the flood – desperate nothings

The Flood – Completed, and Movie Night

We did a read through of The Flood on Friday night. I made final adjustments, printed it out and sent it off to the Noosa Arts Theatre One-Act Playwriting Competition this morning. I’m happy with it. Fingers crossed!

Now I’m working on an unusual project. In 2014 and 2015 I wrote two stories that paralleled each other – they covered the same events, happening to the same characters, but from the perspective of two very different dimensions – yes, It’s strange. Those two stories were “Get Away” and “Forever”. I always planned to tie these stories together with some additional content that would provide a meta-view; an explanation for how these dimensions are connected, and over the past year I’ve tried out a number of theories. During my walk in Sweden this all came together. I sat down on a rock in the middle of the arctic wilderness and made copious notes about what was needed to make a single, large, coherent piece out of these two existing stories. The resulting new amalgamation will be titled: “Movie Night”. It will probably fall short of a “Novella” by several thousand words, but it will be a very long, short story. Probably about 13 or 14 thousand words. I’m a few nights into working on this now. It’s starting to take shape.

The Flood complete to 1st draft stage

The Flood is now a complete narrative, which is where I wanted it to be at this point. There’s a sequence of edits I’ll go through next, but I wanted to have a complete story from start to end, before I head to Sweden, which happens a week from now.

I like the play. I think it’s retained the idea I started with, which was to explore what happens when a stable situation, with unbalanced power relationships, is invaded by an outsider. The characters are Gideon, the father. Danny, his teenage son, and Magill, the outsider. There are a number of other issues floating around in the narrative, and this is my first play to incorporate physical violence, which was fun to write. It also contains – or at least flirts with – elements of absurdist theatre, which I think aligns it somewhat to the first play I wrote 3 years ago: “Final Performance”.

Anyway, as I said, I’m heading to Sweden a week from now and I’ll be there for 3 weeks, then, when I get back, I’ll submit The Flood to the One Act Play competition, then I guess I’ll re-commence work on The Worm, starting on Part 3. I also have a couple of ideas for new sci-fi stories. My interest in writing sci-fi has been reignited by the acceptance of The Fear Engine by Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. I guess I feel like if I can get one sci-fi story accepted, then perhaps I could get another sci-fi story accepted, or maybe it’s at least worth trying for that.

Three One Act Plays now also in traditional book format

The title says it all really. I’m not sure anyone will want to own a book of my first three one-act plays, but now they can. Maybe it will become a curiosity in the future, if I ever get anything else published. Anyway, now that this vanity project is completed, I’m able to get back to the real work of writing The Worm, which is currently 6 scenes into chapter 9.

My book of short plays is available here.

In other news, an idea is starting to emerge for a new play or story called “The Flood”. It’s around what happens to people during a disaster. The way disasters can be a catalyst for the emergence of natural instincts, for better and for worse, and how this can play out as social threads start to unravel. That feels like a compelling idea to me.