My first week (and first letter) as a 33 year old. 33 feels strange to me, a little bit of a nothing age, older than most your heroes, younger than most who are fulfilled. There's something in it though that hints at a personal narrative shift. Turning your gaze ahead into the years of your 30s to come rather than having one eye still on your 20s. It starts to get odder if you're not in a long term relationship. Quite a few of your friends have had kids by now. Middle age (!!) is something that remains - just about - remote but you begin to catch the first glimpses of it. The age itself is nothing, but what it signals feels quite foreboding.

Appropriate then, for this to have been a week of inoculative minor upheavals. I spent it flying (well, train-ing) all over the place, far from home and feeling a bit miserable about it to be honest. Hotel rooms are exciting for half a night but I often woke up longing for my own bed. It was an upsetting disruption to routine and joy and felt like a backward step. I hope that I'll get better at dealing with this and, hey, if I stay in a few more hotels, I might even get a Simon Stephens play out of it.

It wasn't just me that got churned up, my scripts did too. The big piece of work this week was getting noted on the script I mentioned in the previous letter and then responding to those notes. I am grateful for this part of the process - I firmly believe that a writer is only as good as the notes they get. The thing is though, it's hard for a writer to accept that the notes are good. For me at least, they need to be planted by the brave dramaturg/script editor and while I'll thrash and argue, eventually I will realise they're exactly right. To paraphrase the Big G: "First you laugh at notes, then you fight them, then they win."

There are ways to make that process a little smoother. You've got to let yourself feel every thought after you're noted, work through the emotion of it, rant to a friend who will not hold you to your wild promises of this being the very last time you bother and how - actually - you're probably going to leave the industry rather than go through this again. Then, you've got to mourn the old draft. Because it's dead. Don't think "oh maybe I'll keep that bit there and - ". No no no. Let it die and acknowledge its passing. Not because you won't salvage anything from it but because you can't get cracking with that thought in your head else the new draft won't have its own life or coherency. Next, make a roadmap to the new draft. Don't just dive into it, if you can help it. Fill yourself up with new material, new research, new ideas and only then begin again. Trust me - it'll feel less brutal this way.

There should be more here. But I'm late for a play! So, quickly...one last bit...

As I returned from Newcastle (a brilliant, beautiful city that I'll shortly be going back to), I got thinking about travelling more broadly. I've never really done it. I didn't have a gap year. I never went interailing. I've never done that seemingly ubiquitous few weeks in either South America or Australia/New Zealand. That's not say I didn't feel that urge. There was, of course, a voice in my saying that good writers should travel and see other parts of the world and engage with other cultures. But I felt like I could either be a guy who indulged in travelling or indulged a creative life - not both. Considering it now, I've no idea why those felt mutually exclusive? Because I was deviating so far from what my family wanted of me? Because the arts felt like a luxury? Funny how you trap yourself with your own rules and don't even realise it. When I was a child, I was obsessed with rainforests and was sure I'd be living in the Amazon by age 21.  As a teenager, I loved going camping and exploring and hanging off of dubious looking cliffs.  Maybe if I followed that instinct through, I would've settled in another country. Maybe I'd have learned five languages (I was good at them, once) and built myself a hut on an abandoned coastline somewhere. Perhaps I'd be this age on the other side of the world with several children, most of whom I was aware of.

I dream of all of these things but as I haul myself out of the Tube and step towards the open window of my flat and see one of my cats poking his face out, miaowing at me like he's cheering on a marathon runner at the final mile and I put my key in the front door and it sticks just so and I sit in a chair that probably knows my body better than any person does just now, those dreams of lives not lived and travels not taken dissolve and there is only one thought in my head...

I'm back. I'm back. I'm back.

Thank God.