Sunday 15 May 2011

Plans for the Summer....

As you may have gathered I'm getting increasingly revved up for the summer. As well as my fitness plans, I'm heading out to Seville for a long weekend in early June and I'm already planning a massive blitz on writing. I've certainly got a lot to do; I want to make major inroads into writing new stories for The State of the Nation (I'm thinking particularly of ‘The Staggering Adventures of Bulldog Carruthers’, the ‘Nanny Knows Best’ top and tail stories, ‘They Came from IKEA’ and the new, as yet untitled, Elvis story) but I also want to polish up ‘Shooting Stars’ and ‘Dawn Of the Brain Dead’ and rewrite/polish ‘Keeping up with the Kingstons’.

I also want to start getting things in circulation again re: submitting to magazines and anthologies, particularly ‘Shooting Stars’ and ‘Dawn Of the Brain Dead’ as well as a number of short flash fiction pieces/sketches which are going to be interspersed between the stories in a Little Britain-style "roving eye across Britain" manner, so that one story ends then leads into a sketch which then leads into another story. I've got ideas for three, possibly four, of these; I just need to write them. I'm hoping that as they are all only around 500 words or so it shouldn't take too long to write these and get them into circulation amongst the flash fiction markets. The only thing which concerns me a little about these is that the ideas and tone of these are quite reminiscent of some of Chris Morris' Jam sketches (although that's probably not a bad thing) so I have to be careful that they are original pieces which fit into the whole, rather than leaving myself open to accusations of being a copyist (although I'll be avoiding expressions like, "Quadraspazzed on a life glug," so that should help.....).

On top of all that, I also want to polish and submit the radio play, First Love, Last Love, and if I have time, adapt the script into prose, nominally for the third collection which I'm currently calling Odds and Sods (although this is just a working title, as yet).

So all in all, a hell of a lot to do, even in a four-month break. However, I haven't been this excited about writing for a long time so I really hope I can make some progress here.