In At The Deep End

Finally managed to go for a swim yesterday for the first time this year, which considering there's two swimming pools in easy distance, and I've got the English Channel at the bottom of my road, is pretty much unforgivable. I managed to do it in the end simply because I'm very aware that I'm in my last couple of days off from work right now, but also because of the damage I did to my shoulder earlier in the week. I thought, in some vague way, that swimming would do my shoulder some good.

So far, that seems to be the case, as my shoulder hurts significantly less this morning that it has all week. It wasn't always thus, though: while swimming, I was very weak on my right side, and wincing manfully (or something) as it was too painful to do a full stroke on the right hand side. I've never been a strong swimmer in any case, having never really learned to swim properly: as a kid, I just got into the water and largely suceeded at not drowning. Water seemed to be the great leveller, as I seem to remember the tough kids being surprisingly inept in the pool. But, as I say, I never had 'proper' swimming lessons, meaning that even when I have full use of all my limbs, I always end up being convinced that the onlooking lifeguards aren't there to potentially save my life; but more to sneer at my pathetic attempts to look like I can swim. But hopefully, I'll be able to take the start suggested by yesterday, and begin to swim more regularly.

However, next week is where things start really to kick in. On Monday is the first acting class of the new season at the New Venture Theatre, led by myself (I'll chat more about the details of that in the next blog), and for three nights of the next six weeks, I'll be working on a one-woman show, Three Kinds Of Me, which will be produced in early October. Right now, that seems like a reasonably long time away. I'm sure my opinion on how much time I have will drastically alter very soon. I'm still working on a couple of short stories, and expect to have a significant demand on my time in all of November, which I'll tell you about closer to the time.

And tonight, I have an extra Ghostwalk, this one being at the same time as Brighton Pride. I have no idea how that's going to go yet - the streets are likely to be somewhat busy because of everyone being, well, proud, but I'm not convinced that a lot of them will actualy make it out to the Walk. And, anyway, a lot of our core audience - kids - won't be dragged away from the living room tonight. For tonight, Doctor Who starts its 50th anniversary season. I'm very glad I live in the era of the iplayer ..

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.