Writing Life: insights, updates, and craft

  • A bit about me

    Incredibly pleased to be included in a series on women writers on the excellent Bang2Write writers’ blog, here. Do wander round the site, it is a superb resource.

  • Developing this oniony play – in pictures

    I sometimes feel I don’t get visual enough on this wee blog. So I thought I’d try to raise a Friday afternoon smile from you (I just hit 7 hours with only a short breather, working on this oniony play’s structure/s and need a break). I’m going to show you my scribbles that have taken…

  • The heartbeat of an onion

    The play I’m working on has turned out to be an onion of a piece. Except that the layers seem, at first glance, to have very little to do with each other. It started with some Keith Johnston-inspired automatic writing (long story). Under that layer, something ridiculously epic, galactically so. Get through that one, and…

  • Say Who You Are

    For all kinds of human reasons, I’ve been absent here. But I have been writing. OK – pre-writing: in one of those “hold fire” poses, pen in hand, ink pot unscrewed. And my brain will not be still. There are the strands, the Big Things. There are characters, growing warts and bad habits by the…

  • Brian Eno On Creativity

    Wow. Thanks massively to Phil Gladwin at ScreenwritingGoldmine for sharing this. A calm, thoughtful interview with Brian Eno: Brian Eno On Creativity.

  • Happy News

    The wonderful people at The Peggy Ramsay Foundation have given me a grant to support the writing of my new play! Now if that’s not a kick up the imagination, what is?

  • Gnash, gobble, splat: the sounds of a new script hitting the genre wall

    It is a fine thing to get the teeth into a new script. Delicious, clean pages. Fresh bodies waiting to spurt, the splatter marks on the walls giving us the story to decipher, like CSIs of dramatic fiction. Does that make the writer a bitey vampire or besplattered detective? Either way – and I suspect…

  • Thanks

    2012. Not what I thought at all, interestingly. I’m clearing up the office, prepping for an exciting year ahead, and putting old posters, reviews and script notes in their proper place (this only happens once a year). I don’t like the weekend papers at this time of year – that “reviewing” thing, even dressed up…

  • Muscle, sinew, brain surgery

    I’ve spent the last few months at the lathe. Honing, smoothing, cutting myself, wiping the blood off the creation… It’s been very interesting. 2012’s been a year of muscle, driven without a doubt by the rigour of Channel 4’s 4Screenwriting course, which I was fortunate enough to get a place on this year. Every sinew…

  • Vim, vim, vim

    I know. Shame on me. August? That’s the last time I was here? Alas, no. Twice I’ve got excited, blogged merrily away and the darn thing would not upload. So this will be short – just in case. I have, nonetheless, been busy. The spec screenplay has undergone a complete rewrite (this is my 4Screenwriting…

  • Writing, kids and all that jazz

    No, I am not in Edinburgh, catching all the top acts de nos jours (damn). I am working. Uhuh, as per that list in the previous post. I have one more week left of Daddy DayCare (teacher husband) where I can type all day. The pressure is terrifying. Before marriage, step-kids, baby “etc”, I’d do…

  • Get creative on yo’ ass

    The other day, I remembered that 2012 is going to be an exciting year. And then realised we’re 7/12s of the way through. Apart from making me feel like my brain is falling has fallen through a hole in my saggy toddler-mum trews and lies spat on, in a wet puddle alongside the rotted tendrils…

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