All men dream; but…

Yeah! I admit it. I’ve been bad at posting recently. In mitigation – I have been exceeding busy in recent weeks.

I wish I could say that I have been busy writing. But the truth is that I have been placed in that paranoiac state that plagues every non-professional writer suffers “The day job (that pays the mortgage) is getting in the way of my writing”.

Being in the Royal Navy, there are time that my service calls on me – and that’s what I signed up to do. I’ve been exceedingly lucky, having spent the vast majority of my service career ‘alongside’ (in a shore-based appointment for the non-naval of you). This has enabled me to develop my skills as a playwright as I have been able to write, and more importantly, attend rehearsals and productions.

But I was called upon to go to sea. And then I was called upon to go to sea again – at very short order.

This has forced me to feel guilt on so many respects: First, I haven’t been able to write (indeed I haven’t turned on my home computer for over a fortnight), I haven’t been able to finish my job of editing the anthology of shorts I intend to publish, I haven’t been able to contact my dear playwright friends that I want to set the new agency with, I haven’t been able to email my dearest and newest mate that I have been writing with in recent months.

But that is the nature of the service I am in. Once we are at sea, the public forget about us. Our families are forced to forget about us, else their day-to-day existence is destroyed. But our friends that are not in day-to-day contact with my service ask why we are ignoring them, feel rejected and justifiably make assumptions.

But myself - I torture myself. I have too many ideas in my head that need to be committed to paper and then performed on stage. My notepads are starting to overflow – I have at least five ideas that will make it to the point of finished stage plays - all developed in the last couple of weeks.

Yet, here I am – back on dry land and desperate to write, and I can’t! This weekend is going to special. One of my dearest friends is getting married. My family and I are intricately involved in this wedding – so we have to be there. But yet, my desire as a playwright wishes that I was at home alone writing my next potential West End Box Office Smash!

So, my apologies for the tardiness of my postings of late; sorry about the fact that there is next to nothing about my writing; sorry that there is no news about how I am pitching my plays; sorry that there is no news about future productions.

But this is the reality of this wannabe professional playwright.

I do dare to dream; but reality dares to intrude.