Wrote the first draft of a short play, Room with a Door, for the Cheshire Prize for Literature. The theme of the prize is the impact of Covid, the lockdowns etc. rather a dry subject. My idea is relatively simple, a play about being confined to a room with two protagonists; a sort of cross between Waiting for Godot and Satre's No Exit. It's sufficient. I'd rather try a play, it's more interesting to me than a poem, and is good practice for any future writing. Contests like this are ideal practice in a new field. I feed off the idea of competition. As with any creative work, the key is drama and a point of impact, a twist, and ideally lots of little ones along the way. I need to redraft it... one key principle is image; to find the key scene, point of impact and focus on that, as Hitchcock did. As of now, there is no action at all, it's all text.
Also converted my poems/songs of 2020, ready to add them to my website. I merged poems and song lyrics last year, I think, as I often combine the two but they appear separately on the site... ideally I need to check and update all of them (there are 1770 songs/poems to date) as I'll have inevitably made changes and corrections, but I rarely make them on the website too... they all need checking by hand.
I've had a boost to my Spotify listener numbers, it seems due to the electro-pop I made with Tor back in 2007 or so. I expect things to grow hugely over the next few years. Everything I've made before seems very out of date, simple, synthetic, computer game music... not like the music I want to do, or can do, or will do. I really must produce more new music. I must obliterate my old work. I feel the same about my painting, my old paintings, which are so crude compared to my current abilities. How frustrating each day is! I feel so capable of so many good things yet I feel that my 'old rubbish' gets the attention, as though this defines me. The production of new work seems to be interminably slow. Well, I expect all artists feel this way. I feel more excited than ever about my future work.
Onward!
