claytoncast

As I may have mentioned before, I like the idea of sitting down at a blank screen with no idea of what I'm going to write just to see what comes out. To this end I discovered a rather delicious piece of online software called Ilys, which absolutely personifies this way of writing. You set your word target, click on go, and are presented with a blank screen which doesn't actually allow you to see what you've written, but only shows the input letter by letter. The program won't reveal your writing until you reach your prearranged word target.  It's a bit like setting out into a New Year, not really knowing what's ahead, and just carrying on until you feel you have got there. I remember many New Year's I've started without work booked into the diary. Now I can't think of anything more terrifying. To try to summon up all the resolve needed to cope with New Year resolutions and the feeling of a new beginning, and yet nothing is actually booked in. Th...

Here we are on the first morning of January 2016 and having woken up without a hangover, the world is full of promise and possibility. Today is a holiday, so that gives me licence not to do anything, but so that I have some satisfaction, I sat here at my computer and blogged. My diary for the first two months has enough workdays in it for me to feel secure until at least the beginning of March. The thing I'm asking myself as I look at it is "does it contain enough excitement?". By excitement I mean challenge. No new jobs in the diary. Most of the days pencilled in for January and February are continuations of the job I was doing for the last three months of 2015. The other task looming large on my worksheet is editing my book "The Working Actor". I'm now understanding the phrase "that difficult second album". It's a year ago since I submitted the manuscript of the first draft of this book, and it's been returned to me in instalments ...