July 17, 2018

Heaven Blogs #??: Into the Unknown

By jenbitespeople

We started our main tranche of rehearsals today. It’s been a long day, or rather the latest in a series of long days, and the words in my head refuse to arrange themselves in an orderly fashion and be typed out. We launched straight in with a very complex scene, the actors pulled out all sorts of interesting and exciting things, and I’m champing at the bit to get back into the room tomorrow and shape the material we found.

But first, emails and showers and sleep. Let’s pretend this isn’t a non-post for the sake of maintaining the blog, shall we? Look, media content! Check out this gorgeous photo of Marion Geoffray as Isobel, taken by the wonderful Chris Scott. It’s not the one I’ve been posting everywhere else, this is a blog-exclusive (not in any way a consequence of me forgetting to vary the pictures):

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June 27, 2018

Heaven Blogs #4: A post that got away from me somewhat

By jenbitespeople

I’ve just spent three incredible days in the depths of the Roxy, watching characters who have existed in my head for three years starting to take shape.

I can’t pretend that I have even the least amount of chill about this. The process of making theatre blows my mind every single time, and this is the first time I’ve had the chance to work this way on one of my own scripts. I’ve watched other people direct my text, I’ve directed other people’s texts, but I’ve never been both writer and director on anything but development pieces.

Over the past few days I’ve found myself saying repeatedly that I know almost nothing about this play. That might sound like an odd thing for the writer to say, but… it’s true. Yes, I poured my research and craft and love and labour into the script. I thought I knew the characters and their motivations inside and out. Then I actually got into the room with the actors and realised how utterly wrong I was.

Letting go of the script is always nerve-wracking. I’m used to that. But when I hand it over to another director, it’s out of my hands. This time I am the director, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to assume a position of complete authority – to say “this is my text, my word on it is final, the actors’ job is to serve my vision”.

The fact that it would be easy is precisely why I don’t do it. It’s far more difficult for me to relinquish control and just trust the actors to use their instincts and intelligence… so that’s what I have to do, because I know how much I love the results this process can yield. Besides, it would do an injustice to this play if directing it were not a leap of (or into) faith.

On Monday I handed the cast over to Flav again. We’ve had a change of lineup, losing our original Isobel, which meant welcoming a new member to the team – the excellent Marion Geoffray of Theatre Sans Accents. Fortunately Marion is a veteran of the Domingues D’Avila experience, having participated in Flavia’s PhD workshops earlier this year, so she fitted right in and it has been thrilling to watch her bring her own unique qualities into the room.

I wish there was a way to describe what happens in the rehearsal room without sounding utterly wanky. Either it sounds boringly hippyish, all about grounding and breathing and repeating the same phrases over and over again, or it’s fanciful to the point of being alienating. I could write about the strange alchemy that takes place when you get the right combination of people and words and energy and music, but… does that mean anything to people who weren’t there? It’s a live performance medium. Everything that has happened these past three days is unrepeatable. It can only exist in the moment, you can’t experience it through my retelling. Even if you come and see it in performance, that will be something different. There’s no way to pin down that feeling when you see something that’s just right for the very first time, and that’s probably for the best since the act of pinning it down would kill it. We aim to create those moments in every performance, of course, but that’s still a very different thing to watching it happen in the rehearsal room – and inevitably, a different thing to seeing it through my eyes. The one thing no audience member will ever bring to this show is the years of living with Heaven Burns in their head beforehand. That’s just me.

Experiences that are impossible to capture precisely in words are infinitely frustrating. It bothers me that I can only tell you that these three days have been amazing and ask you to take my word for it. I want to make everyone who reads this understand that I’m so incredibly excited about this show, and that this script has occupied a special place in my heart for reasons that even I don’t fully understand, and that I feel tantalisingly close to making it into the thing I’ve always thought it could be. I want you to understand that these past few mornings I’ve woken up with my heart pounding with excitement at the day’s work ahead of me, and I’ve never felt that way about a show before despite having worked on many things that I’ve loved. Watching the cast making discoveries and taking me into parts of this fictional world that I hadn’t realised existed is something new and intoxicating, and I’m grateful that I have the chance to do this.

This was not how this post was going to go. The plan was to write something insightful about process and music and being in the moment. But fuck it. This is what I’ve got. I suck at marketing but I occasionally surprise myself with my capacity for candour. Come and see the show and maybe more of this will make sense, I don’t know. Come and see it because that’s how being part of the weird wanky alchemy of theatre works.

Melted

That’s me dying of warm weather on the pavement outside the Roxy on Monday, but it’s also a pretty accurate representation of how I feel right now. Knackered and collapsed but so, so happy.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Being a Working Artist, Edinburgh Fringe, Uncategorized

May 26, 2018

Heaven Blogs #3: Domingues D’Avila’d

By jenbitespeople

Time to introduce the Heaven Burns team…

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There they are! From left to right, Kirsty Eila McIntyre (Isobel), Susanna Macdonald-Mulvihill (Christian), Flavia D’Avila (movement director), Daniel Hird (understudy) and Andrew Findlater (John).

 

I’m so happy that these guys could all be involved. Kirsty, Susanna and Andrew were in the rehearsed reading back in 2015 and they were always going to have first refusal on their roles if the opportunity to stage the play ever arose. Dan is stepping in to cover a performance before he heads off to drama school. And Flavia…

 

If you know my work, chances are you’re also familiar with Flav. Artistic Director of Fronteiras Theatre Lab, director of the beautiful and award-winning show La Nina Barro, We met during our undergrad at QMU, the hell in whose flames our bond was forged, and we’ve been working together in various capacities ever since. She always encourages me to up my game and hold my nerve, and if I could work with her on every damn thing I ever do, I would.

 

This particular iteration of our working relationship, with me directing and Flavia as movement director, is new to us. At first glance, Heaven Burns probably doesn’t look like the kind of play that requires a movement director – but that’s exactly why I want one. It’s a dense, texty script that could easily slip into inert staging, so Flav’s job is to help me keep it alive and in the actors’ bodies as well as their brains. She’ll also be helping me to solve the problem of the play’s violent moments, finding a way to make them read effectively in a small space.

 

Last Monday I handed the cast over to Flavia for a workshop to introduce them to her way of working. We only had four hours together so it was a short, intensive spurt of activity, and I loved watching it. Although Flav and I ostensibly take very different approaches to our work – I’m all about the text, she’s all about the body – we share a lot of fundamental values. We both spend a lot of time at the beginning of our respective processes building up trust and rapport, encouraging actors to work on instinct and bond as a group, and we both find that this speeds up the later stages of the rehearsal process exponentially.

 

Like me, Flavia makes extensive use of music in her work. Having been in her rehearsal rooms on a few occasions, I’m always intrigued by the pieces she selects for her playlists as she guides the actors through various emotional states. They’re seldom the same songs I would have chosen, they’re often very different in tone and feel, but I can always see where she’s coming from and it’s a constant reminder of how different our cultural influences have been.

 

The actors had each been asked to bring in an object that they felt represented their character in some way. I love this exercise. It seems to make people so nervous because they know their choice makes a clear statement about how they view the character, and that’s a nerve-wracking thing to do at the beginning of the process – particularly when you’ve got the writer in the room and you’re worried that you might reveal that you’ve completely misread things. But honestly, I’ve yet to see anyone get it “wrong” – for me as a writer, what’s interesting is to find out how the actor sees the character, where and to what they connect, and to be reminded that I’m no longer the exclusive holder of knowledge about these fictional people. By the time we do this exercise, the characters are out and living in other people’s heads, being reshaped by someone else’s life experience, they’re not solely or wholly mine any more. It’s a useful exercise in humility at the best of times, but particularly when I’m directing my own writing.

 

I won’t share exactly who brought what and why, since I didn’t ask the cast if I could and I would jeopardise their trust if they thought that anything they say in the rehearsal room might end up here. What I will say is that they all made intelligent, insightful choices, and gave themselves over freely to the exercises they did with their own objects and each other’s.

 

Much of the workshop was spent exploring and responding to objects and the actors’ bodies, creating and recreating sequences of actions and finding ways to link them together and make them correspond. It’s so simple and beautiful. Nothing is choreographed, everything is generated by the actors – yet due to the combination of their instincts, the music and their prior knowledge of the text, I started catching glimpses of the characters and the dynamics between them. It’s exciting, that moment. That’s when it all starts to feel very real, and when I begin to feel certain that the show’s physical language can be found, not imposed.

 

And that, when it comes down to it, is why Flav and I work so well together. Whatever the differences in our approaches, we both believe in the actor as an artist in their own right, a contributor to the creative process rather than just a tool by which a director’s vision can be realised. We care about the process being collaborative and exploratory, rather than hierarchical. I’m excited about the work we’ll do over the next two workshops and what we’ll find during rehearsals in July. Finding the right collaborators makes the task of theatremaking far, far more rewarding and enjoyable.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Being a Working Artist, Edinburgh Fringe, Uncategorized, Writing

May 15, 2018

Heaven Blogs #2: Prima la musica, poi le parole

By jenbitespeople

Music is vitally important to my writing. The first thing I do when I start work on a new play is figure out the soundtrack – not music that will make it into the script directly (usually), but the sounds that feel like the world of the play. It’s one of my favourite parts of the process, not just because it’s useful to me creatively but because the hours that I spend searching for the right pieces always yield a ton of excellent new discoveries.

 

I start by going to YouTube and if I have a piece in mind, I look it up and start wandering through the recommended videos. If I don’t have any specific starting point in mind, I just start typing words related to the world and characters until I find something. Even when I do know which track to start with, it’s often quite abstract. I just go by intuition.

 

In the case of Heaven Burns, my starting point was a song I had heard in a café and Shazam’d – CW Stoneking’s Don’t Go Dancing Down the Darktown Strutters’ Ball. Why that piece? Not a clue. That song didn’t end up on the soundtrack, it just led me to other things that did. The first was another CW Stoneking track, The Love Me or Die, which quickly established itself as Christian Caddell’s anthem.

 

After that I began following links and refining search terms until I somehow found my way to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Luzifer’s Abschied. It’s… weird. Not the most musical of music, and every single character in Heaven Burns would be horrified at how Catholic it is, but it was exactly what I needed to get me into the right place to write some of the more emotionally gruelling scenes.

 

Beyond the YouTube playlist, however, there was another musical influence on the script. I wrote most of the text during August 2015, while I was operating for Lucid Arts & Music’s production of The Secretary Turned CEO. It was a reimagining of Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona, blending the original baroque intermezzo with Danyal Dhondy’s original music – all of it beautiful and sparkly, all of it a downright bizarre influence on a dark, moody tale of 17th century witch panics. But somehow it brought out aspects that I hadn’t realised the story and characters would have, particularly where the character of Isobel was concerned. Her story became more romantic and her intelligence got sharper, and both of these things I attribute to the strange juxtaposition of music and subject matter.

 

At the moment I’m supposed to be making decisions about what kind of music, if any, will feature in the show this August. I know what I’d like to do, though time will tell whether I have the resources to make it work. I know that my ideas might completely change in response to the workshop we’ll be doing next week, when I hand the cast over to Flavia for their first movement direction session. I’m fairly certain that none of the pieces I’ve mentioned here will appear in the final show… but you never know.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Edinburgh Fringe, Uncategorized, Writing

May 1, 2018

Heaven Blogs #1: The Origin Story

By jenbitespeople

I’ve picked up a lot of new followers recently, which I imagine has something to do with the EdFringe entry for Heaven Burns going live… which probably means it’s about time I wrote something about the show!

 

The short introduction to Heaven Burns is this: I’ve been fascinated by the Scottish witch hunts since my teens, so when I started writing plays it was only a matter of time before I wrote one on the subject. That play was Heaven Burns, which I wrote in 2015. There was a rehearsed reading at Previously… Scotland’s History Festival that year, followed by two years of looking for a home for the script. After a lot of rejections I was on the point of shelving it, but then the Assembly Roxy Theatre Award came up and I decided to give it one last shot… and I won! Heaven Burns will run for three weeks at Assembly Roxy during #edfringe2018.

 

As we get into workshops and rehearsals I’ll be sharing bits of the preparation process here. Until then my plan is to talk a bit about where the play comes from and the process of creating it, starting today with the very earliest point in its journey – my interest in all things witch-related.

 

I can’t pin down the origin of my interest with any certainty. I was a spooky child and anything with a supernatural element was right up my street. From Babette Cole’s The Trouble with Mum and Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch to Bewitched and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, if there was a witch involved, I was sold. The concept of magic made sense to me, possibly because I experienced a lot of powerful hallucinations in childhood and the possibility of growing up to command an army of museum exhibits didn’t seem like a stretch.

 

As I grew up it became increasingly clear that the world didn’t work the way I thought it had. Like all 90s teenagers I dabbled with the kind of magic that has to be spelled with extra letters, but all it did was bring me to the realisation that things like Wicca aren’t for me. I was looking for something that doesn’t appear to be available within reality. Not to mention that styling yourself a witch was just so bloody popular in the late 90s, and I was an angsty pretentious teenager who wanted nothing to do with things that were popular, so I had to find a way of satisfying my interest while still feeling different.

 

God, being in my teens was exhausting…

 

The answer, I decided, was to look to history. By this point I’d started working as a ghost tour guide, because if you work in the arts in Edinburgh it’s pretty much mandatory that you do your time telling scary stories to tourists. I’d developed a bit of an obsession with the bubonic plague, particularly the epidemic during the 17th century, and had started reading more widely about the period in order to flesh out my mental picture of the society it affected. That led me on to reading more about the witch panics, which fuelled my interest in learning much more about them than we covered on the tours.

 

At this point, being a young and undisciplined reader, my ability to evaluate sources was limited. It took me a while to get the hang of reading critically, but as I got better at it I began to realise how little I understood. Next thing I knew I was down the research rabbit hole, trying to wrap my head around the complex factors that contributed to the witch hunts – Scotland’s shift to Calvinism, folk belief and its overlaps with Catholicism, James VI and all his emotional baggage and subsequent paranoia, the ravages of the plague, family dynamics… even the weather causing crop failure and lost fishing boats. The more I read, the more interested I became in what it must have been like to live one’s everyday life in that society, and that’s what started finding its way into my plays.

 

My first Fringe play, Creepie Stool, contained a sneaky reference to the North Berwick witches. Old Bones, which opens in Prague later this month, engages more explicitly with the events leading up to the North Berwick trials – I’ll be writing a separate post about that in a few weeks. Heaven Burns, the first of my plays to focus solely on the witch hunts, is set a bit later and deals with the brief heyday of the witchprickers, and particularly with one named John Dixon, who turned out to be a disguised woman named Christian Caddell.

 

Spoilers for the play? Not really. Between the blurb and the opening scene, those of you who see it won’t be in any doubt as to the situation. I first heard Christian Caddell’s story from Susan Morrison of Previously… Scotland’s History Festival. She had encountered this little-known figure, unearthed by Dr Louise Yeoman while working on a BBC Scotland documentary, and thought it was such a powerful story that she actually had it printed on the back of her business cards. I’ve still got that card somewhere, and it’s to Susan that I owe the initial spark of the idea for the play.

 

As I searched for what little information there is on Christian, I noticed that she was operating in Morayshire at around the same time as Isobel Gowdie, whose story I had learned in my earlier studies. Isobel is a very unusual case, since she presented herself to the parish authorities and freely accused herself of witchcraft, apparently without being under any kind of duress. She confessed at length and in great detail, telling about her coven’s activities and contradicting prevailing opinions about the Devil’s proficiency as a lover. Her eventual fate is lost to history, but the records of her confessions remain. Christian Caddell, or rather John Dixon, doesn’t seem to have been involved with her trial – but John Innes of Spynie, who hired the disguised Christian to prick witches near Elgin in 1661, was the Notary Public who recorded Isobel’s confession, so they at least have some common acquaintance.

 

This was enough to set my imagination to work. Did the two women ever meet? What would have happened if they had? What kind of fervour spurred Christian on to hunt witches? What makes someone accuse herself of witchcraft when it carries the death penalty?

 

I don’t claim that the play answers these questions, but it does explore one possibility – and I’ll be talking more about how I chose to treat the historical subject matter and how I see its contemporary relevance in future posts. For the moment, I’ll leave things here and not risk turning this into the mega-post where I attempt to explain every thought I’ve ever had relating to Heaven Burns. If you’ve got any questions that you’d like me to answer in future posts, comment away and let me know!

 

And get your tickets for the show, I’d love to see you there. Cast announcement coming soon!

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Being a Working Artist, Edinburgh Fringe, Tracing the Scenic Route, Uncategorized, Writing

March 4, 2018

The Nastyversary

By jenbitespeople

A year ago yesterday I received a book in the post. This book:

Nasty Women author copy

My contributor copy of 404 Ink‘s Nasty Women. The look on my face is somewhere between pride, joy and sheer bloody terror based on the growing realisation that this book was something much bigger than I’d anticipated.

I’d first heard about 404 Ink through my husband, Mark Bolsover, who had spotted them on Twitter and foretold their greatness/retweeted them a lot. As the deadline for submissions for the first issue of their lit mag approached, Mark kept nudging me to send something in. I kept putting it off because the only thing I had to send was a monologue and I doubted they’d want it. Then, half an hour before submissions closed, 404 tweeted a gif from one of my favourite songs.

Muse gif

I don’t think it was that actual gif, but it was close enough. It made me smile – 404 Ink has the best damn gif game out there – so I thought “fuck it, why not” and fired over the monologue. It was selected for the lit mag (which surprised me) along with a piece of Mark’s work (which didn’t surprise me at all), so for the first time we were published together.

We went along to the launch, which turned out to be one of the most useful events I’ve ever been to. It was our introduction to Interrobang, Chris McQueer, and most importantly of all to Heather McDaid and Laura Jones themselves, the powerhouse women behind 404 Ink.

At that point I knew they were doing an anthology called Nasty Women and I was aware that the call for pitches was due to close shortly. Again, I’d been ignoring it – not because I didn’t feel I had anything to say, but because the one thing I really wanted to write about was so damn personal that I didn’t really want to write the pitch. That changed when I actually met Heather and Laura in person and decided that I liked them and thought they seemed sound. Again, I thought “fuck it” and proposed a piece about my experiences with hormonal contraception and the toll it took on my body.  Again, they accepted something I’d felt sure they’d reject.

Writing the piece should have been a more nerve-wracking experience than it was, but given the speed with which the anthology was pulled together, there simply wasn’t time to get spooked. The piece was written, sent in and ready before I had much of a chance to think about it. Besides, it was an anthology by a new publishing company being funded via Kickstarter – not much chance that anyone beyond a fairly niche crowd would actually read it, right?

How very, very wrong I was.

The crowdfunding campaign spent its first couple of days bouncing along at a nice rate, which I attributed to a combination of Heather and Laura being savvy about it and to the large number of contributors who were sharing the link. Then Margaret Atwood backed it and tweeted about it and suddenly everything went absolutely bonkers. The project was 100% funded. Then 200%. Then 369% (iirc). There was extra money (always appreciated). There was publicity.

…there was a sudden certainty that people were actually going to read my essay.

And they did. I have no idea how many copies of Nasty Women have been sold over the past year. What I do know is that friends have sent me photos of it in bookshops in different parts of the UK, that it was the best-selling book at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival, and that Audible turned it into an audiobook. I know that copies have been ordered by people all over the world.

Which means that there are now a lot of people out there who possess in-depth knowledge of the state of my uterus and more about my sexual history than my mum would have been happy with. I mentally apologise to my mum on a regular basis for my need to share my life with strangers – but I think she’d be happy about the results of my oversharing if she’d lived to see them. I don’t just mean things like Book Festival bestseller status, but the responses I’ve had from other women.

I had always assumed that the extent of my troubles with contraception was unusual before writing that essay. Nobody seemed to talk much about it, and the doctors I saw acted as if I was a statistical outlier. But after Nasty Women came out, several women left reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and their blogs saying that they’d had similar experiences. At the Glasgow launch I found myself having intense, hasty conversations at the signing table with women who wanted to tell me that they’d been through it too. It’s been the same at every Nasty Women event I’ve been involved in since. Older women talk to me about the early days of the Pill and the things they went through. Women my age and younger open up to me because they know that I know. I’ve had medical staff tell me that the essay gave them a new perspective on the patient’s experience. I get emails and Twitter messages from strangers telling me that because of my essay they’ve requested bone density scans, adjusted their calcium intake, rethought their contraception.  One even sent me pictures of the passages she’d highlighted and shown to her GP in order to get a gynaecology referral to discuss sterilisation.

Even though it feels strange to have given strangers such intimate information about me, it makes me incredibly happy to have those moments with readers. It’s often quite emotional, because they’re often talking about it for the first time or I’m the first person they’ve spoken to knowing for certain that there’s a shared experience between us. That’s a big thing to be trusted with. Which is why, for all it has felt exposing and raw, I know that writing that piece was the right thing to do and I’m glad I didn’t have time to talk myself out of it.

My essay isn’t the only one that provoked this kind of response, of course. Skim through the reviews on Goodreads or Amazon and you’ll see lots of readers name-checking the writers whose pieces really spoke to them. I’ve seen my fellow Nasties’ work recommended in threads on social media discussions about the issues they explored. I’ve heard them talk about the readers who have engaged with them, who’ve reached out to share their own stories in return.

In addition to bringing us into contact with the readers, the Nasty Women anthology brought us into contact with each other. I didn’t realise, this time last year, how much of a bond I would feel with my fellow contributors. Ren Aldridge described it as feeling like she’d joined a coven, and I’d agree with that. We haven’t all met in real life, but that doesn’t matter – even the Nasties that I’ve never met are special to me, and it makes me happy when good things happen to them.

Most of all, I feel incredibly happy when good things happen to 404 Ink. Laura and Heather have gone from strength to strength, won one award after another, and continued to be genuinely lovely human beings who do their work with principles and respect for their writers (and they have the best office dog ever). I’m very glad to have them in my life, on my CV and on my bookshelves.

The moral of this story: Writers, find publishers who tweet gifs from your favourite songs and send things to them.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Being a Working Artist, Uncategorized, Writing

February 9, 2018

Rejections Suck

By jenbitespeople

Today (well, yesterday, but it was today at the time of writing) has been a rotten day. Two days ago I got a rejection for a thing I really, really wanted. I got shortlisted, which was nice, but still rejected. Then yesterday I got a rejection that I’d kind of expected but got angry about the way it was handled. Then today I got three rejections, including one that I’d had high hopes for. It’s been a pretty galling time, and it’s probably not over – I’m due to hear back on three more things within the next two days. One of them I’m expecting to be rejected for. One I’m expecting but desperately hoping I’m wrong. And one is something I’m on the shortlist for when I didn’t expect to be, so I have no idea what to think. I’m bracing myself for a rough weekend.

 

Normally I find rejections a lot easier to handle. They’re usually spaced out. Some of them hurt, because when you’ve put a lot of work into an application and fallen in love with the project you pitched it’s always galling when the answer’s no… but individual stab wounds to the heart and ego are manageable, and there’s usually a sprinkling of acceptances to soothe the stings. When they’re bunched together like this, though, it feels relentless.

 

The thing is, I know all the reasons not to get upset by rejection. I’ve been on selection panels myself and I know that perfectly valid (and sometimes extremely impressive) applications have to be rejected for any number of reasons. Sometimes it comes down to a simple gut instinct for how things fit together. I’m well aware that rejection doesn’t necessarily mean that your application was terrible (though that is a possibility).

 

This is why I like being told when I’ve made the long or shortlist. I know that not everyone does, I have some friends who hate to be told that. Personally, I appreciate the reassurance that my application wasn’t the first one in the bin. That mine wasn’t the one that got passed around to gleeful cries of “look at this joker!” (This might be something that only happens in the depths of a fevered and anxious writer’s brain, but still, if I’m shortlisted then it can’t have happened at all. Unless they’re shortlisting me for sheer comedy value. Oh god.)

 

However, knowing better than to get upset and actually remaining un-upset are two very different things. I can brush off an individual rejection, but five within three days? It hurts, and I will admit to feeling somewhat bruised and in a deep sulk.

 

The worst thing about it is feeling powerless. I can’t change a damn thing. There’s no undoing the applications, no restoring the moment I began writing them and using a different project instead. There’s no changing the lifetime of experiences that brought me to the point where I felt the need to make these particular shows. And of course there’s no arguing with the decisions made, tempting though it always is.

 

Today I feel useless. I feel like there’s no point in continuing with any of this, like nobody cares about my work anyway and all the work I’ve put into honing my craft is worth nothing. Time is passing, life is short and progress isn’t happening fast enough. I feel resentful towards the years I lost to events that were completely outwith my control. I feel angry and cut off and as if nothing I’ve ever done has any kind of value. I feel like everything is personal even when I know damn well it can’t be.

 

Such is the power of the sulk that I also feel resentful towards the good things that are happening because they interfere with the strop-narrative. Yes, I have the new spoken word show and I’ve got bookings for it and it’s shaping up well. Yes, a show that I wrote is going to Prague. Yes, I got a Tom McGrath award to help with one of my works in progress. These are all things to be happy about, which means that I can’t even just be allowed a straightforward woe-is-me outpouring. Clearly the entire universe is out to torture me by denying me abject misery.

 

The solution, of course, is to buck the fuck up, end the sulk and get on with things. Have the genuine emotional reaction that only my nearest and dearest get to see, turn the entertaining/potentially useful bits into a blog post for the handy dopamine hit that comes from online attention-whoring, go out in the sunshine, restock the cat litter and maybe buy a Crème Egg, then write the things that need to be written today. Read a bit. Do the next round of applications. Get over it. Get over it because freelance life means the next rejection is always just round the corner and if it hits while I’m still in this mood it’s going to be harder to bounce back from. Get over it because freelance life is better than the alternatives available to me and for all its precarity I’m generally pretty happy with it. Get over it because it’s annoying and so is everything else, but at least I can choose whether to annoy myself.

 

I’m pretty sure I intended this post to be a bit more positive and potentially helpful than this. Oh well. Too full of rage for that today.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Being a Working Artist, Uncategorized, Writing