It’s late and I have tomorrow’s day already encroaching so this will be brief. I’ve been busy with work up to my eyelashes at the moment and it’s all exciting and extremely knackering. What with my unpredictable bouts of gallbladder problems and unhealthy scoops of lethargy I seem to be either writing, scrawling, writhing or sleeping.
But I came here to tell you what I’m up to…
Come end of this week I’ll be working with a few select students alongside Theatrix to do a modern adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. We’re going to be workshopping the short story and picking out the relevant themes that the students involved want to explore. It went in my favour that I saw an adaptation of this very short whilst up in Edinburgh. It was a humble amateur production that excelled in places and limped along in others. But what it did show me was the importance of the male voice within this female representation of post-natal depression and insanity. There’s only one male figure that appears directly within the text which is that of the controlling husband. The adaption I saw seemed to gloss over the role too easily and made him appear cliche ridden and lacking depth. What I’m hoping to do is flesh the male voices (I’m going to give a voice AND face to the much mentioned brother) out and add texture to the piece allowing for relationships to jump off the stage and not be hidden in subtext. This may seem to go against the grain of subtlety but the short story is essentially a monologue but I want to turn that on its head and explore it as a multiple hander. The one thing I want to do is free it of the claustrophobic Victorian setting it currently resides in.
Aside from that I’m still umming and arring over what play to chose to take along to the Arvon course in November. It’s something that I’m fretting over because I want to make sure I’m giving out a good representation of my work. I’ve got my first full length play that was written for the Royal Court as part of the Young Writers’ Programme which I should be working on to take it to a third draft stage. But I’m lacking the motivation. Then there’s the second one I wrote as part of the Invitation Only group at the Royal Court which hasn’t been touched since I handed it in earlier this year which could do with whipping into shape. I’m leaning towards the latter so I can have potentially two strong pieces but I don’t know if I’m just being lazy about the first and looking for a good excuse to leave working on it a bit longer… Ignore this rambling please, sometimes I just have to write down my inane thoughts so I can what a doofus I’m being. The other pressing factor is that I’m going to be working with Simon Stephens on the selected work so I do want to make this decision based on proper thought. I’ll leave that till later…
Since my last posting I’ve been having a fair few short pieces flung around the Internet-electronical-sphere. All exciting and confidence boosting to say the least but also because the contacts I’ve made with the sites mentioned are absolutely Lovely and keen to showcase new work so if you’ve not visited them before please go and tell them I sent you. They’re rather nice. Here’s a list of the new works up and raring to be read:
“Homecoming” over at Six Sentences
“The Horny Insomniac” over at Six Sentences
Please feel free to wander over and rate and/or comment on them. Then go try it yourself, very good for editing skills (as I seem to keep stressing recently) and a fun experiment.
Aside from that aside I’m tinkering away on audition monologues which seem to be more interesting than anything else I should be working on, but for those that know me (or are getting to know me) I prefer to be busy. Along the way I’ve been experimenting with Hint Fiction of which details can be found here. Through the myriad of blogs and competitions I keep adding little tasks to do writing wise so if I’m not working on writing, I’m thinking about working on writing and more than often it’s not the thing I should be working on. Go figure.
This jumbled blog was brought to you by the power of Ribena and the letter 9. Out.
P.s. I realise I still haven’t blogged about Edinburgh. I apologise for my tardiness.
P.p.s. I also realise that this is written and not talky talky for you. I apologise for my… Lack of self-pimping?
Katie Mccullough Talks and Writes 
I’ll let the lack of self pimping go, due to the short “eye” dance you videoed in the middle. I blame the Ribena to be honest : )
OH and my reco for Arvon is to work on the 2nd play you did for the Invitation One group. For no better reason than it sounds like you want to & doing things you want to do is really good for the old soul. Just a thought