Residency

I meant to say this two posts ago but just forgot. The residency I'm applying for is at the Blue Mountain Center. I know that no one is reading this blog except me which is fine but I think it's important to share information about such things. I know how hard it is to feel connected in this writing business and this is one thing I can do to hopefully connect with someone else out there in the world and perhaps help them in some small way. So if you're reading this, google Blue Mountain Center and check out the application and get something on paper and in the mail by this Friday and perhaps we can hook up there and have a good time together.

Kev

Last May I decided that I was going to buy a goldfish for my best friend for her birthday. K and her husband C had just moved to Melbourne and I thought that a fish would be a nice thing to make their house into a home. So I bought them Molly. And Molly looked so cute that I then bought Polly. Polly stayed with M and I and Molly went to live with K and C. Well Molly and Polly didn't turn out to be the great gift that I thought they were going to be. M didn't really bond with Polly evidenced by the fact that he continually called her Moby and C took too much of a liking to Molly and set about doing everything he could to smother this poor little fish in love. C got a new tank for Molly and then decided that it was too cold for a coldwater fish in Melbourne so started to turn up the heating in the tank. And up. And up. You can see where this is heading. That's right. C electrocuted the fish. Burnt it to a crisp. I swear I saw smoke. So Molly went to the great big fishbowl in the sky. Polly/Moby continued on until she too one day saw the light and paddled her way to the big man upstairs. K and C decided that they just weren't fish people which is probably the understatement of the century but M and I decided that it was kinda nice having another being in our house so we promptly climbed back on the horse and came home with Kev.

Kev has been with us now for nearly seven months which is pretty damn good for a 5 dollar fish. M is so enamoured by Kev that sometimes he talks to him in his sleep. We love Kev. I love Kev. I love that Kev never takes time out. He swims around his bowl at a million miles an hour. He ducks and weaves around his toy shark, he never stops being hungry and I swear when you go to his tank he comes over and says hello to you. I know that Kev must be nearing the end of his term with us and it's not right to love such transient creatures, but we do love Kev and we want him to break some record for just how long a 5 dollar fish can live. Go Kev. We know you can do it.

Schedule

I have set myself up an impossible task of writing projects. I know it is impossible but still I try and achieve it. By Friday I have to have a residency application (complete with essays on a new project) and a new 10 minute play. That sounds alright. That, in fact, may be doable. Except that this is me that we are talking about. So I've got two projects that are ready to be started (and have been for a while) so I'm not sure which one is the better one for the residency. The 10 minute play I started a couple of weeks ago but then I just wasn't feeling it. It was a bit clever and then a bit ditsy for me. But I did come up with a new idea yesterday. This is for the Heartland 10 minute play comp and you have to write a play dealing with the theme/setting "the coffee shop" in some way. The idea I came up with yesterday was to do a series of letters between two people who are trying to find each other. We see them in different coffee shops around the world and we hear their words as they try and get closer to one another. So I have the ideas. I just don't have much else.

On top of that, I'm trying to keep the momentum from my week away on my play The Cleaning Station. Yesterday, I finished off the plan but it's still in bits and pieces and needs to be typed up to look clean and lovely. And then of course it has to be written. Preferably by 15 Feb.

All of this is not necessarily a bad thing. I like having a lot to do. I like having a lot of deadlines – it keeps me from staring at my navel wondering why my life is crap. But with all this work, something gets lost. A dreaming time, an imagining, things erupting out of nowhere. If you're always chasing something, nothing has a chance to come to you.

Away

For a blogger that started out with so much passion, it didn't take long to fall by the wayside. How pathetic. I promise I will do better.

I've just come back from my week in the country which was better than I could've imagined in ways I didn't even begin to imagine. Firstly, never underestimate the potential inspiration of a million cicadas and their ceaseless noise. It provides a rampant energetic soundtrack to the milieu of your day. Secondly, old adages contain more than a droplet of truth. You don't know someone until you've shared space with them. I learnt so many good and wonderful things about my writing partner J namely that she is a first class nurturer, listener and knows how to own her space. Could you ask for more? I also found myself relaxing and rejuvenating and feel now that all things may just be a little bit possible. No, you couldn't ask for more.

J and I set ourselves a daunting list of tasks to complete. Firstly, we were primarily there to work on our new play, The Cleaning Station. We conceived of this idea about a year ago but have been too busy on other things to really do much more than talk wistfully about it. We set ourselves a deadline of a week before we went away to have some sort of rough first draft in the other's inbox. We decided that we weren't going to write a play together but rather write our own pieces and then try and find ways to link the narratives. Our only stipulation was that it had to relate to a shared concept of the cleaning station. Basically this was defined as how humans find ways to nurture and cleanse each other the way that marine life do. It didn't have to be physically like the cleaner fish do but rather that life was a continuous set of battles and how do we find ways to shed the wounds of the last battle in order to fight in the next.

We both approached this in really different ways, J deciding to set hers on an oil rig and the blossoming friendship between a young girl that fillets the fish on the island and the oil rig worker who is alone and stuck on the oil rig. Mine is set in two rooms and is about a husband and wife who are dead in their marriage and how an affair actually breathes life into both of them in different ways. This is actually where we ended up. Most of the week away was taken up with talking these concepts through – what we were actually trying to say and how we were going to say it. This is not something that I am usually very good at. Talking about my work while I'm trying to write it is akin to heavy dental work minus the novocaine. But it was amazing how easy it was with J. We seem to have this instinctive knowledge of what the other is trying to say and J always asks the right questions – not the questions you want to hear but the questions that need to be answered.

We also talked a lot about ways to link the pieces and different things we could do on a stage that would find connections through the play. We're toying with using a screen and having a lot of filmic aspects as well as the use of specific objects that can be used in both plays. Nothing is set in stone at the moment but it was great to have that time together to just dream and imagine.

J managed to flesh out her first draft while we were away and I managed to nail down what I was trying to say and how my characters were going to say it. So now I'm back in my little house in the city and have just finished the detailed plan of my play ready for me to add the poetry and magic.

We also worked a lot on our screenplay but I'll leave that for another post. And I promise that won't be far away.

Train travel

I took the train yesterday to Albury from Melbourne. I've never been a fan of train travel but this was quite spectacular. Quite. And I don't really know why it was so much fun but I think it has something to do with the process of leaving and arriving, of actually travelling somewhere as opposed to getting in a plane and being plonked somewhere an hour later. I got to see every tree, every sheep, goat, cow, horse between my house and my destination. I loved all the little train stations and how every tiny town is its own tiny town with its own unique little pub and set of shops on the main drag.

So J and I arrived to write our little play here in the midst of nowhere and so far it has been great. We've talked until we were blue, we've walked the streets of Albury, we had dinner in the pub, we went grocery shopping together and now we've just woken up and thought about stuff. It usually takes a while to get into these residencies but seeing as though we only have a week, we've got this pressure on us to get started. Now, now, now. We're trying to work on both our play and our screenplay and anything else we think we might want to do. So we've set ourselves an ambitious program of work from now until Sunday but we're both walking around with this very eager look on our faces so only time will tell what is going to happen.

Today

Finally finished at day job last night so that I have a few days to prepare for my week away. Even though I'm only going away for a week, it seems like I have a million things to do. Of course, as always happens with me, I tell myself the first thing I am going to do is sleep. Sleep and sleep and sleep. And then, always, I wake up at the exact same time I do when working the day job. However, and here's the interesting thing, when waking up for day job, I need about 20 pushes of the snooze button and an electric cattle prod to get me up. When not going to the day job, I wake up bursting with energy ready to tackle day ahead. Interesting. Well, perhaps not. Perhaps my body is just a slave to the moods of my mind. But here I am. I've been up for a couple of hours, reading Nicola Barker's Darkmans which is a fantastic book, full of ordinary characters doing ordinary things which turn out to be mythical and fantastical and anything but ordinary. I'm about ¾ through and it's endlessly fascinating. And I've already got a load of washing on.

Today is going to be half admin, half writing day with a couple of sessions with my new pilates DVD. Yes. I'm fast becoming a devoted member of the pilates cult.

Now that I've got the first draft of The Cleaning Station play out of the way and am not going to do anything to it until I get some notes back from J who is up to her ears at the moment judging a short film comp, I'm kinda flitting between projects which is bad and not what I want to be doing. I think most of my admin time today is going through my submissions folder and working out when I need to have things done and ready. Last year, while I submitted a lot, I missed out on things because I didn't leave myself enough time to get things ready. I have two full-length plays which are still in the developmental stage (meaning they are just a bunch of crazy notes with bits of scenes and random dialogue from the characters) and I should be working on at least one of them so that if I get time, which I won't, I can work on them next week when I'm away. But I'm not going straight back to day job when I get back so it will give me something to focus on when I get back.

And then there's the short story than I'm trying to get ready for the end of Feb for a competition that's worth some money. One of my goals this year is to make some damn money from my writing. So all money opportunities should be top of my list.

Fish and Humans

No time to blog on the weekend. I was trying desperately to finish a first draft of my new play called other forms of harm. It’s part of a project called The Cleaning Station that I’m writing with my friend J. It’s still in its experimental stage (which really means we don’t have a clue what we’re doing at the moment) but we’re hoping to find way to mesh both of our plays together to create one play called The Cleaning Station. It’s based on the marine concept of the cleaner fish that clean off the other fish and then send them back into battle. But it’s not about fish even though fish plays are thin on the ground. We’re adapting the concept for humans, what humans do for renewal, to cleanse themselves, so they can return to the battle.

In order to help this process J and I are going into residence at this place for a week next week. It’s my first time in Albury-Wodonga and am quite excited to see the world’s largest rolling pin which apparently can be found at Henri’s Bakery.

Also tried pilates for the second time and while I’m no more flexible and I look like an octopus with mental health issues, I did manage to get through the whole DVD without my brain hurting which it did on the first go. Still haven’t got the breathing thing down. But managed to fit into a coat that has been too small for ages this morning. Feeling good for Monday.

Even when my imagination is game on I cannot compete with the human spectacle.

Vomiting and Blurbs

I've got a play opening in November this year at this wonderful place. I've been working on this play since February 2006. I wrote the first draft at this incredible place (where everyone slightly creative should try and get a residency) in May 2006 and have been drafting, developing, workshopping, listening to actors tell me how to write a play and all of the other horrid things associated with getting a play ready for the masses and now it's come to the hardest thing of all - the 50 word blurb for the brochure.

What the #$%!?

I can't believe how hard this is turning out to be. I've done hundreds of these for short plays in various festivals but this full-length one is killing me. I thought I had nailed it last night but now I'm kinda looking at it going I don't know if I would go see this just by reading that. Which is both stressing me out and pissing me off. Stressing me out that all I need is 50 measly words and for someone who is engaged in a long destructive codependent slightly S&M relationship with her word count button I know my master is not happy with me. So much fiddling, rewriting, deleting in a hysteria of what can I say to make you Please Like Me, Please Like My Play, Please, please, please COME SEE MY PLAY!!! And then it pisses me off that I'm fading into a pathetic loser that can't even get 50 words together about a play that I have lived, breathed and occasionally vomited over (well drunk too much in order to get away from it and then vomited).

And don't even start me on finding an image to go with the blurb. DON'T. EVEN. START.

Women writers

Very interesting article about women writers in Hollywood who are apparently sick of being called unfunny.

http://:www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2008-01-09-female-writers_N.htm

And so it begins

I'm sitting here on my couch in my underwear watching Medium on TV - has anyone noticed how slowly Patricia Arquette talks? She's a touch creepy if you think about it for too long. It's like a 1000 degrees outside and 12 000 degrees inside and I have sweat in places that's just plain gross so it's obviously the perfect time to start a blog.

I'm going to try and make this about writing, about trying to write, about what I'm writing and why writing is worth the hassle.

One can only hope it some day finds an ending and doesn't end up in the cyber bottom drawer along with most of my stuff.