Exciting plans

I probably shouldn't be writing this because any plans I usually outline on this blog end up changing beyond all recognition or simply never materialise at all. Nonetheless, here's the plan...

Over the coming months I will be publishing selections from the glut of short fiction I've been hammering out over the last couple of years. Many of them will appear in a forthcoming collection provisionally entitled "Babbage's Disease & Other Fictions", which will be disseminated via Olchar's mOnocle-Lash imprint. In addition to the 10,000 word-ish novella of its title, it will include somewhere in the region of 8-10 shorter pieces, some of which are rewritings of the better bits of "Selected Prose Works" and many of which I have yet to release in any form.

In the run up to that publication I'm planning to self-publish a short series of chapbooks inspired by the concept of promotional music singles. Each of these chapbooks will feature a selection from "Babbage's Disease" accompanied by a "B-side" story which will not be published in any other form. The first of these will be "The Punch-Up", with a B-side entitled "The Cathedral of Meat" and will hopefully be ready in time for a reading I'm doing in Torquay on September 9th.

All in all I'm planning to release over a dozen new stories by the end of the year. Hopefully this post will serve to spur me on rather than stand as a testament to my inability to follow through on my grand ideas.

CONTENT.

New content, no less, albeit based on some pretty old ideas. The tracks below are recordings of a short performance I did at Bryce's awesome cafe-bookshop-arts venue thing called Epicentre. If you're ever in the vicinity of Paignton you should drop in for a nibble and a browse and make a foreigner smile.

This was my first attempt at doing anything which could be legitimately referred to as "live comedy" and I'm deeply indebted to the lovely audience of clever poets who had the decency to laugh at a few of the least awful bits. I'm not at all happy with my performance of the William Morris monologue. I was rewriting it on the train (four years since I first wrote that bitch and I'm still fiddling with it), and the combination of failing eyesight, dangerously small font sizes and my own illegible scrawlings resulted in some very unsightly pauses in all the wrong places. Ah well. Have at it:

A Letter of Disenlikenment by dbedwards

William Morris/Crab Scenario by dbedwards

A dusty old poem

I found some scans of a splat poem book thing I produced for a project at Dartington. The recording of the performance has long since vanished, so I thought I'd better record what I can remember of the event here.

I seem to recall the performance involved me slowly progressing through the pages book, performing each double-page by first focusing on the left before introducing elements of the right page and drawing on them simultaneously then performing solely from the right page. Once that was done I'd turn the page and restart the process as seamlessly as possible. This created a nice mix of slow progressions and abrupt shifts. It took about twenty minutes to work through the whole text, which I performed behatted and becaped in a hot studio. I built the sense of encroaching exhaustion into the piece, exploiting my lack of breath and straining voice for all it was worth.

I'd distributed noisemakers amongst the other students, who were mostly music students I think as this was for one of the optional cross-disciplinary modules. They were a bit nervous at first, so I had to bring them in with a gesture and conduct them for a couple of minutes before they really got into the shifting rhythms and began to bounce off each other as much as anything I was doing.

I think this remains the furthest I've ever taken the splat poem as a form, certainly as an act for a single voice, but I feel certain there's far more still to be done with it if I can challenge myself not to slip into a mode of delivery which is now so familiar and comfortable to me that it no longer feels like a worthwhile activity.
















In other news I've been doing some comedy performances recently, audio recordings of which will hopefully find their way to me soon (and will naturally turn up on this blog when they do).

These things happen

Hmm.

Something better will be along eventually, I should imagine.

I am an award-winning playwright.

The awards ceremony for the Gloucester One Act Play Festival was held this evening. Broadcast and those involved in its occurring had been nominated for six categories:

Best Set
Best Director
Best Actress
Best Actor
Best Original Play
Best Play

In fact, the only categories we weren't nominated for were Best Juvenile Production and Best Supporting Actor/Actress, neither of which we were eligible for anyway as it was an adult cast of two.

I wasn't present at the ceremony due to my recent relocation to Plymouth, but I received regular updates from the cast and the other members of Nailsworth Dramatic Society who had gone along to cheer them on. I expected us to maybe pick up one or two of the awards, seeing as we'd been nominated in so many categories, but to my great astonishment we won the lot. All six. Huzzahs all round, methinks!

I've said it elsewhere, but I am hugely indebted to the members of Nailsworth Dramatic Society who assisted me in all manner of ways to finally get one of my plays off the page and into a theatre at long last. It's been a wonderful experience.

PS - I have a shitty audio recording of the final performance which I shall try and make available to any interested parties just as soon as I've cleaned it up as best I can.

Fats and THE BBC HORSE

During the process of hurriedly packing up all my worldly possessions (again, again) I came across a couple of brief narratives culled and assembled from various sources (a similar style of composition was employed for the text for the Jackanory performance embedded in my previous post). I think I was planning on making a habit of these, but life, as ever, blah blah blah. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility that more may still happen eventually.

This one is basically still intact (I think), but the other one needs some patching up. Anyway, I thought I'd share it before I went back to the dreary task of decanting the contents my flat into a new one far far away.



And, should you be having difficulty in accessing the image, here's the text all typed-up like:


Fats and THE BBC HORSE

Can you Use a bank note to KEEP A HEDGEHOG HAPPY Mr. Crawford?

You try Miss Allnut "I'm an awful duffer at this sort of thing, .Each of the Adjustable lamps under his eyes turned into a yellowish-green liquid and one of them appears to have a foot he said

Miss Allnut Jumps 15 separate jumps which no canvas could withstand in pursuit of
Tradition
Judgement
Liberty
Nature
Character
Style
Duty
Chance
Common Sense
Hope
Civilization
Evidence
Money
Force
Energy
Art
Life
Genius
Moral
Unity
State
Will
Analogy
Category
Space
Time
Love
Value
Form
and gas permeable elbows made from yeast

Here we have 100 nuts in five bowls. declared Mr. Scott a soft yet crisp fungus which has to be removed by surgery
His Tarry, beefy nose was Harmonius and long with a fairly broad tip and a traditional Chinese ink stand in its salmon-pink Spode cones Miss Allnut and Mr. Scott look misty, as though they will flutter and rearrange DRESDEN During the course of a canoeing holiday,

Mr. Crawford, decays quickly of scurvy- and of newspaper and of drought, telegraph poles and several diseases,

you can overcome this, by cutting your own meat although Crawford is compressed from the earthy, dead-still air.

More vim vom vimeo!

I told you I'd get round to it eventually...

In which we extract some honey from a bag of flour from David Beris Edwards on Vimeo.

And, whilst we're at it:

Jackanory from David Beris Edwards on Vimeo.