Tricky Business

This rewriting business is indeed tricky. One small change and the ripple effect is more like a tsunami. But if you play it right, if you take your time and make considered choices your reward will be a smoking play. And isn't that what we all want?

Weekend

Late on Saturday night when normal people were out getting drunk, hooking up, eating nasty kebabs at 2.00am, I was at my laptop finishing my play. What? I hear you say. What did you just say?

Yes. That's right Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. I got to write The End, although what I actually wrote was End of Play. And while it is The End, it's still not finished. It's a draft and it's not too shabby but it still has some holes, some big enough to fit an tram through, if fitting trams through metaphorical holes is your things.

No judgement.

Tonight

Tonight I'm going to try and finish my epic play New Light Shine. I have three scenes left and the house to myself. It's going to be go, go, go and hopefully at some time before I collapse into bed, I am going to get to write THE END!

Which as we all know are the two greatest words in the world.

Deprivation

Number 24 on the great and masterful list is Lose a Dress Size.

For the last week, I have been dutifully attending to this. How? I hear you ask. Well, it's very simple. No bread. Not one bit. And no cheese. And no chocolate. And an absolute shirtload of vegetables. And by shirtload people, I mean SHIRTLOAD.

Only time will tell if all this is in vain.

Word of the Week

Word of the week this week is ... (drumroll please) ... (okay, well just do the drumroll sound in your head) ... (Fine. Forget it)

Milquetoast

noun (sometimes initial capital letter)

a very timid, unassertive, spineless person, esp. one who is easily dominated or intimidated: a milquetoast who's afraid to ask for a raise.

Weekly Update

For last week, and I know, I'm a little slack on the posting but you know, no judgement and all that. Well, judge if you feel like it. It's entirely up to you. If you want to be that person then you've got your own issues to figure out and perhaps you should start your own blog about it all. But anyway, back to me.

Last week saw a magnificent event take place, otherwise known as THE WRITING OF THE PLAY. Which I will come back to.

Because you see, I dawdled through most of the week or at least that's how it looked even though I was doing things, I was planning and rearranging and working on stuff. I was trying to live my life better which, after all, is the purpose of all of this. For example:

36. Eat vegetables at least 3 times a week.

I don't thinkI've mentioned this one yet and while it sounds a bit naff because I am a grown woman and I really should know this by now, it is so easy to eat potatoes and fool myself into thinking that I have my vegetable intake sorted. Well, no more. Let the green and red and other colours of vegetables run free through my body. And they have, and they will continue to do so. Not only am I eating them three times a week, I'm eating them at least twice a day. I know. VICTORY!

64. Use my lunch hours for something other than wandering around aimlessly.

This has been easier than I thought. Mainly because I'm only taking half an hour for lunch instead of an hour. I'm using this half hour daily to eat my vegetables and catch up on some reading.

98. Stop biting my nails.

This seems to go in a cycle. One week I won't even look at my nails, the next I can't keep my teeth away from them. And I don't think it has anything to do with nervousness or stress. I think it's just a habit.

And now to the writing:

11. Finish a full-length play.

There are three on of these on the list and there could be 12 more but again, a girl has to sleep. The play I'm trying to finish now is called New Ligh Shine and I think this is about draft seven. Well, it could be more than that and it could be less than that because I don't think I've ever finished a draft of this little play that became a monster play and is now back to being a little play. But this one is definitely going to be finished. In fact, I'm close to finishing. Like, really close. Like, three scenes to go which is way further along than I was last Friday afternoon when I had 3 scenes and 20-something pages. Now I have 75 pages and three scenes left. Yes, The Sandy Method does work and life is very, very good. I can see myself retiring in the Bahamas as I speak.

That was the main writing task of the week but I also managed to do another draft of a short play which will need one more read-through and edit and then I can cross that off the list, and I started thinking about my Mastodon play and I think i have the story for it.

I also rewrote the ending of a one-act play which had been annoying me for about a month and now looks and sounds much better.

I also had a great idea for a new play that I can't work on yet but hopefully will soon because it is ace and I can't believe I was the one to come up with it.

And that was pretty much my week. I also scrubbed my kitchen floor which I know doesn't sound like much but trust me that thing was gross and now it is pretty and I feel good walking on it unlike before when I had to think of pretty things so I didn't have to think what I was walking on.

How to Skin a Cat

Perhaps I have chanced upon what it needed to stop my obsession with the internet when I am at work. Small tasks. Because I'm perfectly fine when I have actual work to do but when I don't I'm googling random people I knew in primary school and obsessing over the careers of other playwrights. NO MORE! Small tasks, which is what I did today. And while I had a lot of actual work to do, I also got a few things crossed off my to-do list. VICTORY!

Voices

Last night, as we battled through the third night of a semi-heat wave (which means that it is hot but you really shouldn't complain about it, because it is not THAT hot) I started to put my ideas on paper regarding Number 85 - Write a Radio Play.

There is a monster competition for Radio Plays that the BBC runs every year which I always mean to have something ready for but of course, never do. This year will be different.

I have a play that I wrote as a short piece when I was at NIDA that was always not quite right for a short piece. And then I turned it into a long one act and that didn't really seem right for it also. So, third time being a charm and all that, I'm going to see if it might work as a radio play. And I think it will. It's about two people that meet once a week to play out a series of fantasies. It's a little bit sexual but mainly it is games that boost the psyche, make the ordinary a little more liveable.

So last night I started to inch it out and see what I have. I got to the point where I was out of ideas but really excited about it and these characters, Tommy and Belle, who have lived inside my head for about 5 years now, are still talking, still moving about, still want to tell their story. I guess it would seem mean if I didn't let them.

Progress on The Sandy Method

Well, contrary to my wonderful and hardly thought out plan, the play didn't get written in one weekend. 30 pages of it did get written, and now has been edited back to 20 pages.

So while the Sandy Method hasn't been the roaring success that it promisd itself to be, it wasn't exactly a complete failure either.

What did I find out by applying the Sandy Method?

That it is extremely possible to write a 1,000 words an hour, it's finding the hours that are free of distractions.

It terrifies me how easily I succumb to distraction. The slightest thing - a bird, a TV in the background, THE INTERNET, can completely rip me away from the task at hand.

What is worse is that I don't know how to get better at it. I'm sure there are like brain training exercises that improve concentration. Are there? Is this an actual thing, or am I just being lazy?

Stay tuned for answers to these things and much, much more.

Word of the Week

Haven't done Word of the Week for a while but I think the wait has been worth it because I have a killer this week.

Mastodon

A large extinct mammal of the genus Mammut, resembling the elephant but having nipple-shaped tubercles on the crowns of the molar teeth.

 

Why am I bringing you a Mastodon this week? Well, I'm thinking of writing a play about one. Or more than one. Why am I thinking of doing that? Well, there is a company in New Jersey that are looking for plays about Mastodons. No. I am not kidding.

New list item

I'm adding another thing to the list, because as the saying goes, when a horse is down that's the time to beat it. That's not how the saying goes? Mmm … interesting.

Anyway, meet

117. Write a short children's play.

I've added this because there's an opportunity coming up for a short children's play and there are not many opportunities for a newbie children's writer to get their foot in the door, and trust me when you are through that door, there are 72 virgins waiting for you. No. I'm pretty sure that's correct.

So, if I'm going to write it, and write it I am, then it is going on the list.

Number 96

Number 96 was to do something wonderful and indulgent for my birthday. My birthday came around last Tuesday and while I didn't exactly paint the town red I did have a wonderful time. The boyfriend and I went to a very fancy restaurant and went wild. We drank, we ate, we had so much fun.

So

Number 96, you are officially crossed off the list.

Basil

As we all know by now, Number 49 on the list is to keep a plant alive for at least 6 months.

Well, it hasn't been six months but my little basil plant is positively flourishing. It's getting so big and lovely that I'm close to being able to go "Oh I know what this dish needs, I'll just pop out the back and pick some basil."

So even if everything else doesn't happen, fresh basil is on me.

The Sandy Method

The other day as I was wiling away the hours at my day job, I read an article with Alexander McCall-Smith who as we all know has written a gazillion novels and they were asking him about his writing methods and he says that he writes a 1,000 words per hour. Which, when you think about it, is not really a lot is it? Write the same word a 1,000 times over. It's not as much as you thought.

This got me thinking as I started to cower at looking over my list and contemplating how to not sleep for a year that the average full-length play is roughly 15,000 words. If you apply what I am now calling the Sandy Method, technically you could write a full-length play in 15 hours. Technically. Writing is of course a lot more than putting words on the page, even though in the end, it is putting words onto the page and deep down we all know this. But if you take out all the planning and outlining and whatnot which takes forever and that's just the way it goes, the actual writing should take no more than 15 hours. 20 if I'm being generous with myself.

With this thought in my head, I'm going to give it a try this weekend with my full-length play New Light Shine which has been outlined, thought about, thought about a bit more and agonised over. I'm going to see if I can put it all together over the weekend which technically has 48 hours but you know, a girl does have to sleep.

BTW, this post is just under 300 words and took me about 5 minutes.

I'm just saying.

4.00 am

Which is when I have been getting out of bed, making a cup of coffee and hten getting back into bed and writing until 6.45 am. It's an odd time of day, especially in summer when it gets light pretty early so that 4.00am is really the tail end of night. I've been telling people that I get up that early because it's quiet and I can work in peace. But that's hardly ever true. The birds alone create some sort of GET THE FUCK UP morning choir and then there are various planes, trains and automobiles who have no consideration for what time it is or the fact that there is a writer trying to work. But all of that doesn't seem to distract me. It's only when the humans start to move and shake into the day that the real distractions happen.

Weekly Report

Well, last week seemed to fly past in a cyclonic rush of hours. And, if truth must be told, I was slack. I wasted a lot of those hours and yes, I feel bad about it so you can just keep your judgment to yourself about all that.

But I had a stern talking to myself yesterday morning and got back on the horse. So to speak. There were no actual horses, but you knew that already ... didn't you? Can you see how easy I find procrastination. You give me a tangent and I am riding that thing until it is quite literally dead.

However, the highlight of last week was writing THE Scene. If you don't know what THE Scene is, then you are obviously not a writer, because all writers, regardless of what they write know about THE Scene. It's the one that is going to nail the project and bring it all together. If you gave it time it would also end world hunger, come up with a cheap alternative to the use of fossil fuels and know instinctively how to make your life better in three easy, painfree steps. Last week, I wrote the scene for New Light Shine and it made me happier than, well, think of the happiest thing you know. Got it? Yeah, happier than that. I know. Ridiculous.

This, I know, doesn't sound like a lot, but trust me, when you get that scene and it works, the whole play that sits around it starts to do its business. By this, I mean that it starts to find ways of linking itself together and becoming A PLAY instead of a HUGE BIG FREAKING MESS. And this what we want.

Monthly update

 

Well, I think it is official that it is hard to do two full-time jobs, both of which demand brain power. I once read in one of the numerous 'How to Write' books that I have furiously scanned for the secret to it all that it was better to have a job that didn't demand any brain power so that you could devote all of your intellectual energy to your creativity. Which is all well and good but it said nothing about what starvation and constant financial worry did to your creativity. Guess what? It doesn't help.

So there are some definite low scores on the productivity front but this is nothing if not a work in progress. And I wouldn't be human if I turned this all around in a month. In fact, I think it is quite a stretch that I am going to do this all in a year and if the last few weeks are any indication, then it is most definitely not going to happen. But hopefully the last few weeks are merely a blip in the overall statistics and at the end of the year I will look back and not even recognise the girl that physically can't get herself off the couch at night to go to do some work. I don't want to be that girl. That's why I'm doing this.

SO, how did I fare on my first month (and I seriously can't believe that I have been doing this a month. Feels like three days.

Anyway,

The statistics will show that:

• I've crossed five things off my list. Which doesn't sound like many but a lot of these things will have to wait for the end of the year to be crossed off but require me to do them now.
  
• I have been doing all of my daily tasks and weekly tasks which takes care of another 15 things on the list (so technically that takes it up to 20 on the list).
  
• On the writing front I have got one acceptance for a production and have written 2 new short plays and a one-act play. I am also halfway through a draft for a full-length play.
  
• On the other writing front I have half a new short story which hopefully will be finished sooner rather than later.
  
• I have started on a number of other items on my list, including looking for a new day job, keeping a plant alive (the basil plant is going well! Which means that it is not only still alive but growing! VICTORY!) and turning my writing room into a WRITING ROOM.
  

Not terrible, not fantastic. Again, work in progress.

What I want to concentrate on improving next month is the marketing. It is all good and well to write all this stuff but if I'm not getting it out into the world then there is not much point. Unfortunately, not all of us can be J. D. Salinger and write for the sheer pleasure of it. Well, we do but we want to make a buck out of it. And that involves marketing.

In February, I want to get the submission count up and start looking at ways I can get more things published. After all, that's where the money is. Or what little money there is.

I'm also going to finish the full-length play I am working on (and I think after about six drafts, I've finally cracked it) and I'm also going to start making forays into radio plays and youth plays. It's going to be an exciting, busy month.