Writer soluble

This is the week that my first BBC Radio 4 play was supposed to be broadcast. It wasn’t, for the undeniably sound reason that the entire project died after it was written and before it was recorded.

You can tell I’m over it. Sometimes I am, but it was hard listening to Radio 4 on Tuesday this week, although the play that replaced mine was good.

Only, every weekday this week, last week, and for about two months now, I’ve spent an hour hiding away from everything by writing various projects just for me. Well, ultimately I hope they’re not just for me, but right now nobody’s commissioned them, nobody’s waiting. There’s just me, for one hour, somewhere between 05:00 and 07:00, depending on just how late I worked the night before and/or how lazy I am.

And that 60 minutes has become something I look forward to.

It’s not easy, and yesterday’s was especially hard, was especially like trying to dig an escape tunnel with a pencil, but even that was a help. For an hour, I am in various worlds I am creating, with various voices in my head and, because it’s quite early in the morning, without anything else going on at all.

I feel like I climb back into these worlds. And if Tuesday’s script happened to feature more swearwords than I knew existed, well, at least the writing wasn’t bland.