Right, I've decided to pull my finger out a bit! I've done a couple of serious writing days and pulled together a script for the performance that I hope to do. This has given me a little more confidence as now I have a framework into which I am starting to fit the poems.

I wasted a lot of time on the Ballad of Judy which I have now abandoned as the character didn't feel right. Since abandoning this and feeling more than a little worried, I went to a writing workshop with the writer of 'Bad Mother's Hand Book'. It was an excellent workshop about character but it was delivered for people writing a novel; however, I applied all of the exercises over the day to Judy and I learned so much about her. She isn't an asylum seeker at all! So unfortunately I'm starting from scratch with Judy's poems but now I have all of the background for the character I feel a bit more like it's going to work. Judy is not a ballad either! She is a series of sonnets because she is expressing her feelings (lyric) on daytime television. I'm intending one of the sonnets to be in basic language that Judy might use when cornered but the other two are to be slow and meaningful to counter balance the other poems in the performance. I don't want the piece to be completely hyper.

The script as it stands runs through at seventeen minutes. It currenly only includes three completed poems the rest are either part written or not in place at all. This may mean that the show might end up an hour long with all the props/character changes. If this is the case it will have implications as to where and how I put it on! It would perhaps be better to approach veneues and just do the piece as a one woman show rather than as part of open mic or live lit events where a twenty minute slot would be the maximum.

I watched a one man show at Bantock House in Wolverhampton on Saturday night by Jonathan Collins. He did a Christmas Carol in which he played all of the characters. It was a solid performance and the audience really enjoyed it. His adaptation included masks and a board of woodden characters to represent the Cratchit family. His change of characters worked really well and was handled in the same way I had envisaged for P and J i.e. something distinctive to represent each character. I have, since watching Jonathan Collins, thought that I might not play all of the characters but use a puppet for Mrs Scaramouche and a blow up doll for Pretty Polly! I may have to pay to get Mrs Scaramouche made so need to think about costs.

Away from the P and J front, I've done quite a few gigs recently but not of the usual sort. I did a war poetry event where I was asked to select poems and read them. I really enjoyed this. I also did the compereing for the 5th annual Solihull Slam, which was so hard to do. Marcus Moore and Sara-Jane Arbury make it look easy; they are so good at their jobs. I stood in for Sara-Jane who wasn't well. I nearly messed up the reading of the final scores!!! I got out of it by claiming that I was deliberately building the tension; nobody believed me but they laughed. I also went to a story telling event at the Newhampton Pub in Whitmore Reans (great pub if you get the chance to visit). Taffy Thomas was on (I didn't get chance to see him as I had to leave early and the event was running on too long because of the first part being an open mic. I did a couple of poems which were well recevied. I also did a gig at the lamp tavern which was podcast again and I had somebody recognise me at a workshop and quote my own poems at me! Which was a big buzz. And I've done some workshops with kids as part of my writer in residence work with Wolverhampton libraries.

If this blog entry sounds a little rushed it is because I'm keen to carry on writing Judy! So I'm off now to carry on with it.