Once upon a time...

In a peninsula far far away, or so it seems, a past version of me wanted to be a writer. That kid could devour a thick book in a couple of afternoons. Thanks to the horrible education system in Spain at the time(only mentioning it because soon we'll have no system at all) I could basically ignore what was going on at school and concentrate in whatever novel I was reading at the moment. It was good, I did enjoy reading and, I guess it's because I was younger, I had a lower threshold and I would get anything to the end. I'd go an say that as with women, I've grown to have a taste, but with the latter I always had(ie, I've been extremely picky with women all my life and now I'm also with the books I finish). Anyway, I'm not writing this to talk about women. I was just thinking about that boy who wanted to be a writer and who wrote some short stories. I'm sure that literally speaking, they are much better than anything I could write these days but hopefully I've grown to live better stories though. Thing is that, around last summer, I discovered that not only I like theatre but in fact I do enjoy it a lot; both, reading plays and going to the theatre. I even started reading a book on how to write a play. That book has actually been in my bedroom for like a year, until I got it back to the library last week after having read some bits(it's actually good, at least to a neophyte like me) and never made it past the third line of "my play". "my play" is nothing else than an experiment with the LaTeX package for writing plays where I introduced some generic characters and a badly written first scene. That was last summer and I've been busy since then(it's been an awesome year, after all). In fact I haven't read that many plays during term time and only went to see one, Lovesong, which I liked quite a lot. And I just found out that you can rent  online(although I am not sure you'll get all the visuals the production has in the theatre):



So, I had kind of forgotten again all about that boy who wanted to write.

Actually, that's not true. I just remembered, I went to see Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, which when I read it, I found difficult and which when played by actors is very good. Although, TOO MUCH DRAMA for my taste. By the way, and so I remember it, they have Much Ado About Nothing with David Tennant and Catherine Tate and it's on my TO WATCH list:



It's like £7, but I think it may be worth it.

As I was saying, it was all a bit forgotten until about three weeks ago I decided I was going to start watching that famous British TV show called Doctor Who. All those carefully crafted scripts made me wonder again, how do they get their ideas? I mean, you've got to be very clever and very imaginative to come up with such amazing story-lines and more importantly, to develop them in 50 minutes of TV. So although I don't think I'll be writing anytime soon(other than my thesis, and I've been already told my writing style is too wordy for science) I am extremely curious about the creative process behind, at this particular moment, Doctor Who. Luckily for me, the first showrunner of the new series, Russel T. Davies, wrote a book just about that. Well, it's not actually a book, it's a collection of e-mails with a Doctor Who magazine writer during some years where the whole process, according to the book extract that I can read on Amazon, was documented for some episodes. And, also, I got the filming scripts for the first season(it was less than £3 and, like right now, it was late at night). So, that will be interesting to read.

PS: To those who ever come across with a play titled "Copenhagen" and feel attracted to it because it's about Heisenberg and Bohr, don't bother. It's the biggest bullshit ever and I can sincerely not understand why on earth it is so famous. On the other hand, if you want to read a good one with a famous physicists   in, try Clever Dick by Crispin Whitell

In fact, this is a list of the plays a read and I enjoyed(in no particular order)

• Clever Dick and Darwin in Malibu by Crispin Whitell
• Breathing cropses by Laura Wade
• Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
• Peepshow by Isabel Wright(weird thing, I would have loved to see the original production).
• Kiss me like you mean it by the GREAT Chris Chibnall(I just realized that this little play, that I enjoyed so much is by the same guy who wrote "Dinosaurs in a spaceship" and other Doctor Who episodes :) ).
• Entertaining Angels by Richard Everett

And I just bought Mirror Teeth by Nick Gill because I have wanted to read it for a while and because apparently that's what I do when I am in front of my computer at 3am, I buy books.