Poor neglected blog

A writer's blog is a strange animal. You might imagine it should be bursting with words and ideas, but if I'm writing here I'm not working. So when it's quiet here it doesn't mean I've stopped writing, but I'm writing more than ever.

Admittedly with the school summer holidays here that isn't always an easy task. Right now I'm typing while my toddler plays and watches a musical, rhyming show about rescuing small animals. It's a sort of baby aimed opera - and as bad as you might imagine to adult ears.

But dragging my mind back to the task at hand. I've reached the process in writing the play where I have written all the scenes and I'm about to check the ordering. It's the kind of freedom you don't get with longer prose projects, but with a six thousand word play you can metaphorically throw it all in the air and rewrite your linking lines.

Which of course shows how lucky we are to have access to wp. I've repeatedly heard the argument that wp means we have become lazy writers. We don't need to worry about ordering in story and construction because we can always change it.

But you know some of us have minds that don't happily follow linear order. I remember - and this shows you how very long ago it was - that I used to cut my draft university essays into paragraphs and then rearrange then on my bed before rewriting.

A play is exactly that - a play. It's about playing with the audiences assumptions and expectations. It's about teasing them, filtering through information drip by drip and only pulling it all together at the end when the pieces should snap together tighter than a toddler's grip on candy.

This is where I am - and because I'm writing a play based on very real events, it's hard to surprise and intrigue, but I'm working on it. I will remember to drop by here more. Honest.

Oh, and the little animals appear to have all been rescued, but it doesn't appear to have stopped them singing. Pity me.