely within the realms of possibility that they'd collaborate with me 'just to be nice', but that gets a bit too Truman Show and oddly egotistical to make a great deal of sense, so I have to put my faith in my lack of faith.)

In last nights rehearsal, I began talking about the image of Russian Dolls (you see how I talk around something rather than getting straight to the point?), and it's just occurred to me now that that's how the rehearsal itself felt - while was looking in on Sarah (my actor), hoping to guide and support her, I felt Sarah (my previous actor) looking in on me, offering guidance and support. Didn't always stop me feeling like I was being exposed as an idiot who didn't know what he was talking about. I don't know why I was worried: I achieve that quite well enough by writing this blog.

The Sound Of Deadlines As They Woosh By

So, I failed. Utterly. I had meant to complete at least 500 words for the short stories I'm working on at the moment, particularly as I'd missed my vague daily target of 1,000 on the previous two days. But, no luck: 500 might not seem a great deal, but the trick is to have them make some sort of coherent sense. Now, you may think that such concerns about coherence haven't previously constrained me before (such as in the writing of these blogs, for instance), but I feel compelled to make the occasional effort.

However, at the end of last night, I couldn't even manage the 500, ironically because I'd been entering that day's blog entry. Ironic because one of the main purposes in my keeping up to date with the blog is to ensure that I don't get too rusty with the writing. But I've decided not to feel too guilty about missing last nights writing session (although if the same happens tonight, then we have a problem). If I was going to beat myself up about the fact that I'd missed a night's writing (alright, three) then it would be very easy to get despondent, and go three weeks without bothering to flip open the pc. Better to keep the momentum going, even if you stray from the path for a couple of days. I imagine it's a bit like attitudes to giving up smoking. Now, I myself have never smoked, so I've never had to go through the whole trial of giving up, or trying to, but it seems to be that the problem is all contained within those two words, 'giving up'. There's not much wriggle room there; you're either a smoker, or you're not. You either still smoke, or you've managed to give up. So, when someone who is trying to give up has a faltering moment, and has 'just one' cigarette, then it's too easy to think that they've dropped from having 'given up', back to being a smoker. I've often thought that instead of 'giving up', we should try the phrase 'pausing'. Everyone's allowed to pause. And it means there 's no pressure: if you successfully 'pause' smoking for a good long while - say, three years - and you happen to take a puff of someone else's fag on new years eve, then no-one can judge you, it's not like you've fallen off the wagon; it's not like you now give up giving up, and go back to smoking 20 a day.

All of which is a tortuous way of saying that, despite the fact that I haven't written a great deal over the past couple of days, I'm not going to panic about it too much. Although, to be fair, you can only go so long, not writing, and still call yourself a writer. But I'd rather not get back into the groove of going too long without writing again. Too easy to let things go fallow, let the ideas wither into dull nothingness.

There are things to get in the way, however: there's another rehearsal for Three Kinds Of Me tonight, and both Thursday and Friday are taken up with Ghostwalks, which are beginning to have a different feel to them as the nights get darker.

I Think They Call It Grazing

A reasonable amount of writing today, although if I had an editor, they probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. My attention span seems to be slim for a writer. I've got about ten short stories on the go at the moment - which is great, it can be tough enough to come up with just one idea - but since one of my biggest problems (or do we still call it challenge these days?) as a writer is to actually finish the darn things, this can be something of a worry.

What I do then, is either a delaying tatic, or the best way forward, depending on what your view is. I spend a couple of hours on one story, and as I feel my interest begin to wane, or if there's a currently unsolvable problem that's about to demolish me, I jump ship to another story. I can't shake the feeling that this feels distinctly amatuerish, except for the fact that it seems to work. I certainly get more writing actualy done this way, rather than attempting the almost-always-failing method of re-working one page in an effort to get it exactly 'perfect' - whatever perfect means. I seem to work in this way even when I'm working on a single project - for instance, when I was writing 'Four Play', I intially wrote various keys scenes or jokes, then began to fill in gaps between them, before finally shifting them around, deleting them, re-writing, ignoring massive plot holes, writing the two scenes to bridge the plot holes, which would normally suggest only one logical thing between the two , write that .. and then, finally, have something approximating a coherent script. It probably isn't the most time-effective way to write, but it seems to have worked so far for me.

I'm a little concerned about work taking hours and mental agilty from me when I return next week, although it's true that for the first time in a year, I won't be working seven days a week. What is nice, however, is the messages of encouragement friends send regarding my writing, asking to see works in progress/finished stories. It's remarkably energising, and it's at least partially why I've been making an attempt to keep up this blog: while I'm painfully aware that there are few things more dull than a writer talking about writing (there's a fair chance that if they're talking to you about the novel that they're working on, that novel will never be completed), I use this blog to speak loudly and clearly to the three or four people who are actually reading it as a way of painting myself into a corner: if I have enough people asking me how the play/story/whatever is going on, there may be enough personal embarassment actor at stake to goad me into actually finishing the damn thing.

For the record, there are two projects (as a writer) that I'm working on at the moment: a re-write of 'Four Play', that I expect to take until at least the end of the year (which probably means that any new production won't be until at least well into the latter part of 2013), and a collection of short stories. As for the latter, I have no idea if short stories are fashionable at the moment or not - whatever I read on the subject seems to have conflicting views. But in any case, short stories seem to have a disipline all of their own - and the possibilty that they're about 150,000 words more likely to be finished.

Crown Jewels

Does anyone truly care about these photos of Prince Harry? I know I don't, and I'm starting this blog entry talking about them.

It's not exactly news; a Prince who's known for being a bit drunk and silly at times has spent an evening before going back into active service being a bit drunk and silly. I'm fuly aware that we're meant to expect a little more decorum from our princes - but we always have, and we've always been let down. After all, what else is Brighton's Royal Pavillion but the Prince Regent's dirty weekend getaway hut?

If anything, the people who should feel unable to look at themselves in the mirror this morning are those at The Sun who managed to come up with a reason to publish the photographs - being the first British newspaper to do so. Their main argument is that these photographs are freely available on the internet, and so it was 'perverse' to not publish them. I'm not sure I can follow this through as a sensible argument. Did The Sun's mother never ask the question regarding the age old problem: if everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you do it too? Apparently, yes - The Sun would be racing to that clifftop, elbowing small children and asylum seekers aside as it did so. There are lots of things that are freely available on the internet, but The Sun doesn't feel compelled to publish those (I'm thinking specifically of those pictures of cats doing amusing things. I have no idea where your mind just went).

The Sun claims that it's an issue of freedom of the press, that it should not be stifled or gagged. This in itself is a noble idea, and one that should be defended and celebrated, but freedom of speech does not mean that you are contractually required to say everything that comes into your head. Just because you can say something, doesn't mean that you have to. Freedom of speech gives you the marvellous chance to, on occasion, just shut the hell up.

The Sun's defence of its actions is reasonably shaky - I'm sure that on legal grounds, it's perfectly sound, but equally I'm convinced that we all know it's to justify the publication of some photographs of a rich boy with no clothes on. If the newspaper felt that some service was being provided by these photographs, maybe it could go to further extremes: each time there was a horrific car acident, perhaps the newspaper could splash some lurid pictures of the maimed victims, as a sombre and caring reminder to drive carefully. Maybe next to some Keith Lemon Movie vouchers. You know, to make sure the entire family is involved.