After many years writing tv scripts it was particularly liberating to work on my first novel. At last I could include any crazy thing that popped into my head – providing it made at least a tiny bit of sense – and no production people would yell at me. (“That can’t be animated! There are too many characters/scenes/locations/props! It’s impossible!”) And since it was a fantasy story, the sky really was the limit. All of which explains how Eldritch Manor ended up featuring an unruly mob of characters, an extremely busy plot, and magical marvels at every turn.
Fast forward six or seven years to last summer, as I struggled to distill Eldritch down for the stage, cursing myself all the way for cramming so much into that book. Hoist on my own petard, as they say.
The process began when Adina Hildebrandt, local independent bookstore big-wig and theatre school impresario, uttered the fateful words “You should turn this into a play!” I thought she was just being polite. Every time she said it for the next couple of years I thought she was just being polite. Sometime in the third year I began to think she might actually be serious.
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We saw the new year in pretty quietly… after a game of Scrabble my 11-yr-old and I dragged sleeping bags into the living room to sleep under the xmas lights I’ve strung everywhere. There was really nothing good on the radio, so we just counted down to midnight ourselves, then climbed into said sleeping bags and chatted a little before falling asleep. By 12:30 it was all over. Party animals!
When my daughter was born I wanted to learn more about babies. I wanted to know how they perceive the world and how they learn. I wanted to know how her body was going to grow and develop. I wanted to know when her teeth would come in, and in what order, and what caused hiccups and if she would yawn if she saw me yawning right away or if that was something she had to learn. I wanted to know how she would figure out who the baby in the mirror was. I wanted to know about eye colour and hair colour and right- or left-handedness. I wanted to know what babies like and what they don’t like. I wanted to know what babies laugh at and why.