CAN'T WRITE FOR TOFFEE

Well, after ten years of trying, it appears, with the latest Bruntwood Prize announcement once more confirming my failure, that I actually can't write for toffee (given today's date, presumably treacle toffee) and I'm being given a big enough hint that it's time to pack it in and go and find something else to do with my free time, especially when it comes to the laughable idea that I could actually write plays that someone might think worthy of performing...

The strange thing about this year's Bruntwood competition is that I really hadn't been all that bothered. I'd dusted off a play about the First World War which I wrote a couple of years ago and, because I really couldn't find any time to actually write the "other" play I'd sort of had in mind, I decided that it was better to send "something" rather than "nothing" and, because, for various reasons, this particular play had never got the read-through with a group of actors that I had once planned for it, I decided to just bundle it up and send it off and see whether anyone thought anything all that much of it...

It appears not...

So I am, at least, rather glad that I never embarrassed myself by sending it off to an actor I once had in mind to perform in it, nor by doing that reckless thing that I once thought about of sending it off to the Imperial War Museum so that they could mock me mercilessly in my absence.

The problem is that, for once, I actually was stupid enough to believe that I thought that this play was really quite good and, perhaps, the best thing I had ever written and, I'd decided in the great tradition of the playwright Arthur Miller whose boots I am not even worthy to lick the mud from, if this one was unsuccessful, I really would have to give up play-writing and find something else to do with my need to pour out ill-conceived words for no very good reason.

This is obviously delusional. I haven't actually written a new play in quite some time now, instead pouring my limited talents and energies into creating new and slightly tedious bloggery each morning, but I digress...

Interestingly enough, after I'd sent that off, way, eway back in March, I discovered that another theatre company, albeit an amateur one, were holding a writing competition specifically for plays about the topic I'd written about, and that this particular play might be the very thing that suited their competition entry requirements...

But there was a catch.

The entries could not, under any circumstances, be plays that were currently under consideration in any other competitions at the same time, so, I believed that was that one totally stuffed then.

Ah well... You make your choices in this life, don't you...?

Obviously, it would be most arrogant to assume that it was going to be successful in the first, so you might as well send it to the second, you might think, but I'm nothing if not a stickler for the rules because there's always a "just supposing..." to think about.

The closing date for the second was before the "long-list" release date for the first so that was that, it seemed.

Until a few weeks ago when I was idly checking the progress of both competitions online and I happened to notice that, for various reasons perhaps not unrelated to the other contest in question, the closing date for the second had slipped back beyond that "long-list" date of the first, and that there was now a short "window" where I might be able to squeeze the entry in at the last minute...

Of course, I tried talking myself out of it.

After all, if it hadn't been good enough for the first, then...

In the end, with what happened at the crucial period of time in my personal life, fate intervened to try and stop me from embarrassing myself twice, but I'm nothing if not resilient and, perhaps because I am the kind of an idiot who can't let go of a stupid thing like hope, I spent half an hour, and ten whole pounds of my own money as an entry fee, bundling the whole thing up again and sending it off to them anyway to face another abject failure and further proof that I am indeed no kind of writer and simply cannot write for toffee...