Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

Adapting a Sitcom For the Stage

Last week, I visited London with a pal. Among other attractions, we stopped at a West End show, namely a musical version of the sitcom Only Fools and Horses.

Both of us enjoyed the performance, yet it started me wondering about the pressures of adapting a much-loved show without disappointing the audience. A good start is to find writers with a track record of hits, and this show had two of them.

One of these is Jim Sullivan, who penned the spin-off show The Green Green Grass and is the son of the original Only Fools and Horses writer John Sullivan. Completing the duo is Paul Whitehouse, bringing his extensive background in character-led sketch comedy.

The resulting show is one that borrows major plot points from the TV series without ever feeling like a rip-off. The mix of music was interesting as well. It included many original songs, but the writers also chose to sprinkle in pre-existing tracks from other artists like Chas & Dave and Bill Withers. The opening and closing themes also featured prominently.

While it’s nothing to do with the writing, the accents of the actors were spot-on, helping to draw the audience into this world immediately.

In short, these two writers have pulled off an incredible feat of taking a TV sitcom and presenting it on a stage without losing any of its charm. I can’t find any other Whitehouse & Sullivan collaborations, but I look forward to seeing what they produce in the future.

Uncategorized

Local Stories in the Global Room

Let me address first of all why you’re seeing this post on a Sunday when I’m accustomed to making them on a Tuesday.

I forgot to update on Tuesday, so my self-imposed punishment was to make two further entries this week: one on Friday just gone and one today. From Tuesday, we’ll go back to weekly posting.

In this entry, let me take you back to last Sunday.

Every year, the University of Dundee runs the Being Human festival, in celebration of the humanities. I’d signed up to join their Talking Bus tour, driving a round trip of approximately 75 miles to places in Angus. During the trip, we were told folk tales by Dr Erin Farley. She’s someone I’ve known for a long time, and last year she launched a collection of these stories.

This book has proved to be rather influential in my poetry group, the Wyverns. The group is not normally open to the general public, but we do have a history of tie-ins with the Being Human festival, so this is the one time of year we can showcase our work. Tuesday saw the launch of our seventh pamphlet at the university with accompanying readings.

In common with our previous publications, this took place in the Global Room on campus, used for social and cultural events rather than lectures. Each of the Wyvern poets stood up in turn to perform our poems, and the words were also displayed on a TV behind us for the audience to read along. The best perk, in my opinion, was the bowl of posh chocolates that was passed around the crowd to accompany the tea and coffee. Erin and a few others were in attendance, and it seemed to go down well.

In all that excitement, I simply forgot to update this blog. I only remembered early on Wednesday morning, when the moment had long passed.

After the event, the group exchanged a few emails on our discussion list. One member reported feeling exceptionally nervous about performing, which reminded me that not everyone is comfortable standing on a stage to read. I sometimes forget this because I read to an audience at least once a month, and I rarely think anything of it. While this is a subject I’ve addressed before on the blog, a casual search suggests I haven’t updated my advice since 2018.

I reckon that’s a topic to revisit next week, but in lieu of a more comprehensive entry, the best general piece of advice I can give is to treat it like learning any new skill.

Let’s say you know nothing about snooker, but you read up on the rules, buy a table on a whim and find a regular willing opponent. If you play three frames a day for twelve months, that’s well over a thousand matches. Within a year, you’ll know which moves work and don’t work, the optimum spin to place on the ball, how to block the other player effectively, and so forth.

In short, you’ll be pretty good at playing snooker by this time next year, just in time for our potential eighth pamphlet.

Uncategorized

Welcoming Faraway Poets

You might be wondering why you’re reading an entry on a Friday rather than a Tuesday.

This is because I forgot to update on Tuesday, as explained in an entry from Wednesday. As such, my self-imposed punishment is to make two further entries this week. Each one needs to be a minimum of 500 words long, which is roughly double the content I would normally include.

Fortunately, there’s been a lot to talk about this week, not least last Saturday, when my open-mic event Hotchpotch welcomed the Edinburgh-based group I Am Loud. This was the second of two planned visits after the last one in September.

Most of the time, Hotchpotch is exclusively an open-mic event. There are no headliners, and every attendee is permitted up to seven minutes each to read work to an audience.

The members were advised far in advance that this event would be different, with just eight slots of three minutes apiece, plus three headliners. We had a smaller crowd than we would normally attract, a fact that might be blamed on the change of day and/or format, but it also meant we comfortably filled seven of the eight slots without disappointing anyone.

The three featured headliners were: Bex Sherwood from I Am Loud, the writer and activist Miss Yankey, plus our regular member Mark Richardson. I was interested to see how the three styles would play together because Bex largely performed work about cows, while the other two focussed mainly on social issues, albeit from different perspectives. Their styles, though, seemed to complement each other.

From my own point of view, I was able to relax a little more than usual. I Am Loud brings technical staff along, so my role was instead to welcome people at the door, sell poetry books, and take sign-ups for this and future events.

So what of future events? I Am Loud has expressed an interest in coming back for another collaboration next year, but that depends on funding. The financial structure of the poetry scene tends to mirror that of the live music circuit, in the sense that money tends to flow towards venues rather than performers. So if that funding arises, I – and the venue, I’m sure – will endeavour to accommodate them as well as we can.

The experience has also encouraged me to look further afield for other potential tie-ups.

In one case, there’s a YouTube creator I’ve been following for a couple of years. He’s looking for ideas he can film in 2023 before he winds up his current series. There’s a slim chance he’ll reply, but I’ve nonetheless pitched the idea of him performing at one of our shows. This would be as a punter, not a headliner.

I think the best approach to take for side projects is to accept that some will fail from the start, some will be popular at the start but quickly lose momentum, and others will still be standing for a long time. Hotchpotch itself was set up as a short-term experiment, yet here it is still thriving more than 12 years later.

Uncategorized

Where Did Tuesday Go?

A full 25 hours on from Tuesday at 8pm, and an entry finally appears. Here’s what went down, and what’ll happen now.

Every Tuesday, I run the Dundee & Angus region of National Novel Writing Month. We meet weekly all year round in person and online, which becomes twice a week in November. That’s when the main novel-writing challenge is held. Yesterday, I knew I wasn’t going to be available to host because of a poetry event. I turned to my co-lead, who is normally able to fill in, but she was unwell.

As such, the meet-up had to be cancelled entirely, which rarely happens. I spent my lunchtime sending messages to make sure none of the members turned up.

These meet-ups are such a fixture of my week that it doesn’t feel like a Tuesday without one. I regularly use the time to write or finish my blog entry, which is why it’s always posted that evening. No meet-up meant it went completely out of my head. In fact, I only remembered this morning.

So where do we go from here? The last time this happened, the self-imposed sanction was to post an extra entry, but I feel this deserves something more severe because there was no reasonable excuse for forgetting. It’s normally enough of an effort to write one blog entry a week, so let’s have another two this week.

As such, the extra ones will be posted on Friday 18 November and Sunday 20 November, both at 8pm. Each one must be at least 500 words long, and they can’t cover the same topic. This punishment can be increased, but not decreased.

I’ll catch you again on Friday.

Uncategorized

Presenting to Creative Folks

Although these entries are posted in a regular fashion, they’re sometimes written days in advance, giving me time to iron out any flaws. This is not one of these entries. This is about an event from this morning.

I’m part of a local group called Amps, self-described as a community of people who make and cultivate creativity in Dundee. Every Tuesday morning, the members gather for a lighthearted online event that includes discussion questions for everyone, and one of the members typically gives a talk about their work.

It was my turn today, and I talked about the challenges of running both a poetry open-mic and a novel-writing group. I first considered the many differences between the two groups, then ended by discussing three key rules I follow when running both of them.

I’ve been working on this topic for a long time. In 2020, I was supposed to make a Pecha Kucha presentation that never went ahead, but I’d planned what I wanted to talk about. All I really needed to do was bring it up to date.

Regarding Amps as an organisation, I’d heard about them a few years back, but I didn’t join until about this time last year. I didn’t initially imagine I’d be welcome as I don’t rely on the arts to make a living, but the organisers keep a broad church.

After the presentation, there is always a short question-and-answer session, in which I was able to expand upon some of the points I made and put some preconceptions to bed. The weirdest question was whether I would consider using artificial intelligence in my writing.

I’m not always at these meetings because of work commitments, but I’ll endeavour to go whenever I’m available.

Uncategorized

The Ghosts of Blogs Long Gone

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how this blog is now nine years old, and I’ve updated it without any significant gaps. Regular readers will probably be able to identify my style of writing. This is no accident. Before moving to WordPress, I cut my teeth on LiveJournal for many years, and some of what I learnt has carried over to this very day.

Affectionately known as LJ to its users, the site was big news around the millennium. I was relatively late to the party, making my first entry there in 2003. Nonetheless, I kept it updated with day-to-day events until around 2013. My experimentation there was crucial to how I approach blogging today. I found out what topics would engage and disengage an audience, how to structure the text, and the optimum length for a given entry.

Looking back, I’m surprised that some of my least engaging updates were made between 2011 and 2013. I knew LJ was losing its audience by then. In a misguided attempt to keep it alive, I’d largely dispensed with the diary style in favour of a dull series of weekly posts titled #MusicMonday, featuring a different rock or pop track.

By that point, I was starting to take my writing more seriously, so I chose to start afresh on WordPress. This would have a focus on fiction and poetry, and would go on to be updated on a strict weekly schedule. From the moment I set up my account here, I could see why users were moving away: WordPress offered basic features such as scheduled posts and picture uploads as part of their free account, but LJ still charged for them. Most of these features are now free, but LJ still charges $15 just to change your username.

That’s not to say LJ is dead. I still have one pal who updates to this day, and it was a comment underneath her most recent entry that led me back to another blog I kept at Dreamwidth, based on LJ code with modifications.

In 2009, I set up what would now be termed an alt-account to share thoughts that I didn’t want a wider audience to see. I stopped regularly updating there at the same time as I opened WordPress. Then the rabbit-hole deepened when I remembered I’d set up a secondary account to record fragments of dreams. The intention of using them for writing prompts never came to fruition and that blog has remained untouched since 2011.

I have one other LJ page that’s now inaccessible. This was set up for a juggling society at what is now the University of the West of Scotland. Members were kept updated on that page because this was an era before MySpace went mainstream. The student email address no longer exists, my password guesses have been incorrect, and I never set up a recovery question. As such, it’s remained fossilised since 8 Feb 2005.

Reading the LJ Help pages, there is no hope of recovery, so I’ve written to the helpdesk to ask when it’ll be purged. This is often done with accounts that have been idle for too long.

That’s the story of how this WordPress blog came about, and why it’s written the way it is. I can still look back at entries from its earlier days and see what I would have done differently, but I am generally happy with how the past nine years have gone.

Uncategorized

Preparing for November

For the last eight years, I’ve had the privilege of running the Dundee & Angus region of National Novel Writing Month. The name is usually shortened to NaNoWriMo.

My official title is Municipal Liaison (ML) and I’m just one of an army of volunteers around the world who run local regions of differing sizes. Dublin, for instance, is one region. By contrast, the entirety of Italy is also its own region for NaNoWriMo purposes, although that’s not uncommon outside the Anglosphere.

The poster child of NaNo is the challenge to draft a 50,000-word novel over the 30 days of November. Regions are not required to meet year-round, but ours does every Tuesday. November sees an increase in membership, so we’ve learnt to plan accordingly.

In addition to our Tuesday meetings, we have an additional one each Saturday in November. Traditionally, this is at a different location. I always like to have a co-ML as a backup, and she organised that alternative venue.

But why meet year-round in the first place?

It’s less well-known that the organisation also runs standalone challenges during April and July where you choose your own goal.

The idea came about after the 2015 November challenge, when there was an enthusiasm to keep meeting up into December. A previous co-ML and I decided to extend it on a trial basis each month, and we eventually met up every week until April 2016.

At that point, it was clear the weekly meetings were a winner. These allowed our members to come along during the off-season to work on other projects or prepare for the next challenge.

When the pubs were closed during the pandemic, we already used Discord as a meeting place, and this was stepped up. Our meetings now take a hybrid form, where members have the alternative to engage in our private server.

The in-person element, however, will always remain central for as long as I’m in charge of the Dundee & Angus NaNoWriMo region.

Uncategorized

A New Domain Name – and Going Ad-Free

Until the start of this month, visiting my custom domain https://gavincameron.co.uk would redirect you to this blog and the URL in the browser bar would change to https://gcameronwriting.wordpress.com.

Having learnt a little about domain name server (DNS) settings from recent projects, I wanted to find out whether it was possible to keep gavincameron.co.uk in the browser bar while visitors look at this blog.

In short, that was indeed possible – but other problems started the moment I adjusted the relevant settings.

My email address also has a gavincameron.co.uk suffix and that slowly began to break down. Initially, I could send but not receive, and then no traffic was going in either direction. Meanwhile, I had written and scheduled last week’s entry. As it was edging closer to Tuesday, I was prepared to reset my configuration to restore email service, even if it meant the entry wouldn’t be posted.

I rent the domain from Dreamhost, so I spoke with the helpdesk there. The company has the good sense to insist your primary email address should be one that’s not hosted by them. I was able to use an old Googlemail account that remained unaffected.

In the last helpdesk message, a member of staff told me the DNS settings so I could both use my custom domain at WordPress and access my emails at Dreamhost without one affecting the other. I was away on a trip last week, but I was able to change the settings with my phone browser, so you saw the entry as normal and I finally received all my emails.

In all that excitement, I forgot to mark the ninth birthday of this blog last week. As a belated present from me, you won’t see any adverts here for at least a year because I needed to upgrade from a free subscription to use my own domain.

Until then, I don’t intend to touch any more DNS settings.

Uncategorized

Acting as Gallery Assistant and Finding the Time to Read

I’m a regular visitor to the Dundee Contemporary Arts building, which holds around three major exhibitions per year. No matter what’s on display, I’m forever fascinated by the job of the gallery assistants. Aside from opening nights and special events, the pace is normally relaxed enough that some of them read novels while on shift.

Last week, I had the chance to experience this for myself on a smaller scale. First, a little background.

On Thursday, I visited an art exhibition called Funeral For My Deadname at Saltspace in Glasgow. This was run by an artist pal, and the highlight of the opening night was him completing and signing a document to legally change his name to Luke ‘Luca’ Cockayne in front of a crowd of visitors.

Luca also displayed a selection of his artworks in the gallery, some dating back more than a decade. These were available for viewing until Sunday, and some are featured below.

Close-up wall of paintings and drawings, laid out in a salon style.
Wide view of paintings and drawings, plus two freestanding pieces.
Exhibition viewed over the top of The Thursday Murder Club book.

As I hadn’t originally planned to be there on the opening night, I’d already booked my travel for Saturday. I didn’t intend to waste it, so I visited again and spent the day at Saltspace. In contrast with the busy opening night, there was a mere trickle of visitors during the day.

I’d brought with me the Richard Osman bestseller The Thursday Murder Club. It had been sitting in my bag for a long time, and by last week, I’d reached the halfway stage. With a combination of a long bus journey and quiet conditions at Saltspace, I was down to the last few pages by Saturday evening, then I finished it on Sunday.

I also promised my pal I’d dash off a quick clerihew in honour of the event:

Funeral for My Deadname.
I hereby proclaim,
announce and swear
that a change is in the air.
Uncategorized

Seeing the Result of an 18-Month Side-Project

For around the last 18 months, I’ve been working on a side-project: a gameshow called the Literal Flow Test. Born out of pandemic ennui, it combines elements of the BBC radio show Just a Minute with the scoring system and structure of a poetry slam.

On Sunday, I made the rulebook available to buy from a dedicated website for £1.99.

My Hotchpotch open-mic pals have been vital in helping to bring this project to life. Since its debut around a year ago, their help in real-world testing has prompted the addition, removal and redrafting of rules. Indeed, the version for sale contains a hasty rewriting of the tiebreaker section. When it was staged last month, we were kicked out of the venue because it went on too long.

I’m realistic about my expectations for this game. Josh Wardle, for example, was incredibly fortunate to have Wordle quickly picked up by a large audience, while Richard Garfield held onto RoboRally for almost a decade before a publisher would take it.

It’s time to see how the Literal Flow Test goes for a while, then decide what to do with it next.