Surfacing

Gosh, it feels like an eon has passed since I last blogged, so I wanted to drop in and give a few updates. I've been going through some major life transitions over the past few weeks (all good), which have disrupted my normal ebb and flow to quite a large extent. On top of that, I've had a couple of medical issues that I've needed to get sorted out. This included a "tenotomy" on my right elbow this week for lateral epicondylitis, or what used to be called "tennis elbow". (I should disclose that I haven't actually picked up a tennis racquet since I was about 15-years-old...with very good reason.)

Interesting, then, that I choose to exert it by writing a blog post just two days into my recovery. But, then that's just me, I guess. Logic, practicality and I have always had something of an uneasy relationship.

Speaking of odd relationships, I also wanted to let you know about the new book I'm working on. This is an adaptation of my one-act play "Cuthbert's Last Stand" which was one of my early successes. It won a national one-act play contest the same year I wrote it (2001), and the following year was selected as a finalist in the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, where it received its second Off-Off-Broadway production. It also went on to a very successful production in Montreal (two, in fact, in different forms), which is where the poster you see here comes from.

I'll post more when it's nearer completion, but in the meantime, here's a little more on what its about:

Mrs. Pennington-South has succeeded in coercing a handsome young man – Tristram – back to her home to have tea with her and her ill-tempered son, Cuthbert. What the shy, rather awkward Tristram doesn't realise is that he is, in fact, being presented as a possible suitor for Cuthbert. His mother's matchmaking arrangements, however, have become increasingly intolerable for Cuthbert, and as the tea progresses and the intimations and pressures are ratcheted up, Cuthbert finally reaches breaking point. Exasperated and angry, he decides that the time has come at last to confront his mother with the shocking truth that he knows can only break her heart: the open admittance of his heterosexuality.

Incidentally, anyone who's read The End of the World may notice a distinct similarity between the mother in that book and the mother in this one. The one in "Cuthbert" however is the original incarnation of this rather batty, outré matriarch.