2016 Thus Far

A random update on random things.

2016 is hopefully gonna be a busy year.  It’s a year in which one book is published and, touch wood, two are delivered to my publisher.  (Book 1 of this bundle is in, hurrah!)  It’s also a year in which I want to really nail a few things on the lighting side of the business, as quite simply, it’s been a long hard 2015 and I’d like to put a bit of legwork in to see if 2016/17 can be that fluffy dream of better paid and artistically rewarding.  Fingers crossed.

So far, therefore, in the first six weeks of 2016, I’ve lit two shows, with another four booked up to the end of April.  I’m about to talk through editorial notes on the next Claire North book (no.4 – well, no.5 if you count the novellas, which I think I shall…) and we’re gently gearing up as well for the publication of Sudden Appearance of Hope.  I’m also kinda dancing around writing the next book.  I got the idea (kinda got a few ideas, taken a while to weed out which one is the keeper) and I got the beginning of the plot, but since delivery isn’t until October I’ve been sorta taking it easy on this, until I’m absolutely ready to go.

Meanwhile, there’s a fair amount of DIY happening in my flat.  My partner is a highly skilled craftsman; I am not, at least, not when it comes to anything that isn’t shiny.  We therefore have a division of labour whereby he creates beautiful, exquisite, skilled and sexy things over a careful and extremely long amount of time… while I just throw paint at stuff and stick glue everywhere.  It’s taken a while for us to understand the validity of each other’s style of working, but now that we get it, it sorta makes sense.  It’s also useful that one of us understands all things workshoppy, and the other can do wiring.

I’m sometimes asked if my flat is lit beautifully, as a side-effect of being a lighting designer.  The answer is, no, not really.  I spend so much time around lights that the idea of taking my work home with me leaves me a little knackered.  However!  I am hugely picky about bulbs.  You try and throw an arctic-white LED up in my kitchen, or an energy saver that takes twenty minutes to warm up and even then still only manages a dribble of 400 lumens of sickly blue-green-white, and I will get phenomenally stressed.  I also like controlling light intensity in the evening.  When you’re heading to bed, the last thing you need is a cold, very bright light source in your life, or unnecessary spill from another room.  So no – my flat isn’t lit in a deeply sexy way, but there’s still a fair amount of giving a damn that’s gone into it.

Thankfully, as a writer, my flat is indeed full of books.  One of the big DIY projects we’ve got coming is putting up more shelves, and I’m already giddy with excitement at the idea….

A fair amount of film stuff seems to be gently gearing up in 2016.  I doubt I’m allowed to talk about any of it, but as always, I remain hugely impressed and so grateful that I just get to write books, and other people make movies.  Watch this space…

As part of the pursuit of more lighting, I’m also trying to watch more theatre in 2016.  Thus far I’ve seen a few shows, of which the two that stood out for me were Guys and Dolls at the Savoy (just because it’s always joyful fun, even if my lighting designer hat struggled to detach for the show) and Macbeth at the Young Vic, which was just awesome.  (Also happened to have in the cast two people who I’ve lit; one from Ra-de-da, another from the National Theatre.  However, as is the nature of these gigs, I suspect I recognised them instantly and they’d struggle to know who the hell I was, even though I spent best part of a year lighting each.  It’s not a personal thing – they’re in the light, I’m in the dark.  Technical theatre is not unlike a police one-way mirror in that sense.)

It’s doubtful if I’ll get to see much in the coming months, as there are a lot of shows about to go into tech again, but I’ll keep trying.

I’m now a grade 7 at escrima, which I think means I should perhaps start to be looking all sombre and martial-esque and that.  However, the classes remain so much fun that I doubt I’ll ever get the goofy grin off my face, no matter how far I go.

I need to see my friends more; this is a work in progress for all of us.  All of us make this pledge, and in fulfilling it, all of us find ourselves continually in danger of winding up double-booked.

In 2016 I turn 30.  I don’t really have any strong feelings about this at all.  In many ways, I’m kinda looking forward to it.  I recently attended a careers evening at LSE in my capacity as a Representative of Art (it didn’t say that on my badge, but it couldda) and had people innocently asking me what course I was on.  In other words: I still look, and probably act, like I’m about 12 years old.  It’d be nice, I think, to have a demeanour that suits my age.

Or shit, who am I kidding?  It’d be nice to carry on being ridiculous until I’m an ancient giggling biddy.

There are a few elections incoming in 2016.  The USA has to choose between mildly semi-progressive sorta liberals on the one hand, and raging out-of-their-minds fearmongering bigots on the other hand; please choose wisely, oh land of the free.  In London I hope and pray that we’re finally gonna rid ourselves of a Tory Mayor (shudder) and for the UK as a whole it looks likely that we’re going to be choosing whether to leave the EU or not.  (At the moment, based on the data available, I’m a fan of staying in, if only because ideologically I find national identity one of the weakest and most corrosive of all sociological identifiers, and ‘cos I like the notion that certain laws regarding labour, human rights, quality of goods and the environment should be enacted for all humans, everywhere.  Don’t get me wrong – there’s loads about the EU that’s pretty pants, but nothing which our country doesn’t already do stupid too.  Anyhow…)

In short, 2016 thus far has been fun, and looks like it could get more so.  Fingers crossed for the next 10 months….