Oddments at year's end

Thank you, dear readers, for sticking with me through this difficult year. Thank you for coming back, post after post, even when I was a misery. Thank you for all your comments, your emails, and your support.

Tell me…What do you wish people, when you wish them Happy New Year?  Do you wish them what you would like in the New Year? Or do you wish them what you think they would like?

And do you know what they would like? Creative writing students are taught to make copious notes on their characters before they begin to write the novel they’re planning. I have a list of questions I answer about mine. The last two questions in my long list are:

What does she think she wants?

and

What does she really want?

People wish me good luck with my screenplay and hope I will get it produced, and then they say “Oooh, you’ll be rich and famous.” Actually, I wouldn’t be either. And actually, it’s not what I want. All I want is to get my story on screen – to share my characters and their story with lots and lots of people, and to see my characters on screen for myself. It was such an emotional experience having professional actors and a director work on a scene from my screenplay at the London Screenwriters’ Festival that if/when I switch on the telly and see my characters, I’ll probably deliquesce into a pool of mush on the sofa.

And talking of mushy slush, I didn’t mention my saxophone in my review of the year. I realised this week that for the last six months I’ve been working on two numbers “Here's that rainy day” and “Embraceable you” which seems rather apt.

Here’s a poem I recently fell in love with which also fits my year:

At the Moment

Suddenly, I stopped thinking about Love,

after so many years of only that,

after thinking that nothing else mattered.

And what was I thinking of when I stopped

thinking about Love? Death, of course—what else

could take Love’s place? What else could hold such force?

I thought about how far away Death once

had seemed, how unexpected that it could

happen to someone I knew quite well,

how impossible that this should be the

normal thing, as natural as frost and

winter. I thought about the way we’d aged,

how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew

dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.

Joyce Sutphen

 “At the Moment” from Naming the Stars by Joyce Sutphen. © 2004 by Joyce Sutphen. Used by permission of Joyce Sutphen and the publisher, Holy Cow! Press. www.holycowpress.org

I’m wishing you all what you really want for 2016, hoping it’s what you really need. Most of all, though - and call me a soppy date if you like -  I’m wishing you love.