I think this has been a full week of blogging every day now, and it’s been an interesting one. Well, I say that, anybody who’s actually read the blogs would probably beg to differ. It’s fair to say they’ve not all been brilliant. Indeed, it would probably be being kind to say that any of them were. Still, it’s been an experiment of sorts. I wanted to see whether sitting down to write a blog every day would help my writer’s block at all, and whether it would enable me to get more work done writing scripts I have planned. In that respect, it’s been nothing short of a complete failure. The problem now is that I see writing a blog as my task to be done for the day, then when I do that I think “Well, I’m glad that’s out the way, now I can relax!” and do no more writing for the rest of the day. This is all time that I could have been spending writing other work, so this week I’ve got pretty much nothing done. I am going to make a more concerted effort to actually do some real writing next week though. I’ve got three stand up gigs within a week from Tuesday, so I’ll probably be editing and writing stuff for those, trying to actually put some proper effort into it and see what happens. One of the gigs is a competition gig, perhaps the biggest new stand-up act competition in the country, so I’d really love to do well in that, and will indeed, be trying my best to make sure I go through to the next round. It’s not done by audience voting like the rest of the ones I’ve been in so far either, some actual expert judges decide who’s good enough to go through, so I won’t be able to blame it on other people bringing far more people to vote for them. If I’m good enough, I’ll go through, if I’m not, then I’ll just have to work harder to get better. It’ll be fun.

Also next week, I’ll probably finish this first sitcom script to at least a reasonable standard hopefully. From then I think I’ll probably start writing a short film that I’ve planned on writing for ages, then maybe start work on a second sitcom idea I’ve had as well. I hope it’s a constructive week. If I make it that far anyway, I’ve got three cod in butter sauce pouches boiling away downstairs. I’m not watching them so hopefully they won’t spark a blazing inferno that kills me, and leads to a situation where my gravestone says ‘He died as he lived, enjoying cod in butter sauce’.

I like the fact that I write this blog as if I’m addressing somebody, when in actual fact nobody reads this. I’ll probably try and keep up blogging though, I mean, probably not every day, but I’ll try to do it at least once a week, rather than just occasionally coming back to it once every two months or so. I’ll see. Anyway, I’d probably better stop now, as this is getting too boring even for me. Bye.

Having read back my previous post on writing, around two posts ago, I realise that it could actually come across as slightly arrogant to say ‘Oh, I’m worried if this got commissioned they’d mess up the production, that could be the only problem with what I’ve written, it would be somebody else messing it up, the writing wouldn’t be to blame at all’. That’s not what I intended to really say, and indeed, I realised that that’s not actually how I feel. I was thinking about it yesterday, and though I’ve tried to convince myself that that’s why I’m hesitant to send it off to anybody, I realised that’s actually not the real reason. I think the real reason is that I’m afraid that maybe I’m not actually any good.

At the moment, I’m not exactly living a glamorous life as such, I’m working part-time at the local newsagents. It’s not quite how I imagined my life panning out, but still, while I’m working there I can always convince myself that “Oh, this won’t be forever, this’ll just be until my writing/stand-up takes off. Excuse me, Sir! Sir! Could you pass me that BAFTA shaped bar of chocolate please? I’d better get practicing my speech!” I think if I were to realise that I’m not actually much good at this (and I don’t know, maybe I am, maybe I’m not), and it’s not going to go anywhere, then it would really properly hit me that I’m actually just a part-time One Stop employee not really earning much money, and, as it appears at the moment, seemingly very little hope of getting anything else for a while, and that’s kind of worrying. Comedy kind of seems like all I have.

I think this is perhaps why I put so little effort into my stand-up sometimes too. I think that if I put little effort in and it goes wrong I can always fall back on ‘well, I hardly worked on it, if I worked harder on it it would have been different’. I’ve had some dreadful gigs, I really have, but at the same time I’ve actually had a lot of good ones too, and when it goes well I think “blimey, imagine how good I could be if I actually put all my effort into it.” I never do though. I prefer to maintain the illusion that I could be brilliant if I wanted to be, rather than actually risk finding out that I’m not, and I think this is something that I need to change. I’ve got a hell of a lot of regrets from not taking risks, and I think that I need to change that and actually start taking more risks. At least, if I want to actually achieve everything I want to I should. With that in mind, I intend to actually start showing people my sitcom script next week. It’ll probably be as good as it’s going to be by then. The problem is, I genuinely can’t tell whether it’s any good any more. When I originally wrote it I thought ‘yeah, this is quite good’, but having read it so many times I’ve become so desensitised to it that I can’t tell what it’s like. I think I’m happy with it though. We’ll see.

Incidentally: Kipling watch – I am yet to receive a reply. How the hell else am I going to find out whether Malt Loaf is a cake or not? I mean, apart from Google or any other search engine. Mr Kipling is better than any search engine, even Jeeves. He’s basically bakery Jeeves. If Jeeves starts making me milkshakes, then we’ve got a rivalry, but until then, it’s no contest. Why the hell did Jeeves come back anyway? They got rid of him years ago, which, frankly, was probably the right decision, since, as a search engine he was bobbins. As a friend he was fine, but outside of that, rubbish. Did somebody suddenly think “Blimey, this internet has become a bit impersonal hasn’t it? Let’s bring back that bald Butler who doesn’t understand any of the questions you throw at him. That’ll sort this mess out.” I’m surprised he didn’t feature in Terminator: Salvation at all actually, since he’s practically the beginning of the rise of intelligent computers. Mind you, it would have been considerably less tense with a metal Jeeves running about in the background shouting “DID YOU WANT GARY RHODES’ RECIPE FOR MALT LOAF?” Less tense, and yet somehow better.

Anyway, nearly 750 words, and another blog post for the day (albeit a slightly emo one. I may as well have posted some Fall Out Boy lyrics and a black and white picture of me staring wistfully at the floor), I’m going to go and try and so some more writing, try not to be rubbish, and maybe watch Demolition Man. BYE!

I am warm. It is warm. I cannot think because it is warm. Or I am stupid. STUPIDLY WARM! (Good one self.)

I haven’t really done anything today. I was distressed to find out yesterday that I don’t have any marmalade cake left, and was thus forced to eat chocolate and orange cake instead, which, as we’ve already established, just isn’t quite as good. It was alright though, indeed, it’s probably the second strongest of the cakes, with tea cake in third place, and behind that, the unranked malt loaf who didn’t quite make it onto the podium and spends its life bitterly ranting against the perceiving injustice. You see, to malt loaf, I suppose these other cakes come across as steroid fuelled cads. The fact is though, they’ve just put the effort in and been rewarded. Malt loaf is still good, but it’s not world-class cake. If you want to step up to the Champions League of cakes, you’ve got to work hard to perfect your craft, and that craft is being a cake. Is malt loaf technically a cake? I should write to somebody and ask. Does anybody have Sebastian Coe’s address? He’ll know, being as he is the prince of the Olympics or something. Actually, scrap that, I’ll email Mr Kipling, he’ll know. I shall email him now.

Dear Mr Kipling,

Hello, my name is Andy Ward. You might not have heard of me, I’m not big in the world of cakes. We probably don’t hang out in the same circles, or indeed, the same battenburgs!

Please forget I made that joke Mr Kipling, as looking back at it in retrospect, it makes no sense. My logic was that battenburg is more 3D than a circle, as well as being a cake that you sell. I think I was hoping that this would be a lot more witty than it came across when I actually wrote it down. Now I appear to have got myself into a spin! Or should I say, a Viennese Whirl! Now we’re talking Mr Kipling! Now we’re bantering! Eh? Eh? Please let me know if you enjoyed my joke, as I very much enjoyed it myself, so it would be nice to know whether you did too. I hope you are chortling to yourself now, though be sure to finish your mouthful of cake before you do chortle, as I would not like for you to choke. That’s the complete opposite of what I was going for with my witty cake-based hilarity. I’m not here to kill you Mr Kipling, but I suppose we just bring out the worst in each other, me with my funny funny jokes and you with your… cakes. We are a pair of butter flapjacks!

I’m going to have to ask you to stop goading me on with your cakes now Mr Kipling as we must put all this fun to one side or I’ll never get to my point. I wanted to ask you, is malt loaf a cake Mr Kipling? I only ask as I am trying to draw up a chart of how much I like all my cakes, and so before I commission an artist to draw me a picture of the malt loaf, I just need to know whether it’s worth the effort, and indeed, the cash. I hope that you can assist me with my query, and I look forward to hearing from you.

All the best,

Andy Ward

P.S. What are your favourite three cakes? I do hope they are the same as mine. I shall send you the commissioned pictures of my favourite cakes if you would like to see them. They are very impressive.

I hope he emails back.

As some people may be aware, for a while I’ve been trying to write a few new things, my current project being a sitcom idea. You may be aware of this because I’ve been writing about it probably since February, and yet, here we are in June, and it’s still not properly finished. There seem to be a few reasons for this really, not least that I’m a fairly lazy person and the idea of sitting down to write around 7,000 words that you hope will all be good is a little bit daunting, indeed, that’s why I’ve recently been blogging quite often, and am trying to blog every day for at least this week, I’m hoping that this will help the writing flow more easily. Aside from the laziness though, there’s another aspect to it, and that’s that I have a need to make what I’m doing absolutely as perfect as I feel I can possibly get it before I send it off to people. Of course, this is going to be obvious in everybody’s writing work, it’s natural that you want something decent, but I think that such is my fear of writing something that turns out to be awful that I need to be as confident as I possibly can be that what I’m doing will work on some level.

I think I’m also a little bit hesitant because, with writing, it can often be the case that sometimes even if you’ve got a good script, then so much depends on the production that it can turn even the strongest of scripts into a terrible programme. There’s an episode of Scrubs where they meet a writer from Cheers, and imagine what their lives would be like were they to be a sitcom. The whole show then transforms completely for this episode into an altogether more mainstream sitcom, complete with studio audience, bright sets and different deliveries, and even though you can tell it’s virtually the same script that they’d be using for a regular Scrubs episode, the whole thing just feels a lot worse. Of course, this is all deliberate in the episode, it’s a kind of parody of this sort of thing, and it’s quite clever, but it’s strange to see just how much of a difference the correct production makes to a show. Of course, this is also something that’s covered with Andy Millman’s sitcom in Extras, and shows how The Office easily could have been. I think that whilst I’ve got an idea for how this show might work in my head, albeit a fairly basic idea, the worry that if somebody were to commission it it could so easily be warped into something I hated does make me a bit wary. I think that given the choice between having my own show on TV that I wasn’t happy with, or not having my own show on TV at all, I genuinely think I’d opt for not having my own show on TV at all. I’m not particularly motivated by the potential cash rewards that having your own TV show might bring, even though I am in a pretty poor financial situation, I’d much rather just produce something that I was happy with that other people really enjoyed as well. Of course, it would be nice to both produce something I liked and get good money for it too, but I think more than money I’m motivated by the idea of recognition, of trying to be the best at something and having people like what I’ve made. I’d like to be able to go around high fiving strangers. That’s the dream. I love high fives.

I think my point here is that even if the stuff I’m writing does seem to get rejected, even if it’s not necessarily the best thing ever, so long as I’m happy with what I’ve written, then that’s what’s most important. That’s not to say I’m not open to criticism of it, it’s always useful to have other points of view on your work, and I would welcome suggestions for how to improve it if people offered them, and would indeed make the changes were I to agree with what they were saying, but I’m saying that if I myself didn’t agree with the suggestion, then I probably wouldn’t make the change just for the sake of getting it commissioned. I made that mistake when dealing with the production of my ghost stories. As mentioned in a previous post, I took on board some feedback given to me by people who had judged my entries for the Student Radio Awards, and made the changes even though I was originally quite happy with what I’d done, and in the end, their feedback completely ruined them and left me with something that I hated, to the point where even having these professionally produced stories, I won’t take them to any broadcasters and offer them to them as I don’t want them commissioned in that form. Again, I should note that the changes I made were an error on my part, as what I changed was my style of delivery based on the SRA Award recommendations. I still think that if I’d just stuck with what I believed and coupled that with the professional production and great help I got from the production company I worked with, Demus, I’d have made something really good instead of something that I can’t really even listen to now.

Anyway, this is another long post, in which I’m fairly sure I’ve repeated the same point over and over again, but still, it’s something. Hopefully I will actually be happy with this script when I’ve made a few more changes over the next few days. We’ll see. Then it’s on to the next project: L’Homme Radiateur. It’s going to be top. Incidentally, I’ve found that when I explain my current predicament of working part-time at the local shop, whilst also trying to write some stuff to anybody, they typically treat it with the kind of response you’d give to a child who’s formed his building blocks into the word ‘CAG’. “Oh, look, you nearly wrote CAT, oh you are clever, well, keep trying to live the dream!” All the while thinking “The berk, he’ll never write CAT, heck, that building block doesn’t even have a T on it”. Mind you, this is probably partly to do with the fact that I’m trying to deflect attention from the fact that my life consists of me scanning squash through a till all the while trying to convince myself I’m actually a writer. I’m basically a complete berk. Anyway, I’d better end this post here since I’ll get no writing done at all today otherwise. Bye.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I went to London yesterday, just for something to do more than anything else, as I’ve got a few days off work (I have a few days off work every week, due to working such pathetic hours) and thought ‘Well, I shall use this constructively!’, and in a way, I probably did.

I got in at about 12, and noticed the National Gallery, which is right next to Charing Cross Station pretty much. “Well, I should certainly make an effort to go and be cultured” I thought to myself, and so this is exactly what I did. Unfortunately, the fact is, I’m not cultured at all. Within about 2 minutes of walking in I was bored. I kind of get the feeling that many people when looking at the pictures feel inspired and in awe. My complete lack of any kind of culture was summed up when I looked at the 100th picture of a 17th century man in a hat and thought to myself ‘Well, it’s all very good and all, it’s not bad artwork, but it’s not exactly Monsters Inc.’ I think in years to come, I’ll probably be able to pinpoint the moment when I unfavorably compared classic renaissance artwork with a film about a big blue bear, as the moment that I realised I was an uncultured vagabond. Anyway, this pretty much singalled that it was time to leave, and I promptly did so. Well, I say promptly, I stumbled about in a maze of paintings and made it out before I starved.

I then went along to meet my good friend Mr Edward Stagg. We had a nice drink and a chat about how everything hasn’t quite gone to plan for us career-wise. It basically ended up being a long rant about the state of the world, and after an hour and a half, the bartender politely asked us to leave because we were bringing the atmosphere down, as a thick fog of disappointment had engulfed half the pub. Still, it was good fun, and it’s always good to see friends I haven’t seen in a while. I should meet people more often. I guess with that in mind, my ideal career would be Ambassador. They do nothing but meet people, eat Ferrero Roche and claim diplomatic immunity. It’s almost depressing that this is what I genuinely believe the life of an Ambassador to be like, especially since I’ve got a degree in International Relations. It seems I learn the majority of my information from adverts and the Lethal Weapon series. Still, it got me through my degree, though to be fair I got lucky in that all the questions in the final exams were about the relationship between Mel Gibson and Danny Glover’s detectives and Joe Pesci’s character Leo Getz. This was especially strange as it was a history exam. Mind you, I suppose Lethal Weapon is a part of history now. Perhaps not medieval history, but still, it makes sense when you think about it.

You know, I actually started doing this blog more often so that it might help with my writers block and so that I could get more work done on my actual writing projects, but this seems to be taking so much time that there’ll be hardly any time left to actually write. I’m already 500 words in and I’ve not even got to talking about the waffle shop yet.

Anyway, then I left the now foggy pub and wandered around for a bit. As with every other trip to London, my trip then became about tasty snacks. I like to eat,and I especially like to eat tasty stuff. With this in mind, I went to the waffle shop which I always tell everybody to go to but nobody ever does, for some more spectacular waffles. It’s called Pure Waffle, and it’s down a street that’s opposite Selfridges. Somebody just go there for goodness sake so that I’ve got somebody to discuss waffles with. Nobody will discuss waffles with me.

“So, did you see the game last night?”

“No, but I’ll tell you what I did do, I went to this brilliant little waffle boutique that’s just opposite Selfrid-”

“Bye.”

Content with my waffle-based success. I think I ambled about for a bit longer, then went to Harrods, where I purchased all manner of tasty looking cupcakes. Basically, by this point in the blog, I’m probably coming across as a food maniac. I don’t know if anybody ever saw the episode of Button Moon where the hoover ate all the stars, but that’s basically what I’ve become. Thankfully I’ve got a decent metabolism, or else I’d probably have become the subject of a Channel 5 documentary by now. I then left Harrods in triumph. Somebody asked me if I’d seen the game, I said no, but I’d just purchased some delicious cupcakes. By the time I’d finished my sentence though they’d already disappeared.

After that I just did the usual stuff. Bought a Donkey Kong energy drink. Also bought a Street Fighter drink, a Mario one, and a Domo one. Top. Then I got a train home. Anyway, this has been nearly 900 words of what I imagine to read is spectacularly dull, so I’m going to end here. BYE!