I live!

Well, that was a week that turned into a fortnight. We were having our bedroom decorated while we were in Whitstable, but the decorator found a major problem with damp, so we had to have some building work done and headed off back to Jane's dad's for a few days.

The writing went well in Whitstable, although not quite as expected. I'd been planning to get some work done on Care and Control, the drama series I'm developing with a social worker friend.

However, she's in the middle of cancer treatment and hadn't been able to give the latest draft another pass, so instead I got stuck into Foot Soldiers, a feature-length script that I'd lost a lot of momentum on.

And it went really well – I got from page 14 to page 46 over the week, including some character-defining and thematic stuff that I'd been very apprehensive about tackling earlier.

I had a rough eight-part structure for the script, based on broad story strokes and emotional cues, but had previously found it difficult to convert that into narrative. However, removing a lot of distractions and just getting on with it soon got me into 'the zone'.

That's one of the things I love about writing; when you start to surprise yourself with the material you're coming up with, and sense that the story is developing a real life of its own in terms of tone, imagery, rhythm etc.

Anyway, hopefully I'll get back to posting a bit more regularly now. There are quite a few new things appearing on the box, plus I've been going to quite a bit of theatre and stuff at the BFI, so I'll try and get my critical eye back in again.

In other news - I've got a glowing referral letter from my MA course leader, so I'm going to dip my toes in the chilly water of agent-hunting in the next couple of weeks (once I've done a few final tweaks on my major project).

And it's getting brighter in the evenings! Hurrah!