A new short play

Although I haven't been blogging regularly of late, I have been productive elsewhere. Namely writing a new short play titled FAE.

The short work has been entered in Bermuda's annual 'Famous For Fifteen Minutes' competition, where six plays will be chosen from the entries to be staged during a mini-festival with one of those six ultimately being judged the winner.

It has been some time since I have written a creative piece to a deadline. I had around one month to come up with the idea and get it down in a stage play format.

For me, the preferred way of writing is to do a draft in story format, I just write out my short story as a piece of prose. Once that is complete I go back and type it out in stage play format.

The criteria stipulated that it had to be a simplified play (a 'box set') with no more than four characters and 'NO helicopters!'

Well, it was hard, but I managed to keep helicopters out of the story line.

FAE is set in a remote cottage in the mountains, with a husband and wife and their poorly teenage daughter. The fourth character is a rather mysterious woman who is taken into the shelter of the cottage one stormy night.

Without going into further detail at this point, I would say that FAE could well be a companion story to my previous short stage play Faeries of Green Lochan, which was turned into an animation-live action short film a few years ago, and can be viewed on YouTube. In time I may end up with a small compendium of faerie story vignettes - who knows. The magic of the faery world of celtic tradition tugs at my imagination from time to time.

The disciplined task of writing again, to deadline and within the constraints of a 15-minute maximum play with a limited number of players, was a fun workout. It has given me an added impetus to wrap up the almost complete final chapter of Dolphin Girl.