So much for NY resolutions

Well, my blog a lot in 2010 one didn't work. However I always intended this blog for writerly matters in the main. With the new year off to a slow, snow-bound start, and everyone chilled to the marrow, not a lot of writing activity going on. Mea culpa!
That said, I tutored the first of my play-writing classes at York Uni last week. Really enjoyed it. A great bunch of students (though some fourteen of them brings a time pressure in trying to hear everyone's contribution). I came home exhausted.
Last week, went to an interesting Script Yorkshire talk by Christopher Reason, an Eastenders writer-veteran of the Pat Butcher earrings line fame. (I think Pat's earrings were quite classy compared with Bette Lynch's toilets. Now they were seriously common and vulgar bling.)
Am desparately trying to finish a first draft of scenes for my collaborative play with Mick Yates, 'Doublecross'.
Also have a poem to write for a competition deadline, but it's a very personal and painful one, so not easy.
This morning, am off to West Yorkshire Playhouse to meet the actress, Irene Loftbouse, whom I'm working with on taking 'Malteser Falcon' to Edinburgh Fringe. We're talking to a couple of potential directors who may be able to help develop it further (one being Ray Brown, who I think could be great, but Irene has to decide on who she feels can best 'stretch' her, plus the chemistry is so important between actor and director. Being merely the writer, I'll be leaving them to it a lot - except when it comes to my own favourite equivalent of the Pat Butcher's earrings lines. I've already had to persuade Irene we cannot cut out Derek the winkle-seller. Huh, the very thought of it! He's the nearest we get to a hero.)

End of an era?

End of a year and a decade. Doesn't seem all that long since we were knee-deep in Millenium hype and very sick of the Robbie Williams song. If we'd have known then ... 9/11, the fantasy WMD, war, global warming, the credit crunch, who killed Archie Mitchell (oh, sorry, we don't know that one yet).

For me, a lot of things I'd hoped for haven't happened, but some I never even dreamt of have. I suppose Shakespeare should have the last word, as he summed it up in 'Hamlet' - 'There are more things in heaven and earth...'

Happy New Year!