Category: Writing

  • 2019

    2019

    What, so I only make end-of-year posts now? Possibly. As a glance at the Gig Archive will show, it has been a busy year. Fortunately it has been a kinder year than 2018, bringing no further losses, and a far more professionally satisfying year. There’s still a lot going on in the headspace, but the…

  • Heaven Blogs #3: Domingues D’Avila’d

    Time to introduce the Heaven Burns team… 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…

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

    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…

  • Heaven Blogs #1: The Origin Story

    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…

  • The Nastyversary

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

  • Rejections Suck

    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…

  • Writing Vox

    Two months since my last blog post? Really? Busy times – busy and really exciting! In April I was over in Milan for the opening of #SonsOfGod: Vox, the adaptation of Coriolanus that I wrote for Charioteer Theatre. I’ve been acquainted with Charioteer since I assisted on a show of theirs about eight years ago, and I was…

  • Squiggles

    This monologue was originally intended to feature in Such a Nice Girl, the play I wrote for the Just Festival in 2014. The character was cut and the play went in a different direction, but this piece has been used once or twice as a standalone monologue. I’m sharing it here because the events that inspired…

  • Due giorni a Roma – Comfort & Joy at TREND

    24 hours ago I was in Rome, sitting on the floor at Ciampino airport and trying to ignore the ache in my feet. Now I’m back in Edinburgh, my feet hurt slightly less, and I can hardly believe that the past three days have happened.   The reason for the mad dash to Rome was…

  • History, witchery and recurring themes…

    A few years ago I found my Story Jotter from P1. I flicked through it, interested to see what I was writing about when I was four and a half. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to find a story about a witch, another about a ghost, and one about two children playing in a…