Lousy Smarch Weather – The Encampment Diaries

Lousy Smarch Weather

17/03/2024

A fucking novel!

It’s been months now, and things are what they are. In January I had to sit schtum and let the book fade from immediate completion to back of the mind. Good thing, then, to distract me my computer broke, my game console broke, my social structures fell away and it was cold and miserable so even taking walks was out of the question. I read some 10 books over that month, killed time. February was straight into the fire, reading for the first time the book as it stood, formatted for tablet it hit 700 pages. Took me 5 days on-and-off reading so I wasn’t binging, I was treating it like any other book I’d read. Then broke the chapters down into scenes, played about with structure and took away stories, added new ones, deleted 13000 words and added a few thousand as I went on. I now have just under 150K words, so about 550 pages if printed. A thick tome, a necessarily thick tome.

March has been harsher, the feeling of completion within 28 days (I had leap day off to celebrate) I fell into a delirium and tiredness to beat the band. An isolation thickened, despite social engagements increasing, and the only creative outlet I’ve had beyond my world was briefly working as a show tech for a friend’s one-person stand-up performance (Darren crushed it, watching the journey from improv training to full-on one-person performance in the past five years has been so cool) but it makes one long for a place to exist where meeting creative friends and sitting in that zone, that mindset, that feeling which is so hard to escape but seems illusory to many.

Dispiriting was turning from creative writer to researching and preparing to reach out with my book to those in the business. The demands and requirements for business is a different mindset and skillset and it has utterly hampered me. I’m aware as any about describing art in ways to reach out to many, from brief plot explanation to succinct wiki-style synopsising, and even ‘it’s like this thing but with that thing mixed in’ but turning that onto the self is hard, made tougher when the thing I’ve created is actively reaching many different things without having much in common with (at least in terms of modern works) what is published. Agents seem to want to see your projects will sell by seeing what else it’s like that sold. That mindset is asking for Narcos rather than Breaking Bad, or Madame Web instead of Joker (Or Joker instead of Taxi Driver and King Of Comedy), following the trend rather than making sense of where things go, and what is likely or possibly next. Audiences like what they like, but as a communal mass they go where they are given, give them something they don’t know they like, but feel like they might, and you open the world up. To only want what’s there is to remove the future, ever decreasing circles.

This mindset was made worse when researching by standing in bookshops, staring at walls of books under set types of decree and finding nothing to clarify distinct connection between them and mine. My book would, it seems, be ‘Historical Fiction’, but that denotes a lot more specific history and setting, reality obscured rather than entire ground-up worldbuilding from notions of what once was. But you can’t, I guess, write ‘It is a book of narrative fiction’ and call it a day. The author is expected to become business associate, famously the easiest thing for a creative mind to do.

So my brain and my heart are fucked with notions of the world on the other hemisphere, the one that makes absolutely no sense to me, the ‘logical’, the world where dreams are only aspirations for the real, not impossible concepts turned true by will and belief.

I hate that place. I love to believe. I love to dream. I love to create. But I have begun sending out requests, and so we wait.

We Have A Book – The Encampment Diaries

We Have A Book

27/12/2023

Ok, the year of 2023 is coming to an end and in this year I intended to do a lot of writing. I had lost spice and pizazz during the lockdowns and the infernal emptiness of life, it hurt my creativity, my enjoyment, my purpose, so I wanted after a year of managing to try life again to really nose the grindstone and write. I began by turning notes into a screenplay last December and January, one I’m proud of that of course lost a few contests this month, and then pressed on with February and whole-cloth writing blue sky, it amounted to some 85 pages of moments and scenes but too long before it even went somewhere and too dark for anyone to enjoy. I mapped out the year from there, intending to do Encampment as a book in drips and drabs as I carried on with a TV pilot (Lost contests) and playing with my play (New draft done and sent out now, lost contests) and re-read a book in prep to plot out an adaptation (Corkboard full of story beats sits before me now). But in late June I suddenly fell to writing a chapter based on a half-finished script from early pandemic 2020 and as I’ve updated over time, I was caught up in the effort of feeling this working, this made sense as a book.On December 23 2023 I finished the final pages of the first draft of the book, it’s big, expansive, full of characters and moments and life and death and I’m excited to read it in a few months, once I’m adrift from it and can return with new eyes, but for a year of writing I didn’t think I’d be stuck on one project for so long, however each month I wrote longer than any screenplay I’ve turned around thanks to the novel, and achieved in one project enough success to fuel many many further ones. I don’t know much about what’s happening next year, I need money, I need purpose, I need direction, I need the satisfaction of creative collaboration and human interaction, but who knows where any of that will come from. For now I’m ending the year resting after an intense six months of real hard graft (It’s weird to call typing and thinking hard work, but it is, it is a human manifesting entire worlds and humans from the infinite, and that deserves respect, praise, love, adoration, love me please). 2023 was busy and seemingly never ending, full of horribly miserable times and some big moments, but it’s ending with feet up and head in the sky, I have… written…. A fucking novel.

The Encampment Diaries – Winner And Loser

Winner And Loser

17/11/2023

These breaks between updates, they can hold so much or be so hollow. The years have gone on since I began journaling this whatever-it-is, and in that time we’ve as a world witnessed dangerous insanity every second, and somehow complete stasis for a few years (remember being scared to leave the house but not for normal reasons but the virus thing?). My life chronicled here is as close to open as I’ve been with humanity, the mind of the introvert writer releasing a near-intimate portrayal of whatever they can comprehend from inside and outside onto page. In the months since August I haven’t felt closer to mattering, to existing, and yet I’ve not sat around in a waking coma. The personal life had another hit when we confirmed that, for a second time, my at-this-point-all-but-adopted foster niece had found a forever home, and we went through the motions we did in 2021 a second time. I had hugged my dear podcast/long-time bestie bye from the country and then I had to face up to another goodbye in just months time. It’s been a rough journey, putting on brace face not just for foster-niece but the nephews-in-blood, the final afternoon, hugging goodbye, watching them head off and acting as if it were all fine and good and I’m a rock, I’m ok, no crying in the family, it’s a stoic land for us and we don’t react. Inside was hard, outside was cold. Because if not… the many years of bullying would return once again, family eh? I got some more rejections for projects, watched ideas and fully-written drafts be shot down and made to feel more inept than usual with a week of emails just saying NAH THANKS.

The lifeline I’ve had has been this novel I’ve slowly worked on. In September I managed 3 chapters of some 25 pages each. In October I broke my process by exploring the form further, writing a chapter near 50 pages on its own, followed by a shorter one of about 20. I played with form, I went away from stability now I had found a rhythm, to manoeuvre unexpectedly but excitingly for reader and author simultaneously. November, as I knew it was all going to collapse around me, I planned to work through the grand finale. I’m 22 pages in without having dented the beat outline still, a long way to go in the middle of the month, like my brain has actively fought itself to hide and to crash from emotional turmoil of the entire year all at once.

This past week, whilst not big crescendos like in May, the pilot I wrote in April/May during play read-through and rewrite made it to a quarter-final in a contest, and Encampment, of which this diary entry is definitely all about, made it to the semi’s, which leads me to having another laurel. Collecting them, if only they came with options. Especially now the US unions have settled and the companies in the industry are definitely cool and good and led by people who should be in control of art and culture.

I don’t know how long it’ll take to finish draft one of this book’s manuscript, I don’t know what’ll happen to the play as I feel scared to submit it to theatres, fear of failure is terrifying, fear of pitching worse, how does one sell themself and their art and talent if they’re always unsure about it all? Am I good enough to sell a book, put on a play, get a movie made? Am I that person? I know at this point I know a lot about writing, about the stories and characters I’m compelled to explore and indulge, to know more than anyone else about, but feeling ok that someone else might give a fuck is just not how I’m wired. Oh to have a producer or hype person or second me but not like me to do the extraversion, and I can sit in a dark room away from the world and away from showing emotions to craft worlds of my own I can control, or that can control me safer than the world outside that only leads to loss and devastation.

The Encampment Diaries – Slightly Seen And Not Heard

Slightly Seen And Not Heard

25/08/2023

Back in May I finished a draft of a TV pilot, since then I managed to read Mo Ryan’s Burn It Down, a book about the devastatingly broken industry mainly focusing on the Hollywood infrastructure, and it was depressing but useful for the world I was writing in, and writing for, and writing as a rallying cry against whilst also making sure whatever I did wasn’t insider-ey, rather something everyone could get on board with at a character level, the window dressing of its specific locale only finessing things rather than alienating. Anyway, it’s a Friday of an odd week and I get an email to say the script ain’t going far in another contest, and I just wanna sit in the world where I can work with folk and create stories and landscapes and events for characters for a while. I want to just write, with people, I want to build creatively with others, where I’m in a room with folk and I’m heard along with the hearing I do of others. Life has been strangely one sided for my entire existence. I don’t know how to turn it around and at this point the effort in pushing to even try makes me exhausted before I start to actually speak and thus have no way to carry out my side of a conversation that’ll make people stick around and maybe… I dunno… give a shit like I exist or something.

This week’s main focus was my friend’s book launch. Since February 2022 when she kindly sent me a draft of her book I was so hyped on the work and adamant that there was an audience for this that I was there in her corner fighting to make it become a reality. This past Wednesday the book launched in eBook and paperback, and we had a party to celebrate. Naturally the weather decided to be bright and hot because we were atop a club in Soho and the dress code was Victorian themed, and being a good person I was intent on making sure that there’d definitely be multiple people going full costume (Can’t expect folk to on a weekday evening all be able to throw together a big get-up, and I’m hardly busy these days) so I was all in black (Bow tie and cravat fails, yay) traipsing around hot Soho carrying heavy/awkward things to make sure the party went well (It did), sweating up a storm. The strange thing was standing around in a room and seeing people I know from my stint nearly a decade ago writing about film coming in, giving cursory hellos and then finding their friendship circles nuevo on the other side of the room. Everyone having their own circles. And me, standing in the most costume, no phone to distract for it was used to broadcast music, being seen by all and being heard by none. I don’t think there’s a single image of the event with me in it, a bizarre anomaly. Am I a living ghost? Does what I attempt to do in this world hold any impact? It very much has not felt like it for a while now.

I’ve been writing another book for a few months now, this month I’ve finished 2 chapters of exceeding length, each about a 6th of some books, and it’s been hard not because of their length but because it was about writing hurt and agony and sadness. The universe and the soul have been seemingly conspiring to make me once more go method in my writing, it never of course happens when writing the upbeat and exciting parts of a project, but by heck when I have to dive into the darkness and the void and the gravity of emptiness life finds a way to make further pain for me to draw upon. I cannot for some reason get out of this hole right now, and I’m not sure if I’ll be good for a while. I don’t see much reason to, feel much help behind me and nobody can do things all by themselves, certainly not over and over and over again in this life, and I am very tired of being there for all and feeling like I’m not heard when it comes around. I hate how selfish this sounds, I want to experience joy and love and happiness and share the world with folk, but I don’t know how to turn the one way street into a dual carriageway for all my shit to stop fucking piling up in my head and my heart and my soul.

I cannot keep being around for people to accept I’m here and move away from. I need reason, else I just can’t be here.

The Encampment Diaries – The Dusty Trails

09/08/2023

The Dusty Trails

These summer months run long, the days are too bright, too hot, too humid and too bloody long. Since winning that award for Encampment’s script things haven’t much happened, there’s of course two key strikes that are actively knocking out all production in the world and for good reason (SOLIDARITY!) but it has felt like stasis is the feeling of summer. A lot of not happenings and a lot of waiting for things to happen, unable to take hold of options and opportunities, things disappearing and things just stuck in the clock-watching of the season. Things will come, but they all come down the pipeline later, not yet.

And so I have turned to a new project, an old project turned new by, like Encampment, taking a script and writing a book from it. Something I half-wrote early in the pandemic, struggling to find creative juice as April turned to May 2020 and the depression crippled harder than nearly ever before, I stopped mid-way through this piece after giving daily updates to friends. I realisied there’s a lot waiting in adapting this into a book, the prose would lend itself to enveloping readers in the kind of heightened oldie speaking and thinking and feeling of the characters, and it’s so very metaphorical that the real elements and the more extreme allegorical can sit together on the page without feeling odd, whereas in a film you gotta toe one line or the other more. I have in the last month and a bit written 3 chapters, some 60-odd pages, full of character and building the world and the feeling, and happy to be on this journey as I look at structuring other ideas and letting them sit waiting for things to be able to move again. And then there’s the play hanging over me. A second draft now done, changed and evolved, and sending out in the next month for desperate pleas to get attention and work and love and creation.

I’ve been wrapped in the world of books for so long now, waiting on the book launch of someone dear to me whose book is fucking amazing and the world will be giving plaudits to for years to come (she’s already received a bunch of raves because it’s a great book so of course people love it) and being surrounded by all this has had me in the desire to reach directly to reader, artist-human connection no bullshit, nobody’s thumbprints playing with the idea, a pure and true piece of soul on the page. It’s different in every way from the excitement of building blueprints that you know others will add to and bring their artistic drive to, this is a completely singular avenue and that’s compelling, if very very scary to be so open in some ways.

Keeping head down and writing has been necessary during the last few months as my best friend, the man who I spent the last decade leaning on and being leaned upon, podcasting, movie-watching, hanging out, talking, thinking, evolving as people with is, as I write this, on the last leg of his move from London to Ireland and knowing our time was running out, and that the world as I know it is about to fundamentally change has been killing me. Hiding in a fake world, away from everything, has been selfish and comforting, and I’m writing this now to handle the fact that our time is at an end and it’s all over and Jesus Fucking Christ I hate time. So much so I kill it often. And now it’s passing me by, and making me feel broken, and sad, and yet I can’t feel too bad because these changes are positive for everyone. Everyone else. Hooray.

The Encampment Diaries – King Of The End Of The World

03/06/2023

King Of The End Of The World

I figured after the last update there wasn’t much to throw in here, coming in to June I’d slowed down considerably. Reading a bunch of books, watching some TV, saying goodbye to some shows and good riddance to others, and taking ample notes on a book to adapt. But actual writing, creating, evolving, and actually doing anything outside the house, outside the head? Nadda.

But then Friday happened.

A few months back I wrote about laurels and getting through a script contest’s quarters, and then I discovered I was through the semi’s and into the finals too.

Friday I just check my portal, an excuse to download a script to double-check on my travels outside when I noticed that the ‘Finalist’ detail had changed.

‘Dystopian Winner’

I am Andrew Jones, winner of dystopia.

Encampment wins an entire sub-genre.

It’s a good script.

People should talk to me about it.

If you see me in the street, don’t do that because social anxieties, but stop me online and say ‘hey, can we text about it?’ or something. That I can do.

Anyway, not much more to report right now. Weird times in the head, weird times in the heart, weird times all over. Tis a big summer, and I’m staring at my plans sweating that I’m gonna fuck them all up. But one keeps on trying.

The Encampment Diaries – Doing A Lot Whilst Not Doing A Damn Thing

Doing A Lot Whilst Not Doing A Damn Thing

20/05/2023

It has been a month.I mean that in a ‘literally, it’s been a month’ way and a ‘phew, wipe the sweat off the brow, things have happened’ manner.

Since the read-through I’ve looked over notes from attendees and digitised those, whilst finally this past week met up with the producer-friend who came to the performance for deeper constructive feedback, the spine of which is ‘what you give in the finale, thread that in from the start’ (The perks of a first draft being what you discover as you go, you can realise whilst still building, and go back to make it all fit that feeling later, so he was right on the money but with extra clarity and additional layers discovered).

Meanwhile I received a proof copy of my friend’s novel to do my final edit-read of, which I did within a few days because I’m damned if I’m the one slowing anything down in this world, and now I have a physical copy of her book, which is so fucking exciting. Someone’s heart and brain coalesce into ideas, that become bound by tangible world items, and now they exist beyond the theoretical, they simply ARE! It’s what excites me when I print a script, I hold it for a while, scared to actually read it, but knowing the things I thought can actually exist, hold weight in this world…

On the play-side, a Norwegian friend reached out over that reading weekend because she, too, was about to experience first play reading, at a festival for her, and rehearsed one day and stage-read the next. We went through similar cycles of fear, fraud, failure, focus just 30 hours apart (Maybe 29 because of timezones) and we’ve been back-and-forthing since, just to remember why we’re drawn to doing any of this, and like most writers just to get a sense of who we are, and who we are to others, what we’re looking at and interested most in exploring. Sometimes it’s important to externalise the internal, though certainly for me it’s hard enough of late to look inside, let alone bring it out. But I’m getting there.

I made a Google doc at the start of April demanding myself to write ideas for any new project, because I felt completely like I was spinning wheels on the play, and Encampment had hit snag after snag. By mid-April I had a structure, characters, and ideas for a TV pilot. So I read a bunch of hour-long pilots, both premium cable and network ad-hour (42-45 minutes based on the years produced) and dove into writing. End of April I had two acts done, before my birthday weekend I had Act 3 done and by Eurovision night it was all completed. A first draft hour-long running 73 pages of dialogue, character, hope, anger, love, passion, all about a world I know enough about, but still want to idolise more than demonise. I sent it to a friend who wasn’t in that world, he enjoyed it, understood the emotions and loved some of the characters completely (Some aren’t for love, of course, some are arseholes). I like this thing. We’ll see. Who the fuck knows where to send a pilot without representation. And in a world where writers are striking across the seas. This is British, though. I’m happy to write locally. For now.

But to Encampment, the crux of this whole endeavour.

I crashed out of a competition on my birthday, no less. Quarter finals only. An email as I’m sharing drinks with a friend, ultimately imbibing more wine than I should have, but I made it through thinking ‘well, that’s that then, Encampment as a script is dead. Novel time,’

Last week, however, a competition I wrote about months back, with the laurels, announced their semi-finalists and Encampment made it through. A small production company looking for low-budget easy-to-make but engaging emotionally and intellectually stories considers Encampment somewhat worth looking to produce, I guess. And then the next day it turns out that it’s not just a semi-finalist but a FINALIST! Even though it hasn’t a chance in hell, after 6 years Encampment still has the value and possibility of being made feels like a win. After the dust has settled on so much that it was calling out to before it happened (MeToo, abusive workplaces and homes) there’s still power within the story of Tongs, Barstow, Jay and Havers.

Having said that, today I still finally pushed myself to open back up the document i started in late 2021, of Encampment in book form. And I wrote Chapter 4. A process chapter, a tedious exploration of world and day-to-day routine that establishes so much externally of the life of Tongs. Nearly 2000 words on walking nowhere for a long time.

I will make it to exciting chapters, with dialogue and characters and action and moments, but we all must eat our vegetables to grow strong, and to clear the plate for the tasty meat (Or similarly portioned and tasty goody, it’s a metaphor, vegans, let it be for my sanity? Appreciated) Having re-read my friend’s book, and now starting her next one, whilst reading two Don DeLillo novels, a 600-page Cormac McCarthy and a book of diaries from Alan Rickman in the last month, I’m really in the mindset to explore art, creation, worlds, people, writing and its power.

Also I’ve started adapting a book and I’m avoiding that work right now because I’m a writer and procrastination is 99% of the gig.

SOLIDARITY

The Encampment Diaries – Making My Own Achievements

Making My Own Achievements

23/04/2023

Looking back to the 31st January update on this particularly surreal evening, I definitely throw an open target that I have now eyed to the bull. Like Kennedy declaring men on the moon by decade’s end, I stated I’d have a reading of the play I wrote in the Autumn come 2023’s close.

I have, on April 22nd 2023, effectively succeeded well in advance of deadline.

Yesterday afternoon I hired four performers sight-unseen to use their skills of being confident in front of other people reading words with human emotion, plonked microphones on the table, scripts too (Helps a lot!), and asked friends with understanding of narrative structure, media analysis, creativity in their veins to come sit in and watch. (And those that couldn’t make it were swiftly on my return home sent the audio files, because I WORK FAST!)

The Fox & Hounds had a reading.

And I sat at the side of 4 friends, looking at a stop watch and making timing notes in the margins, feeling so very awkward at the recitation of words embedded in my head now aloud in ears beyond mine.

But it happened.

And the reaction was not a riot.

It was of kindness.

Of love.

Of understanding and genuine intent to help.

And most importantly, positive beyond measure.

A first draft and a first attempt in a medium, my friend a longtime producer, world-weary, seen his share and then some of material at different stages, who I asked more than anyone to note me to death, informed me they had ‘no notes on the structure’. A writer hearing that, the foundations of your house are sound. Nothing’s crashing down or gonna collapse. The interior decorating can always change and often does. The dialogue. My dialogue. That’s the clear attention from response.

And that’s ok.

I love my voice, it’s my internal existence and I’m such an introvert so I enjoy the big swinging bizarre specifications of variant human patois, mixing it all up in a gumbo of American, English, ‘The West’, ‘The South’, class-based eloquence and shortenings, cultural pinpoints of highest and lowest brows, all in one fine pot.

But I understand that this also doesn’t ring in other folks’ ears the way it does for me. Music changes from artist to artist.

And I’m excited to listen, and learn, and explore beyond.

The key factor here is an overwhelming positivity, a real sense of ‘this wild leap Andrew made on his own isn’t to prove he’s a writer, it’s to know his writing exists and works, his decades of learning have not been entirely in vain’.

Within 6 hours of reading’s end producer friend has already sent the audio and script to someone working in stage, believing the sooner the better with this piece, it’s nearly ready on draft one.

My broken brain’s desire for always handing in value from the first draft (which broke me as a video editor, the insisting between myself and my employer to only deliver a first draft when we’ve exhaustedly made what we’d in our room consider a final draft, the notes you’d then receive felt like a crushing blow to all humanity, because all the hard work had been done, just to undo it all and go back AGAIN to the starting board) has paid off in writing. I can’t vomit draft. I have tried. But I don’t connect to placeholder concepts. I always need life in the page, a scene or moment that’s purely mechanical crushes my soul. Every moment must have purpose for narrative, expression of character, hint of the subtextual, and hopefully something for the audience to smile at, laugh at, cry at or get nervous about.

In the reading I felt like a total fraud.

In the aftermath I feel like a writer.

Though I think in the reading that’s what a writer’s meant to feel like.

I’m Andrew Jones

And I’m nervous-excited.

The Encampment Diaries – Perfect Days Have Consequences

16/04/2023

Perfect Days Have Consequences

I always seem to find intense reactions to every action I inflict upon this world. Not when I help others, but when I turn focus on myself. When I reach for a moment of selfishness it is followed by a swift hit from the universe off that track.

A perfect example this past week, Good Friday I got to spend the day exploring Victorian London with the greatest of companions, laughing and joking and investing time and energy in the beauty and intricacy of everything, with the blue skied-sunny bank holiday we were afforded. A beautiful six hours of exploration, of getting away from our time and thinking on those who desired more than their world back when their world was harder to see beyond.

And then my first of two trips to the Soho Theatre to witness live the comedy show The George Lucas Talk Show, a show so silly and specifically deep in lore and character improv that to engage in its open-hearted goofery is to fall into a world of references to external art and its own many many hours of entertainment that kept me sane and regimented with schedule over the lockdowns, honestly a show that engaged with its live audiences so well through twitch chats that friendships and connections blossomed and alone we all came together. I finally got to experience live what I’ve witnessed online so much, and thank the artists that kept me alive at the darkest recesses of the lockdowns. And the moment one asked me my username they blew up with joy, they recognised and were excited. A unique connection, a bond of people on screens making merriment in the worst of times.

A perfect day.

By Monday I had my first ever positive test, COVID.

So.. Yeah, that’s how things play out.

Next Saturday I’m selfishly hiring actors to read in a room a script for me. And my crowd has grown too, a few drop-outs, but more ask-ins. Scary as hell, all to hear words as people not me say them and I can adjust, a first draft, not meant for humans.

Monday week expect a weird sinkhole to open only the size of two people around Upminster. (I’m being mean and making a fat joke on myself, because I can and I hate myself so in MY FACE!)

In the interim, my old writing partner has come back to talk about our individual projects stalling, and trying to find time to catch up and help one-another push through. He sent me a book to read about narrative and writer’s perspective that has already confirmed a lot of needed thoughts on why some of us just aren’t able to process and engage in the world like the humans we see and occupy our art with. Already we’re back to just exploring the macro landscape of why we narrativise and the incredibly atomically micro of what story is and can be and how, and how to cheat it. And I’m imparting this energy with other artistic friends, and my Victorian companion with her ability to craft amazing stories and characters and words too, alone, for the world but more for herself. In a just world these conversations wouldn’t happen on a billionaire’s technical coding screen but near a fire looking over a landscape with a drink in each hand and smile in each mouth.

One day, perhaps.

And then the day after that an asteroid would crash land on me.

(Encampment is now in the top 11% of scripts on a website, that’s something right? Another quarter finalist too, Covid brain made me forget this but I mean, holy shit!)

The Encampment Diaries – Looking At The End

04/04/2023

Looking At The End

No more than a quarter-final, and so with that I seem to be determined to retire Encampment for the longest time. I intend to write a novel version still, it’s always in my drafts and only rarely peeked at since I began adapting in October 2021. I’m scared of the need to expand, to describe, to turn things in the mind into things in the world, and most of all to remove all open concepts into hard-set adjectives and built worlds. One can allow so much interpretation in a screenplay, give artists open environs to add their perspectives and imaginations to something, a screenplay is far more a blueprint, the foundations to build a creative skyscraper upon. A novel, by and large, must be entirely complete within itself. Cover to cover it cannot be open to interpretation, it must be its own everything. My natural desire to wish connection with humans through creative mind and life struggle against that complete control. I may have to push myself out of anything I’ve ever felt and thought like to complete this.

Meanwhile I have two open scripts begun this year between 65 and 80 pages in length at the midpoint, if I’m lucky, and am chiseling away at structure as I go, much like Gromit on the train, laying down track before me I write some scenes, then go back to the structural skeleton and add new elements to move on to, sometimes they’ll mean I’ll go back a few scenes and alter something, sometimes I’ll be inspired to jump ahead and put a pin in a concept accidental that will pay off now in Act 3, I find myself unconsciously crafting moments in the screenplay that I discover would work out well as a runner or emotional throughline and yet do not know where they come from. The mind. The mind. It’s a bizarre, untrustworthy beast.

I’m struggling, though. There’s a need to make sure every character, every scene, every moment has purpose beyond getting from A to B, subtext, emotional decisions, depth of humanity, I cannot vomit draft. I hate this. I want to write a full piece and then go back to fill in the shell with delicious detail, but for the life of me I need every moment to work immediately. Something drilled into me from a young age, your first effort must be as close to perfect so that everything afterwards is only perfecter. So that everyone will like you. If you can’t be the best from the get go, why bother existing at all?

I hate my mind.

Back in March I noticed Netflix had a whole slew of films added from the Welsh filmmaker Andrew Jones, who managed to make nearly 30 films. I had seen one out of curiosity years before, and it was as one might expect for the prolific-in-a-short-span low-budget creation, but the drawing was naturally ‘Here’s someone with the same name doing the thing, actually making things’. Back in the twitter days we talked a little, two Andrew Jones’ with similar desires and understandings of artform, how could one not? So I decided I’d dive deep into his work, but as I prepared for a marathon of Andrew Jones Films I discovered that, sadly, he passed away in January.

I opened up a website to see the words ‘RIP Andrew Jones’

I saw the end before it happened.

There’s a strange sense of familiarity and ghostliness in reading your name but knowing it is attributed to someone entirely different. The shiver and the palpitation (In some circles that’s known as The Emperor).

I know other Andrew Joneses, we aren’t too rare a breed, but now we’re one down, and a filmmaker on top of all things.

And the guy never had a problem finishing a draft without every scene needing three layers of depth.

April, though. The play what I wrote, I have copies printed now, and I have actors hired and ready, a space reserved, a few friends as audience and note-givers. Towards the end of the month we will be reading The Fox And Hounds out loud, I will get to hear how it works outside of my brain and my mouth. Just before sending to print I re-read the play, timed out the acts, adjusted the formatting to make things look presentable, and then added three pages to one scene. Now I have the hardcopy paper versions, and in all my perfection I find just last night on page 87 (of 107) two letters missing. All that perfection.

Why am I chasing perfection?

Nothing’s perfect.

Just be.

Just make.

Just get things done.