Play off

It was the first of the new season of play-offs in the Dylan Thomas Centre last night. The play-offs give amateur writers the chance to have an excerpt of a play performed on stage in front of an audience. Two winners from each monthly event go on to the grand final later in the year. One of last night's authors invited me to go along and, fortunately, her play was one of the two better ones, so I was able to say nice things about it. The other three were absolutely terrible.

I knew one of the judges and spoke to him afterwards. I complimented him on the critiques he'd given on behalf of the judging panel (i.e. they agreed with me!). He'd been quite blunt but constructive. The last time I attended, the judge was useless, just saying nice things, which wouldn't have helped the authors to improve on their works at all. Anyway, the point I'm getting to is that I mentioned that I'd been thinking about a play for entering for ages. David, the judge, said, 'Get it written! Get in in! I have faith in you. You can't be any worse!' So that's what I'm going to do on the plane: write a play. Probably not write a play exactly but think about it and maybe start writing on making notes. I was wondering what on earth I was going to do for 10 hours, apart from eat.