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Blogging will be a thing again, and some reviews

Blogging has again become sporadic and erratic. Fear not Putting on a Show will return, as will #fridayflash, but travelling and other factors have caused some skip weeks.

You’re probably owed an explanation of what else I’ve been up to creatively apart from Nando’s, but sadly the answer to that is not much. Rehearsing a musical somewhere you don’t live, setting up a multiplatform writing partnership, attempting to escape graduate unemployment, and readjusting to the family home and its pets and schedules, plus god knows what else, has very much taken up the available brain space that I would prefer to use for creativity. As such, not much is getting done, I’m afraid.

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Posterity

I’m averaging a post a post a month since this blog started in March 2012. That’s regular, right?

Some updates:

  • Come June I will be free of uni work, come July I will have graduated, and the adult world beckons. Erp.
  • Submitted various things I had hanging around to various places, will be on the lookout for more places to send and waiting on any of it popping back up.
  • Thanks to superhero comics, I’m ahead of schedule on my Goodreads target.
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Deadlines

Alice in Wonderland

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. –Douglas Adams

Many people love that quotation, and with good reason. I’m among the worst (or, perhaps, best) for putting off things I have to do until the last possible minute, working stupid hours to get stuff done, doing other things instead – even this blog post was started as a way to keep the fingers moving while I wasn’t doing work on my second ‘full-length’ script this fortnight, more on which later. (And only finished quite some time later.)

However, if I don’t have deadlines, things don’t get done. Case in point, Alice in Wonderland. I’ve had the idea for a promenade performance of the original text (or as close as possible) of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for well over a year. However, I did  no work on it until it became apparent a week before an opportunity (sadly a failed one) to pitch the idea that I needed to have a finished script in hand, rather than the planned couple of scenes. This meant, in the week of producing my friend Ivo de Jager’s brilliant play Sweetmeat (and also acting as assistant stage manager) I had to come home and rattle off at least a couple of scenes a night.

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Medium and magic machines

I’ve posted a couple more of my Proteus sketches, both unperformed male-female two-handers. Soul Music is a musical written from a female perspective, and Interview a sci-fi tale from a male.

Writing in the sci-fi genre you immediately come across the roadblock of how closely you adhere to the science part of the term. I’m not a scientist, and hesitate to declare much interest in it. I’ve used SFnal tropes in my work, most recently in this short piece, but mainly to highlight things about humans rather than exploring ideas. I’ve used time travel to talk about relationships, a robots to explore emotion, and so on, and will continue to do so. But I would like to address the science more closely in future, if only to avoid my current problem of magic machines. I’m not bothered about accuracy, but knowing more sparks more ideas, and thinking through the reality of your story is always encouraged.

However, I had the same problem with both pieces. I struggled to convey what I wanted to see on stage in script form. Also, if you peruse my short stories section you will find you cannot peruse the short stories section because none are posted. I’ve only finished one in the past six months and we’ve already covered that. I’m far too used to writing in play format and, further, having ideas for that form. It’s as if a short story section of my brain has shut down and the output has been replaced by the sketch factory.

I’m fairly busy from now until, well, the 24th of June, but I hope this only means my output will increase in true procrastination style. This is the first time I’ve had a blog I’ve needed to update, so prospects are good for at least getting three posts a month, more if they’re all as short as this.

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Firsts and adaptation

Keeping Time

Firsts are always hard. This isn’t the first time I’ve done a first post on some blogging platform or another, but I’m hoping this one will stick. I intend to check in here every week with some words on something I’ve done worth sharing, which will hopefully mean I will make myself have interesting weeks (or become experienced at making dullness shine), so let’s launch straight into it.