Well, I’ve finally gotten around to sending Spaceboy off to various places in the hope someone will do something with it.

I’ve sent copies to the Loft Theatre Company (Lemington Spa) for their New Writing Competition and High Tide for their competiton for the 2010 Festival in Haleswork, Suffolk.

In addition I’ve a sent Spaceboy to the Bush Theatre as an example of my (new) writing. (I sent the Bush a copy of Kath and Kin nearly two years ago and if they remember me then hopefully they’ll see I have improved significantly since becoming part of the Nuffield Theatre Writers Group.)

It’ll be at least four months before I hear anything from these places, if at all, so I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve also sent Room 20 to the Off Cut Festival (Islington) – just made Monday’s deadline, lol – and we’ll see what happens with that too. The short-listed plays, to be announced 1st September, will be performed at the festival in Sept/Oct. Fingers crossed, then.

I feel my work is professional enough now to be sent out, though whether any of it will be considered professional enough to be produced is an entirely different matter.

We’ll see.

–

Ha Ha!

Just had an email from Off Cut Festival while editing this very post!

Now, to put this into perspective, the deadline was 5pm on Monday.

And, in less than 48 hours, they have read every single submitted play, chosen a short-list of 24 and emailed everybody else!

“We have be (sic) overwhelmed by the number of submissions, the quality of which has made our selection process very difficult.”

Umm, yeah, well, call me cynical, but I reckon they must have pretty much decided on their 24 before the deadline.

Doesn’t give me much faith in writing competitions.

Well, three and a half months after sending off my script of Kath and Kin it has come back with my first official rejection letter.

The Bush Theatre kindly wrote in their stock letter:

Our reader enjoyed Kath and Kin but I’m afraid we can’t see an opening for developing the piece here at the Bush.

The first of many, I’m sure. I’m not disappointed since I’m at the bottom of a steep learning curve. Besides I’m on the third draft of Kath and Kin at the moment and shouldn’t really have sent it to them in the first place.

Each producing theatre has it’s own criteria and although most will receive well over 1000 unsolicited scripts in a year, they will only produce one or two.

Fin Kennedy received rejection letters from all the London producing theatres for his play How to Disappear Completely And Never Be Found, then in 2006 the play won the Art Council’s 38th John Whiting Award for New Writing, the first time an un-produced play had won! Needless to say, it has been produced since.

PS: Just read the play for part of this fortnight’s Nuffield Theatre Writers Group homework. It’s is very clever in its construction and writing. Just the sort of thing I like. (Also, oddly enough, it makes good use of the shipping forecast in it, as does Kath and Kin.) Thanks Pete, for recommending/lending it to me.

Spent the day writing at Ian’s and started my Kath and Kin re-write. Admittedly the first version was pretty good, and those that have read it thought so. All that was really needed were a few alterations and typo corrections, but in my mind it’s not right.

The characters of Tony and Debs are in the play for two reasons: one, to tell the story (essentially in flashback) and two, to establish a sub plot. And, all though it works, it could I feel be so much better.

I have taken the decision to axe them, re-work the structure the of the play by condensing the time line from a few weeks to a few days and centralise the setting so that the action takes place in one place. By doing this I can also develop the characters of the other four (Kath, Paul, Mark and Sophie) and in particular their family dynamics. I can easily keep the important sub plot since it involves Sophie and can have her telling it rather than Tony and Debs.

This is going to be hard work, and will probably take longer to re-write than it took to write in the first place. Maybe this is what the ‘wrighting’ is.

Most of the Woking Writers Circle and a few friends gathered at Amanda’s this evening and after a rather good curry we all sat in the living room and had an excellent reading of ‘Kath and Kin’ with various people taking parts. It was great to hear all the characters again and particularly good to hear different interpretations by different readers.

The writers group aren’t actors, but they had a good go at it and the result was very surprising with some readers really getting into their parts. Everyone enjoyed the reading and the play provoked a lot of good discussion afterwards too.

I had already decided on the direction of my re-draughting following the first reading a few weeks ago, and listening to the play being read again tonight really helped me with the thinking.

Thank you WWC!

Kath and Kin had it’s first public reading last night. I’d invited some people from a couple of AmDram groups I belong to and we met up in a pub in Ottershaw.

It was great to hear Kath and her family coming to life. Those present certainly enjoyed the play and I was able to pick out bits that I felt weren’t working which was good.

I can already see two of the characters only seem to be there for the sake of the plot and not for themselves. If I cut them it will also mean cutting my clever ploy on the cronology of the play. It is difficult to know wether this would have worked anyway, and a number of people have asked how I would have got it across to an audience.

A great night, and thanks to all those who came and read the parts.

I’ve just sent an email out inviting a couple of my local amateur dramatics groups to a play reading, so figured I’d might as well invite the rest of the world…

We’ll be meeting on Wednesday 7th November 2007 at The Castle, 222 Brox Road, Ottershaw, KT16 0LW from 7.30pm. (Reading to begin at 7.45pm.)

This new work written over the last couple of months is my first contemporary full length play and is a drama entitled Kath and Kin. It explores the modern issue of violence and anti-social behaviour in young people from the perspective of a victim’s family.

There are no naked men or pigs in this serious piece but there is some strong language and it is not suitable for young children.

Please come along for an evening’s entertainment where you’ll be given the opportunity to read if you want. There are six parts (3M, 3F) and we’ll have a break between the two acts finishing somewhere around 10.30pm.

I’d be most grateful if you could email me at kath at pafoster dot com or call me on 07855 303565 and let me know if you are able to come so I have an idea of numbers.

I look forward to seeing you on the 7th.

Kindest regards,

Paul Foster.
Playwright.

(PS: ‘Naked men’ and ‘pigs’ are references to my last two productions.)

Not a good day…

After nearly a decade of pumping paper my faithful HP LaserJet 6L finally met it’s maker – though I have to admit, it did have a helping hand… Or two…

I have not been functioning fully for a good few weeks now and have been desperate to edit and print a final draft of my play so I could send it to a theatre in Southampton.

It has taken rather a lot of effort to get it done since reading and re-reading and correcting the endless typos that always appear from nowhere has been rather tiresome. I’m sure you’re familiar with the missing words your brain puts in for you when you’re reading, and the not so obvious they’re, their and there and the you’re and your. The problem is I’m such a perfectionist that it has to be write (sorry, right). Well at least 99.9% of it!

Anyway, having finally finished at 10pm last night (just in time for Heroes on BBC3, I hasten to add) I promised myself I would print it this morning and deliver it to Southampton personally (what with all the Royal Mail strikes) – No such luck.

Printing from my desktop computer (an Iyonix with RISC OS 5.11 for anyone in the slightest bit interested – no, not a PC and not a Mac either) failed to work due to problems with my network and the much older computer hosting the old printer via parallel cable, so I converted it to pdf, noticing yet another typo, re-did it, stuck it on a floppy disc (a what?) and fired up my a decade old dinosaur of laptop, (Dell Latitude CPt with windoze 95).

I need to point out that I’d already waited a whole week for Viking-Direct to deliver a new toner cartridge using their fast, free overnight delivery service (they did apologise and send a free box of biscuits) and I was getting desperate since I should have sent my play off last week.

Anyway, I’ve had numerous problems with my printer; it’s old, and hand-feeding paper for a 98 page document is only just bearable, providing the bloody paper doesn’t jam, which it did, and increasingly so. But the real frustration came when my lanquid laptop in its infinate wisdom decided to send hieroglyphics to the printer which wouldn’t stop even after I’d turned off and unplugged the printer and reset it. Can you see my frustration building?

I got up to page 4 (twice) and having been at this printing lark for well over an hour this morning and not being in the mildest of moods anyway, I was not best pleased when the paper jammed for what was to be the final time.

I have to admit I don’t really know what happened next. Something snapped somewhere and it’s never done that before. The result was my first fleetingly flying printer. Fortunately my office is not that big and there are no windows, so apart from a bit of scraped paintwork (Richard will be redecorating soon anyway) there was no major damage – except that is for the LaserJet. Suffice to say even the brand new £35 toner cartridge couldn’t be rescued.

I have to say, it’s had a remarkable effect on my mood. I really ought to throw laser printers a little more often! Anyway, I emailed the pdf to KallKwik and will pick up three copies of Kath and Kin first thing in the morning… Can’t think why I didn’t do that in the first place!

Wow, time to write a blog entry!

Apologies to regular readers. The past couple of weeks have been busy – well busy for me, that is, especially compared to my last entry.

The following day – Tuesday 11th, I met a fellow writer for coffee in Woking, and we set about deciding it was about time we got really committed to writing – ie making a living. We now meet three times a week and get two 90 minute writing sessions in per meeting, as well as about an hour or so of writing related discussion, reading etc. We are not ‘collaborating’ as such (though the option is there I suppose) , just commit to spend the time writing on the various projects we have.

We have committed to a six week trial program of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 11.30am to 4.30pm. We meet in each others houses and do each other lunch, then on Thursdays we go into Woking and work in the library or the new Lightbox museum. (Designed by the Architects who did the London Eye and very pleasant.) We refer to these days as ‘going to work’ and having just finished our 3rd week together I must say the benefits have been enormous! I have been working on my play and my colleague has been working on a children’s novel for a competition. We’ll both shortly start writing loads of short stories to submit to various women’s magazines as well as take on any writing projects for anyone willing to pay the going rate!

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working hard on my play and on Wednesday night I finished it and printed out the first full proper draft. With two acts of 60 and 50 minutes, it is gripping stuff; a contemporary piece, quite unlike anything I have done before, and my first proper full length play. I’m very proud of it. I have just handed it over to my friend Amanda from the Woking Writers’ Circle who has been eagerly awaiting to proof-read it for me. The play is called Kath and Kin and I am hoping to hold a reading of it at the end of October.
 

Difficult week. Struggled with being down through most of it. Still not back up properly yet, but OK.

Finally got the car back. One of the keys still isn’t working, even though it went back today and they said they couldn’t find anything wrong with it – again. Oh well. As long as one key still works.

I also handed in a ‘series of scenes’ for the Guildford Play Writing Festival whilst I was in Guildford with the car this afternoon.

All last week I was doing really well play writing, but last weekend I started going down again, and even though I was still excited about the play I’ve really struggled to do things this week.

One thing I wasn’t expecting; the little One Act of about 25-40 mins that I thought I was writing keeps telling me it wants to be a full length play. I’d already had problems with the title (still undecided – now gone through half a dozen and settled on one of the earlier ones as a working title, though probably won’t use the idiom I chose since Agatha Christie already has – not that you can’t copyright a title, you understand, but it could cause problems if someone decided to do a play version of her novel since it has already been made into a film – I digress, sorry.) and two characters wrote themselves out (down to six now) though one did sneak back in – just his voice is heard off stage for one short, but important line.

Anyway, I’ve written in first draft about 70 minutes worth of what I fully expect to be a 55 minute first act and a 45 minute second act full length play. Essentially I have written the beginning and end of both acts and am now filling in the middles. Not done it like that before – not that I’ve written a full length play before. (I’m not counting my Pantomime – different genre.)

Sadly, this last week my concentration has only lasted for about two fifteen minute episodes per day. Not good, considering I can easily write without a break for up three hours before I even look at the time. (And managed to spend a full 12 hours not including breaks writing on one particular day the previous week.) Consequently I didn’t get anywhere near as much done as I wanted to this week – I spent most of it in bed. I was getting seriously concerned that I wouldn’t be submitting anything to the Festival, and wasn’t sure I would be able to right up until about midday today. Anyway, I ended up submitting the first 35 mins of Act I.

I’m looking forward to finishing and editing the full play. Will probably end up getting out my Writers and Artists Year Book and finding a theatre to submit it too, if that is I’ve got a decent title by then!

Oh well, we wait and see…

Shortly off to the (wild; wet; windy – take your pick) Witterings for the weekend (I promised Richard we’d go for some long walks as the weather isn’t shaping up to much) and I’ll be back home Sunday for my Monthly Writers’ Circle Breakfast Meeting.

Called the garage yesterday. Yep! The RAC Patrol man was right. Our little purple Nissan needs a brain transplant. Parts, labour and VAT come to £621.71 – more than our R-reg Micra is actually worth. Pity really. Other than the NATS going a couple of years ago, this car has been brilliant and highly reliable. A little hole in the sill led to a bit of welding in order to pass last year’s MOT, but nothing else has ever been a problem in the 6 years we’ve had it. (It’s not a she or a he, since we’ve never named it!) Wouldn’t be able to get another car as good as that one for six hundred quid (especially since ours has only done 70,000 miles) so gave the garage the go ahead. Hope to be driving it again tomorrow.

To be honest, I can’t say I have really missed it. In fact not having the car has forced me to think differently, which is good since I had a brilliant idea for a new play.

I’m entering the Guildford Play Writing Festival, a new part of the Guildford Book Festival. I found out about it through my writer’s group a couple of weeks ago and set about trying to think of something. The judges are looking for “contemporary themes or the exploration of modern issues” and being as none of my work so far fits this criteria, I knew I’d have to come up with something from scratch. Not easy. With me inspiration strikes when it feels like it. I was beginning to wonder if it ever would; the closing date is the end of the month.

Saturday afternoon an idea popped up whilst having afternoon tea with Richard in his studio in the garden. So far it’s had four titles and lost two characters, but it’s shaping up really well, and I’m very, very pleased with it. Spent most of Sunday writing, 12 hours on Monday, and yesterday afternoon and evening. Still a lot of work to do. This play is coming out in a completely different way than the others I’ve written. There are elements of sytle I have used before, but it’s doing it’s own thing. The characters appear much more real to me than in previous pieces. I think it’s something to do with it being the ‘modern issue’ or the ‘contemporary theme’. Or maybe I’m just getting better with practice. I’m loving it. Richard is pleased that I’m writing again. He says I’m much, much happier when I’m writing.

Time I was back in playwright mode…

Oh, nearly forgot. The excellent Stephen Fry programs are being shown again tonight and tomorrow. Well worth a viewing if you didn’t catch them the first time round.

Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. BBC4. Wed & Thurs. 8pm