Me: The Next Generation.

One thing I’ve been busying myself with today is registering the three work-in-progress dates I’ll be doing at the Brighton Fringe next year.

…and so begin my thoughts on how to follow this year’s show. I haven’t put the current one to bed quite yet - I’m back at Leicester Square Theatre next week, and will be doing it as part of the Leicester Comedy Festival in February - but I’m trying to gently set the wheels in motion for what I write next. At the moment, I’m mostly concerned with the admin - booking the dates etc - but I’ve also been loosely thinking about what the content of a new show might be.

At the moment it’s all very vague. Sadly, you can’t do anything like this on a whim; venues need to be found and applied for and blurbs and pictures need to be submitted before you get down to the nitty-gritty. It’s quite intimidating to think I have to start again with a solo show for the third time around. On the whole, I’m proud of what I pulled together this year; there are things I'd have changed if I hadn’t been so tied to deadlines to finish the bloody thing, but it felt like a good few steps ahead from what I did in 2015, when I first put serious time and consideration into working alone. The only setback now is trying not to be too intimidated by the thought of starting over and finding better and funnier things to talk about.

The biggest aid to all of this will be this blog. Any time I worry about what the content of the next show will be, I remind myself that I’m not working from scratch; I have over three years’ worth of nearly daily blog posts to sift through and hopefully find plenty to work with. The hardest part is finding the best stuff, when there’s so much to get through; I’d hate to miss things that would work because they’re lost within a deluge of material that's both good and weak. What I really need is an editor who’s prepared to read it all for me. Any volunteers willing to face the onslaught can drop me a line at the usual address.