I’ve been working on rhyme and rhythm for my new play, and believe it or not, last night I wrote a sonnet.

It’s actually part of what will probably end up being a fifteen minute monologue for one of my main characters.

Now, Shakespeare I am not, but I’m bare proud, so thought I’d share it with you.

Fuck, get your phone, yeah, punch these digits in,
And save this number under something wow.
Like Dan for dope or Wes for weed, you win;
Bare easy if you wanna do it now.
Then if you’re bored and don’t know what to do,
Or life’s all fucked, and you just wanna die.
Then that’s the time to waste an hour or two;
Get out, get pissed, pick up, get home, get high.
Of course you could ignore this shit instead,
But listen bruv, your tags are on the wall.
We’s got one life, we’s gunna wake up dead;
So come on mate get real and make that call.
And yeah, that shite who deals the night away?
That fucked up cunt is me. Safe man, KK.

Haha, that surprised you too, didn’t it!

Something big.

Something important.

Something happened on Saturday night. I was alone having coffee and a chocolate brownie in the Olivier Café at the National Theatre.

Finally, after at least seven barren months of false starts, depressive episodes and the sheer hell of what I can only describe as writer’s block, something came to life in that wonderful, complex, annoying, stupid, mundane, brilliant, brain of mine.

An idea.

For a play.

And boy has it got me excited.

I mean really, really exicited.

This is bigger than Spaceboy. This will go places. This will be performed professionally, internationally.

This will launch my theatrical writing career. And put me on the playwright map.

Funny how you know things like that. From somewhere deep inside.

So there I was at the National, thinking about Brecht and all the great playwrights who’ve had their hard work performed there, and little, old, boring, depressed and useless me, and I was sat there staring down over the third level balcony at all the flights of concrete stairs…

And then it hit me. Suddenly characters appeared shouting at me and smacking me between the eyes. I reached for paper and pen and just sat their staring at them, listening to what they were saying and frantically writing everything down.

Every image, one after the other after another.

I couldn’t write fast enough.

And at some point, the interval came and went along with the Olivier audience, and yet more ideas came, and still I sat and stared and scribbled away.

Three hours of Mother Courage had passed before I realised I should really have been on a train home.

But it didn’t stop there.

By Sunday morning I had the title.

By Sunday night I had the beginning.

And the end.

By Monday evening I had a number of scenes in first draft.

Last night, I didn’t sleep. I was in bed and still writing stuff down in my notebook at 6.30am this morning.

And now it’s Tuesday afternoon, and I’d love to tell you more about the stairs, but I need to get on with some writing.

You will excuse me, won’t you?