The big news is I'm taking a show to Edinburgh this year, and I'm trying to get as much of the admin sorted as swiftly as possible so I can clear time to write it.
As it stands, I'm creaking toward that kicking-off point. The show will be about my dad (the one slated for 2020 until Covid hit and put paid to that), and I'm excited and apprehensive about the task ahead. There's so much I want to get across - as my pages of scribbled notes already testify - but primarily, I want to capture my dad's character so that the audience leaves the room feeling like they just met him, which is no mean feat. And I want to tackle what's it like to lose a loved one without forgetting that the show's a comedy (which, as far as challenges go, is worthy of fully spandexed Anneka Rice).
What's helped so far is the groundwork I did in 2020. For example, I already had a blurb that just needed tightening up. And I've also got a lot of material about him already, which I'm sifting through to see what might work in this context, along with various blogs I wrote as he got more ill. So I feel like I'm at a reasonable starting point. And I intend to use the few work-in-progress dates in the diary to blow a bit of life back into that old material as I re-engage an aspect of my personality that's been hibernating for a few years: i.e. me as a stand-up.
That last bit is perhaps the most challenging. I've come out the other side of events of the past few years feeling like a different person, and my self-confidence took a battering. And my energy's not what it was, though I'm working on it. It's that old maxim about riding a bike: I know how to do it if I can access the right parts of my muscle memory.