Can my close friends look away now, please. I don’t want to bore them. But this was an absolute high point of the year, and we’re just eleven weeks in. I entered five competitions at the Scottish Association of Writers, some more as an exercise in hope than with any real hope of getting somewhere.Continue reading “Coming Up Blank”
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28 Plays – Encore!
That feeling when you wake up and another month has gone, and somehow you can’t remember what you did? That’s February, in this house. I spent a large part of the month head-down at the laptop, writing plays. Not as impressive as it sounds, as they will accept even one page wonders and utterly dudContinue reading “28 Plays – Encore!”
Please, Don’t Die
Yup, slightly alarming title. I admit it was a bit scary for me, too. We went to a talk on foraging wild food on Thursday evening, and the speaker laid out a load of plants on his table and began to talk to us all about foraging. He was a little nervous, as he usuallyContinue reading “Please, Don’t Die”
No more, please, no more
I was sorry that The Literal Challenge didn’t run their Scriptly Challenge last October. I got some really good ideas from their 2021 Scriptly, and I would love to have put together the music video I wrote for Hugh Laurie’s ‘Didn’t It Rain’. When TLC announced that they would return with 28 Plays Later thisContinue reading “No more, please, no more”
Still Playing
28 Plays rolls on. Two weeks in and still keeping up – the fourteenth brief arrives at 8pm tonight, so by this time tomorrow I could well be halfway through. Which is no comfort, as they save the toughest assignments for the second half of the ordeal. Challenge, I should have said. Last week’s joysContinue reading “Still Playing”
Play for Today
Someone said to me last week; ‘Last time I looked it was Boxing Day and now it’s February! Where did January go?’ It was an odd month. I had a vicious cold just before Christmas which I passed on to himself, and which he passed back to me for a January present. I’ve just aboutContinue reading “Play for Today”
Feckless, Aimless, Pointless and Graceless
Take ten points if you recognised the quote from Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Those are the names of the four cows under Adam’s lacklustre care, but honestly, it also describes how I’ve been feeling recently. We took down the decorations on January 5th and switched off the strings of lights decorating the garage,Continue reading “Feckless, Aimless, Pointless and Graceless”
Not Going Out
We get around to December and all our preparations for Christmas look like a siege. We declare the last shopping day before Christmas, the last trip out, the last set of Christmas cards written and posted. After that, we close the doors against the world and don’t go back out into the traffic again. We’veContinue reading “Not Going Out”
Cromer
After a frantic few weeks of organisation, our OU writers’ group met up at Cromer in the last weekend of November 2022. Six of us arrived at West Cottage; the other three turned up on our screens thanks to Zoom. For the first time since 2015, we had all nine of our group gathered together.Continue reading “Cromer”
Called to the Table
Our latest trip out was to Ely Cathedral. It’s the third time we’ve been there, and every time that first sight of the cathedral is a Wow moment. All those miles of flat land and then that enormous pale building on the skyline. The first visit was for my graduation from the OU with aContinue reading “Called to the Table”
Julia Chalkley 