Going over old work

An interesting thing about going over new work, even things that you are quite proud of in a way, is you realise how much you've improved in certain ways.

Like some of Lock is a real pleasure to read and it's always been the proudest of the plays I've written, but for example I realise how much better I've got a structuring work, foreshadowing, making the dialogue flow more freely and naturally, not getting bogged down and verbose, getting to the point in fewer words where need be or deliberately taking the long way round to build suspense, making the characters motivations deeper - giving them each their own individual voice that are distinct from those of the others!




This is something that I recommend everyone do from time to time! Go over your old work and see what ways you'd do it differently if you were writing it now. If you can't think of anything new to write, rewrite something old and make it better :-)

Close and Faraway meeting

So I met with Stewart Marshall to discuss the music for Close and Faraway and some suggestions on refining the script.

Things are going well and I have some decent guidelines to work within for bringing the score together in a way that follows the progression of the script. Where things come in, where they come out, what kind of meshing of themes would work, where variations on themes could go. It's nice to have a frame work it makes things a lot easier.

Attune Theatre will be performing a new short as part of Seeds of Thought at the CCA tonight, from 7:30. Come along and check it out.

Stewart has been in meetings with various venues regarding preview events for Close and Faraway and organisations regarding receiving some funding, all very exciting.

Music for Close and Faraway update

This weekend I have been working here and there for the music for Close and Faraway, I now have a number of pieces in varying degrees of completion:

- Genesis
- Further Away (Underscore for Alpha's First Monologue) / Alpha's Theme
- Omega's Theme
- Omicron's Theme
- Epsilon's Theme (and variations)
- Omicron's Theme
- Bollero
- Revelations

Chillin like a villain, all good in the hood

So I'm just chillin' at the university mature students' union, typing up notes after notes trying to reduce the massive accumulating pile of papers, half papers, and the like that always seem to rapidly be accumulating around me into some digestible printed-out version that can actually be used towards such ends as writing articles, books, plays, or who knows.

It feels good throwing old bits of paper away, I can reduce 2-5 into a side of printed A4, nice one.

Blogging and "Fish and Moose"

I have this new blog so I guess I should do what blogs are for and blog
I just don't think I'm as pretentious as I was when I got livejournal as a teenager, I always seemed to have something I at least thought was very insightful to write back then.

So I've been a busy little bee

Monday Stuart came over to talk about Close and Faraway the play I am composing music for, and hear what I'd got so far which is a few melodic themes with accompaniment and variations thereupon XP more work soon.

Tuesday night I went out to a creative writing open mic during the West End Festival at Partick Library and heard some people read out poems and bits of prose. I also read out The Pragmatist and recited A Musical Poem which inspired me to post those up here, as well as a couple of other bits and pieces you can check out if it pleases you:

Heart of Matters
The Pioneer
Nympholepsy 

Afterwards Finn came over to work on Fish and Moose which is a sitcom-esque play we started writing maybe a year ago (which is now looking more like a screen play.) FIND OUT ABOUT IT BY CLICKING HERE. The interesing thing about this piece of writing is it started out life as an extensive list of jokes that we had coined over the course of several nights out. Us having a few different strands to our senses of humour, characters began emerging through the jokes as you could think "well that line could be said by the same person that said that line" ...and then storyline started to weave itself around the development characters. It has shown out to be a really cool, interesting and original way of writing, consistently funny, with some very unexpected results regarding the depths of some of the characters. Lots of happy coinicdences and subtext that was coined without preconception.

Today I'm off to Jonos to complete editations on the new Illich sketches, so hope I can post the new one up in the next day or two.

Current News

Hello out there mr/mrs (delete as appropriate) read-y person, sorry if this blogish thingy looks a bit clinical so far, I just set it up today and backdated some posts with haste so they might be a bit minimal in content but they're doing their job of archiving my shiz.

What am I doing?

- Right now I'm writing music for seven-piece ensemble to accompany a production of Stuart Marshall's Close and Faraway which will be staged in September by Attune Theatre,

please stay attuned eh-em for more news on this and possibly previews of some of the stuff I'm working on.

- I'm also working with Mr. Finn Townsley on a project (play? screenplay? sitcom?) called Fish and Moose. Click the link to read about it.

- Illich Sketch Show rages on, despite the evil machinations of the Villainous Dr. Haber who plans to put a stop to it all.

- I don't know if I should really mention this because I'm not sure I will be making updates on it but I'm working on some kind of novella called Beyond Reason which is a platform to entail anystrange philosophical insights I am gleaning from life or inspired by books I'm reading. Just some kind of big mash-up we'll see.

Today was mostly spent chilling at an abode in the care of one Mr. Gareth Vile of The Vile Arts Radio Hour (which strangely always seems to run for two hours - go figure) speaking of life, the universe plus anything and everything under the sun ranging from art, theatre and music to philosophy, politics and relationships, all over about half a million roll-up cigarettes and filter coffee. afternoon win.

Fish and Moose

" Fish and Moose is  a witty comedy following the tale of three close friends and Doug as they face their respective daily trials of work (and the avoiding of it), sexism, finding an occupied bed for the night (and leaving it without attracting attention to oneself).

Ray and Jules set about the task of trying to force their friend James to get over a break up as the sitcom gives a naturalist take on familiar situations. The cast is a highly believable bag of characters who share witty repartee, teaching you why be “moose” when you can be “fish” ! "



This is a most-loved project I'm working on with my friend Finn Townsley who stage managed my play Lock and the Emerald Eyes (my second play) and co-wrote+co-directed Patriot (the third.)

For me the interesing thing about this piece of writing is it started out life as an extensive list of jokes that we had coined over the course of several nights out. Us having a few different strands to our senses of humour, characters began emerging through the jokes as you could think "well that line could be said by the same person that said that line" ...and then storyline started to weave itself around the development characters. It has shown out to be a really cool, interesting and original way of writing, consistently funny, with some very unexpected results regarding the depths of some of the characters. Lots of happy coinicdences and subtext that was coined without preconception and becaue most of the jokes are things that were actually said the dialogue is very natural and believeable. I am very much looking forwards to seeing how this goes!