INDELIBLE FRECKLES

Goodness gracious: Radio New Zealand will be broadcasting a little something I adapted for radio last year, and which was recorded earlier this year.

So if you’ve an hour to spare this Sunday 5 April, between 3pm and 4pm, try out some Kiwi-made drama.

Thanks again to producer Jason Te Kare who was very patient with all my ummm‘s and ahhh‘s to his questions, engineer Phil Benge who put up with my exclamations of I keep expecting someone to run in there between takes and polish the mike!, voice actors Jerome Leota, Sopa Enari, Shadon Meredith, Natano Keni, Rob Lloyd and Eteuati Ete who made the recording day a hoot to watch hear, and big ups to the House of Ash and Fi who very kindly put me up for a couple of nights whilst I was in Wellington.

What have I achieved this year then?

• I wrote a ten-minute play in twelve hours, and watched it premiere (and close) twelve hours after that;
• I’m facilitating a disparate group of Pasifika playwrights (four months straight and counting);
• I’m an (increasingly) active Board member of the New Zealand Writers Guild;
• I’ve had a short radio play accepted for broadcast on National Radio;
• and I did some script consulting on a couple of projects.

I’m tempted to skew my stats a la the police leadership in The Wire but, for me, a project isn’t finished unless it’s finished, knowwha’Imean?

So:

• To’ona’i crawls towards completion;
• I’m co-writing a play, to premiere in 2012;
• I have my own play to push – and thanks to the joys of misery likes company peer pressure, the first act is due by mid-January 2009;
• the diversionary feature spec has copious thematic and strucutural notes… but an actual story has yet to emerge;
• enamoured with the short radio play’s ‘success’, I’m writing an hour-long radio play: I’ve got the opening and closing acts while the middle is currently all rough notes – forty pages to go!
• and the long awaited spec feature of 2007 has been roughed out and is approaching a proper first draft.

[Takes a few steps back and squints]

Okay. I suppose it’s just about perspective.