Yesterday & Today: 1st May

I thought my Crash read-through yesterday morning went well. Having done it so often now I get a sense of where I’m hitting the right notes / tone / emotion and where I’m not. Just under six weeks before the performance and half the tickets already sold…

I may get a chance to ‘dress rehearse’ it in front of a live audience at the retreat next week.

Yesterday also saw more work on “C” which creeps inexorably towards its conclusion, and I spent a fair chunk of time again thinking about options for projects later in the summer.

The evening was rounded off by attending an hour’s poetry from ‘Red Door Poets’. For my taste, I think the poets simply try and cram too much into their allotted nine or ten minutes, which means the audience is hit by poem after poem with no room to breathe and only the chat window in which to comment – and chat windows are only useful for the inane it seems (“Wow!). All of which is a shame, because we didn’t get the chance to properly appreciate the work on show.

And now it’s another month – May already! – not that today will be much different in terms of work: “C”, thinking about future work, fiddling here and there. It is also the North Yorkshire Stanza this evening, and I’m assaulting the group with my second even Villanelle… We’ll see how that one goes. I suspect people may object to the morose subject matter more than the form.

Overall I managed 3.3 hours per day of ‘writing-related work’ in April – which is a little down on March. I expect this month to be similar, with June, July and August then falling away somewhat. I’m sure they won’t be barren months, but for all sorts of reasons September is my meaningful horizon.