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.
Oh, Reel Original 