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.

Icecream Sunday

A day off today. I'm not used to days off. I mean, obviously, I've just come off a few weeks holiday, but that's different. It's been a reasonable whack of time since I last had a regular, weekly day off. The two weekend acting classes that I run were combined into one easily manageable Saturday session, freeing up my Sundays. It means I'll take quite a hit on my monthly pay, so I'm going to have to spend less on things like, I don't know, fresh fruit and vegetables, but on balance, it's probably a bearable sacrifice to make for my mental health. And it's not as if I eat a great many fresh fruit and vegetables anyway.

So far, despite my all new work ethic, I haven't done a great deal with my day off, but I'm going to call that a good thing, since it's my, you know, day off. I've had to prepare for tonight's PPM (Pre-Production Meeting) for Three Kinds Of Me, and sort out what I'm doing in tomorrow night's Acting Class, but that's been fairly low impact, all things considered. Actually, all things considered, I probably wouldn't have found them to be such a low impact duo of tasks if today hadn't been a day off. That's the thing with wall to wall, relentless seven day week work .. Your mind (and emotions) aren't given enough breathing space to do anything,

I even found myself on the beach this afternoon. Only the second or third time this year, which is criminal, considering how close I live. I've been physically down there quite often, but normally only as a passage to get from the flat to town, very rarely as a destination. I think my boredom threshold is very low. It always seems like a grand idea, like the sort of thing I should be doing: sitting on the beach, reading a paperback, but quite often I'm getting twitchy after only ten minutes. I did ok today then; I was down there for about two hours. It helped that I went for a bit of a swim in the sea.

Now, I haven't swum in the sea for a couple of years. Again, criminal because the beach is only blah blah blah, but time and circumstance always seems to drive it away from me. Nevertheless, I'd decided quite early this week that I was going to commit to swimming in the sea on my new found day off. Once I'd checked the weather forecast, I knew there was no escape. It would be stupid not to. Once I'd done enough avoidance tactics of reading stuff on my kindle (it's true, you know, it really is easy to read in direct sunlight), I finally managed to get myself into the sea. Now, bear in mind this is the first time in about two years that I've been in the water, so I spent about two minutes doing a sort of paddle thing as I contemplated just how cold the water might be. As I did this, I was aware that was surrounded by loads of kids who clearly had no problem whatsoever with how could it was. So I (literally) took the plunge. And that's another truth often told: it's ok once you get your hair wet.

And it was actually quite lovely. I swam out further than I expected, not quite far enough to experience an Open Water moment, but far enough to almost lose the sounds of the crowd on the beach. The sound of the brass band on the bandstand did manage to float over. Another solitary swimmer splashed by. And suddenly, without warning and unbidden, an idea for a sequence for the novel that I hope to hack out during NaNoWriMo came to mind. Turns out I was working after all.

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.

What Have You Done Lately?

Great rehearsal tonight, for Three Kinds Of Me. There's been something of a gear change, and it's to do with moving into a different space. Whereas before, we were rehearsing in a flat, we're now in the building of the theatre itself, and that puts a whole different mentality on the process. It's like we're here to actually work. Rather than, you know, drink tea and eat HobNobs (it's just occurred to me that those biscuits could easily be the punch line to an obscure gag about Quatermass, but since Quatermass itself is reasonably obscure, it's probably left well alone).

Acting, and directing, and certainly writing, are amongst the most labour intensive duties for the least demonstrable booty as an end result. I imagine most artistic endeavours are. I suppose that's why the producers of Hollywood films get such a bad reputation. They just don't get it. They have to make sure nobody's wasting the studio's money, make sure no-one's going off in some weird, unpredictable manner. But that's just the point. Rehearsing, and creating a show, can absolutely be weird and unpredictable. And there's not really a great deal of value in putting the brakes on that. Having said all that, however, I'm glad I don't have a gang if Hollywood producers breathing down my neck*, because I know that the work Sarah and I did tonight was productive, constructive, and effective, but if I was compelled to put into a chart exactly how much ground we've covered, script wise, tonight: it would be a single half page. Perhaps not even that much.

But that's part of the process. Digging a little here, scratching at a bit of paint there, applying a bit of pressure to see what bends, and what simply snaps. It's a genuine pleasure when a rehearsal goes well, it means you're discovering the play again anew with each new re-read. Two lines of dialogue that seem confusing are actually the solution to each other.

Actually, the thing about lines of dialogue is intriguing. As a director on this show, I'm directing the writer, who's appearing in her own show. As such, then, conversations about meaning and nuance surface often. After all, it's not often you, as director, get a chance to speak with the person who created your script. I worry, though, because as director, needing to tell the story, I'll sometimes want to shift a line to the middle of a sequence rather than at the start, or cut a word altogether. Sarah's very accommodating, and takes on all my suggestions with good grace and positivity, but I have to repeatedly reassure myself that I've got my directors head on, not my writers. There are few things more egotistical than a writer-director. I should know; I am one. I suspect I'd make a very poor copy/proof reader: rather than checking what my client had written, I'd probably be trying to change the ending.

Talking of endings, in the end, I recall what Harold Pinter said about directing his own work. Like a lot of stories associated with Pinter, it's possibly made up, but that doesn't necessarily stop it being true. Apparently, Pinter was saying that there was a difference between what he, Pinter (the director) needed to achieve with a script, and what he, Pinter (the playwright) had originally intended. The two don't always match up, or at the very least they don't quite hold hands. The trick is to deliver the truth of the script while not feeling a slave to it.

With that in mind, I should really get back to my own writing. I haven't written anything for two days. Partially it's because I'm back at work, but that's a poor excuse: and if it isn't, then it will end up being an excuse for at least the next seven weeks, and that's bad. I'm hoping to get back on track with a thousand words. A thousand words a day - even between work and rehearsals - isn't a bad average to aim for. On those days that I do manage a thousand, I'm working well enough to produce at least five hundred more. I'm not saying that those 1,500 will necessarily be any good, but at the early stages, that's not really the point. And anyway, those days that I manage to hit above the target should make up for the days that I struggle to produce even 400. Or, judging by yesterday, none whatsoever.

Hopefully not tonight, though. It's a bit too late to reasonably think I'll actually manage a full thousand words, but as we hit midnight, I'll settle for half that in cash.

Wish me luck ..


*I'm afraid I don't know at this time what the collective term for a group of Hollywood producers is. A purse of producers? A sequel? A despondency ?

A Short Message About Acting Class

Reasonably successful Acting Class at the NVT tonight. I say reasonably because it's always difficult to tell. The classes are purely 'drop in', meaning that they always cater for all levels of practitioner and performer - the most confident actor, and the most nervous beginner. Add to that mix the fact that some people will want to play the same improv games again and again, while others will want to progress further and further, and you have a great deal of variables to contend with, looking around at a room of faces, unable to decipher they are pale from fear, lethargy, or the British summer.

So, all that said, it was a pretty good workshop, with lots of good responses and ideas from the fairly large group of NVT members we had tonight. I tried not to rely too heavily on improv this time around, partially because I'll be doing a series of NVT improv workshops in January (and hopefully some elsewhere in Hove later this year), but also because I want to see if there's anything else I'm capable of. I'm not sure what's going on there: I don't consider myself particularly confident in many aspects of my life, but when it comes to theatre - whether it's as an actor, writer or director (most often as director) I'm not very skilled at being complacent. I'm fully aware that that sounds like a 'humblebrag' - it's not meant to. Partially because I'm not always sure how successful I am pushing past my comfort zone, but also because it almost always makes me sick: with the last three three things I've directed, I've woken up in the middle of the night, wanting to run away from it all, wondering why on
Earth I ever suggested it in the first place. I include the third of the productions in this list, despite it won't even happen until May next year.

Actually, that's not entirely true. The three productions I'm talking about were 'my' productions - 'Four Play', 'Medea', and the as yet untitled play in next years Brighton Festival Fringe - but I didn't include 'Three Kinds Of Me', which I haven't (yet) ran away from, , possibly because I was invited to direct it (as opposed to asking to do so), although, thinking about it, that should probably put even more pressure on me. Perhaps I won't think about it quite so much.

Comfort Zone

Preparing for the first in a new series of Acting Classes that kick off tonight at the NVT (New Venture Theatre), and they're something of a new direction for me. Usually, my emphasis in these classes has been improvisation, partially because that's where I've had a great amount of experience in the past few years, but also because I've discovered that a reasonable amount of people have a fear of what they consider 'proper' acting - all that business with scripts, and learning lines, and suchlike.

Of course, just as many people have a fear of improv - this idea that you could be mad enough to walk onto a space - in front of people who are watching (and, in your mind at least, judging) you with absolutely no idea of what you're going to say next. For some of us, that's very liberating - at at the core of what we consider acting to be,whether there's a learned script involved or not - the simple idea of not going in with too many pre-conceived ideas, and remembering the joy of actually listening to the other people on stage. Done well, it doesn't matter if you have no idea what to do next: if you simply listen, then all you need to do is to react honestly to what the other person or people are doing on stage - it works as a wonderful cheat, since you'll never really have to think too hard about what to do next.

Doing workshops, ironically, is how I first became involved with the NVT. Ironic because I was somewhat scared of joining for a couple of years. Like, I suspect, far too many people, my acting degree resulted in one, single emphatic thing: the fact that I did no form of acting whatsoever for about seven years. I was living in Worthing at the time, and if there was a thriving theatrical scene in that town, I wasn't aware of it. There was in Brighton, though, and I began to take an interest - firstly via the excellent drop-in improv workshops held weekly by the Maydays (that's how that interest started), but then, eventually, a returning hankering to start acting again. I also knew that I wanted to revive a thing that I'd written at college (an early, half-hour version of Four Play), but I also knew that I couldn't simply rock up to a local theatre company and ask to direct my own script.

There were two theatre groups that took my interest - the Brighton Little Theatre, and the NVT. I circled them both, for quite some time - the fact that I hadn't acted for a while had knocked my confidence somewhat. The NVT held its regular Monday night classes as a way of easing in the less confident, but somehow even that felt too scary. It's always different when you're on the outside, looking in. I'd convinced myself that I wasn't good enough (whereas for the past four years, I've been working very hard at convincing everyone else that I'm not good enough).

Around this time, however, I was holding theatre workshops myself, for young actors. It was this that prompted a friend of mine to ask if I'd ever considered holding workshops for adults. I tend to say yes to offers like this when asked (whereas I don't tend to be very good at creating those offers for myself), and that was essentially how, despite the fact that I didn't feel brave enough to attend a theatre workshop at the NVT, I found myself actually running them for a while. Odd how things work out.

And so, that's who tonight's workshop - and the ones that follow over the next five weeks - are for. People like me, who don't feel that confident with their drama skills, who often feel that they've got nothing new to bring to the table. This is a fear that's shared by experienced and obviously talented performers as well as those who've never delivered a line of script in their lives - in fact, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the more you learn about acting - it can appear that you know less and less.

So, that's the aim of these workshops, then: stick with me, and by the end, you won't know a damn thing.

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.

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 ..