#43 - 2019? I don't know her
Hello folks,
Welcome to the last Patelogram of the year. Of the decade! How was your Christmas Day? I spent it by myself and despite being in the middle of quite a low mood it was perfectly pleasant and I capped it off by watching Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade.
A couple of moments have aged ungraciously but overall, it's still an absolute banger and still contains my favourite edit in movie history (Which is: The hat being put on young Indy's head, match cutting to the hat on older Indy as he raises his head with a smile on his face...thinking on the memory?...and then gets punched in the face. The whole franchise in five seconds). This is the kind of work I've always wanted to make - good, mainstream fare - and it's reinvigorating to connect back to that.
You may or may not know, but no less than Tom Stoppard did an uncredited rewrite job on the script. Not just tinkering around the edges either. There's a great breakdown of what exactly he did here that directly comparing the script to the draft before it. A more detailed breakdown can be found here.
My New Year plans are a little sketchier but there is one tradition I look forward to. Every New Year's Day, just after midnight, I write a note to myself to be opened at the same point in a year's time. I try to (concisely) express how I've felt about the year that's passed and my hopes for the one to come. As the year passes I forget what I wrote and look forward to what message past me had for future me and what future me will think of it.
I'll try doing that with you here in this Patelogram.
OUT WITH THE OLD...
Reflecting on 2019, it feels a little bit like a stutter or a stall. I wrote, I think, less than any year before it. That is, unless you count these newsletters in the mix in which case I've done about par.
There's been a few changes in my life that have forced me to examine both what I'm capable of doing and what I want to do. It's been frustrating and I've had both more and less creative control than ever.
...IN WITH THE NEW
Finally, my next year will begin with a flight to New Zealand (first time in the southern hemisphere!) and with the biggest change of all: My becoming an uncle. I'm not great with being with my family but I am quietly thrilled about this. If it doesn't sound too morbid, it's another way in which my mum will live on - some of her genes expressing themselves in an entirely new being. My sister is one of the best people I know (even if it took me far too long to realise that). I hope to be a good influence on her offspring. The very least I can do is to get in there early and dissuade them from pursuing a life in the arts...
KITTY KORNER
Can I do a round up of the cats over the last decade? I will attempt a brief one. I first met Chill Cat in 2015 in my estate's car park when he ducked out from under a car to say hello. At this point I labelled him 'Nice Cat', for he was just very friendly and miaowy and continued to be so. Pretty Cat I encountered the year after, and it wasn't til 2017 that I met their brother (Hero Cat, RIP) or even knew that they were in fact boys or brothers.
They went from a pleasant, diverting surprise I'd get now and then on my way back home to something I started to crave. If they weren't there, I'd be a little heartbroken. Many a night I would sit in the communal space next to my front door, just thinking, and they'd come along and sit alongside and eventually on me. I was delighted. This became a source of soothing when my brain wouldn't quieten down. Just me in my trackies and hoodies, couple of strange cats tucked alongside me, wondering what I was doing with my life.
I'd often take a walk around the block at night to clear my head before bed. Before long, I noticed that Pretty Cat was following me. I suppose it was an excuse for him to do the rounds of his territory - scratching that bench, rubbing against this tree. Eventually, he figured out the pattern...and where I lived. This meant that whenever I opened my front door, they would slink out of their hiding places and wait patiently for me to begin the rounds. When I was going through the very worst of my depression, this was always a sight that would put a small but meaningful dent in it.
Though I've never owned a pet before, making the instinctive decision to adopt them when their owner sadly died has turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. Though there are only two brothers left, they are a constant source of joy and companionship. They have forced me to care about something beyond my work life and even shown me that I had something which I thought I'd lost long ago: The capacity to love consistently and be loved in return.
(If that's not too much to expect from a cat).
I leave you with this photo from 27th August 2015, the very first picture I captured of Chill. Please appreciate it - I went through quite a traumatic whizz through my past via a decade of photos to find it.
Hello Nice Cat. See you in 2020.
Vin x
If you're new to Patelograms and like what you've read, you can subscribe by clicking here.
If you're an old hand, thanks as ever for taking the time.
Welcome to the last Patelogram of the year. Of the decade! How was your Christmas Day? I spent it by myself and despite being in the middle of quite a low mood it was perfectly pleasant and I capped it off by watching Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade.
A couple of moments have aged ungraciously but overall, it's still an absolute banger and still contains my favourite edit in movie history (Which is: The hat being put on young Indy's head, match cutting to the hat on older Indy as he raises his head with a smile on his face...thinking on the memory?...and then gets punched in the face. The whole franchise in five seconds). This is the kind of work I've always wanted to make - good, mainstream fare - and it's reinvigorating to connect back to that.
You may or may not know, but no less than Tom Stoppard did an uncredited rewrite job on the script. Not just tinkering around the edges either. There's a great breakdown of what exactly he did here that directly comparing the script to the draft before it. A more detailed breakdown can be found here.
My New Year plans are a little sketchier but there is one tradition I look forward to. Every New Year's Day, just after midnight, I write a note to myself to be opened at the same point in a year's time. I try to (concisely) express how I've felt about the year that's passed and my hopes for the one to come. As the year passes I forget what I wrote and look forward to what message past me had for future me and what future me will think of it.
I'll try doing that with you here in this Patelogram.
OUT WITH THE OLD...
Reflecting on 2019, it feels a little bit like a stutter or a stall. I wrote, I think, less than any year before it. That is, unless you count these newsletters in the mix in which case I've done about par.
There's been a few changes in my life that have forced me to examine both what I'm capable of doing and what I want to do. It's been frustrating and I've had both more and less creative control than ever.
I’ve had friendships that started, intensified, softened and basically ended this year. Yet I feel quite at ease with that. It's been a simple and truthful way of experiencing friendship - right for that moment in life, with no expectation to be beholden to each other forever. I think it's less like it’s losing friends and more like every year there are more people, all over the world, that I’ll be delighted to see again one day.
Seeing everything from the pointy end of the year, it's clear that 2019 has ultimately been good for me. I needed a moment to slow down and reflect. It wasn't entirely on my own terms but helpful nevertheless. Especially when I think of this decade as a whole. There's a neat split in it. Before the back half 2014 and after that.
The first half took me from odd jobs and rapidly aborted career paths to a decision to focus on writing. I was so anxious at the start of that half, 2009-2014, watching my friends get proper jobs and proper relationships and wondering if I was tossing away my life on a pretentious aspiration. But I did feel free and excited and I had some of the best and worst nights of my life in those years. Narrativising it now, it's clear that it was a journey from trying to be adjacent to the arts - in a way that protected myself from ever declaring ambition - to embracing myself as an artist. Which feels wholesome, but the energy and focus it took for me to do that took a toll on my emotional life in a way I'm only now just unpacking and trying to change. It's why when I talk to younger and newer artists that I stress the need to find a balance for yourself early. It's the best training you'll give yourself in fact because it'll ensure you can have a career with some longevity to it.
My entire career as a writer so far has been the story of the second half of the decade. Towards the end of 2014 was when I knew I could make this a full time job, if not just for a little bit. It was the year of my debut plays and my first scraps of interests from television. 2015 to 2016 probably still rank as the most intense years of my life, thanks to the massive breaks of Murdered By My Father and being hired on Doctor Who. I also turned 30, which was an age I never expected to hit and meant I was older than my mum and I found that a strange barrier to pass through. I'd given so much of myself with the hope that someone could at least say I was on the path to doing something I felt I was good at and founding in when I died. And then you're just still there. Ah fuck. Now what?
2017 into 2018 was a bit less of the vertiginous trajectory and more a consolidation. I was working on Riz Ahmed's Englistan project, losing myself in the research for what would eventually become An Adventure and doing draft after draft of Who. I struggled emotionally at this point, particularly in latter part of 2017 which was a break up followed by my grandfather's death followed by putting down one of my newly adopted cats (more on them later). 2018 I've talked about fairly fully at the top of this blog post about how to deal with reviews but the TLDR is that it was a banner year work wise - two plays and an episode of Doctor Who, all of which were difficult pieces of work that needed a lot of research and testing - but the worst year I've had in my head.
And so back to 2019 which was quite light in terms of output but in which I am glad that I spread my wings a bit, expanded into short story and radio play writing, picked up three commissions I'm excited about and spent a bit more time trying to be a better human. So. What's next? And how to make it happen?
Seeing everything from the pointy end of the year, it's clear that 2019 has ultimately been good for me. I needed a moment to slow down and reflect. It wasn't entirely on my own terms but helpful nevertheless. Especially when I think of this decade as a whole. There's a neat split in it. Before the back half 2014 and after that.
The first half took me from odd jobs and rapidly aborted career paths to a decision to focus on writing. I was so anxious at the start of that half, 2009-2014, watching my friends get proper jobs and proper relationships and wondering if I was tossing away my life on a pretentious aspiration. But I did feel free and excited and I had some of the best and worst nights of my life in those years. Narrativising it now, it's clear that it was a journey from trying to be adjacent to the arts - in a way that protected myself from ever declaring ambition - to embracing myself as an artist. Which feels wholesome, but the energy and focus it took for me to do that took a toll on my emotional life in a way I'm only now just unpacking and trying to change. It's why when I talk to younger and newer artists that I stress the need to find a balance for yourself early. It's the best training you'll give yourself in fact because it'll ensure you can have a career with some longevity to it.
My entire career as a writer so far has been the story of the second half of the decade. Towards the end of 2014 was when I knew I could make this a full time job, if not just for a little bit. It was the year of my debut plays and my first scraps of interests from television. 2015 to 2016 probably still rank as the most intense years of my life, thanks to the massive breaks of Murdered By My Father and being hired on Doctor Who. I also turned 30, which was an age I never expected to hit and meant I was older than my mum and I found that a strange barrier to pass through. I'd given so much of myself with the hope that someone could at least say I was on the path to doing something I felt I was good at and founding in when I died. And then you're just still there. Ah fuck. Now what?
2017 into 2018 was a bit less of the vertiginous trajectory and more a consolidation. I was working on Riz Ahmed's Englistan project, losing myself in the research for what would eventually become An Adventure and doing draft after draft of Who. I struggled emotionally at this point, particularly in latter part of 2017 which was a break up followed by my grandfather's death followed by putting down one of my newly adopted cats (more on them later). 2018 I've talked about fairly fully at the top of this blog post about how to deal with reviews but the TLDR is that it was a banner year work wise - two plays and an episode of Doctor Who, all of which were difficult pieces of work that needed a lot of research and testing - but the worst year I've had in my head.
And so back to 2019 which was quite light in terms of output but in which I am glad that I spread my wings a bit, expanded into short story and radio play writing, picked up three commissions I'm excited about and spent a bit more time trying to be a better human. So. What's next? And how to make it happen?
...IN WITH THE NEW
Moving forward, I want to try and foster a lightness in myself. First up, I'll begin with this concept of Ideas Debt which basically is looking at the psychological burden of unfinished projects and how to make peace with it by noting the key elements of the project and then getting rid. I'm going to do this with my script (and blog post!) ideas and unburden my drafts folders.
Next, I've taken myself off Twitter since Christmas Eve and I'll stick to that for a couple of months at least. I had a very bad low recently, as mentioned at at the start, and that state reminds reminds you that the signal to noise ratio on social media is very high. It can also begin to feel a bit too cliquey which I'm trying to push back against in myself but I still have my (locked) Insta account for that. I've already got a calming stillness to my mind and it is nice to wake up and sit with my own thoughts and not the worlds. I have previously tried to limit the time I spent on it, but it would just mean I became excited to be on Twitter and nobody needs that.
This feeds into a larger goal of mine to be a lot less public facing next year. There's a good episode of Ezra Klien's podcast which they just repeated about work as identity and that's very easy to engage with in the arts because of the 'leakiness' of what is work and what is leisure as well as who is a colleague and who is a friend. I recommend giving it a listen before you make your resolutions. Fundamentally, I want to be clearer about the distinctions between joy and work, which will let me feel more fulfilled with both. I don't need to see every show and feel bad about it if I don't. I just need to keep my eyes on my lane.
I'll also be loosening some of the metrics I use to keep myself on track. I talked about this in my early Patelograms and they were great to get me out of a rut but they're beginning to become restrictive. Not dumping them entirely, just slimming down to allow some more flexibility in life and be less beholden to a check list.
Next, I've taken myself off Twitter since Christmas Eve and I'll stick to that for a couple of months at least. I had a very bad low recently, as mentioned at at the start, and that state reminds reminds you that the signal to noise ratio on social media is very high. It can also begin to feel a bit too cliquey which I'm trying to push back against in myself but I still have my (locked) Insta account for that. I've already got a calming stillness to my mind and it is nice to wake up and sit with my own thoughts and not the worlds. I have previously tried to limit the time I spent on it, but it would just mean I became excited to be on Twitter and nobody needs that.
This feeds into a larger goal of mine to be a lot less public facing next year. There's a good episode of Ezra Klien's podcast which they just repeated about work as identity and that's very easy to engage with in the arts because of the 'leakiness' of what is work and what is leisure as well as who is a colleague and who is a friend. I recommend giving it a listen before you make your resolutions. Fundamentally, I want to be clearer about the distinctions between joy and work, which will let me feel more fulfilled with both. I don't need to see every show and feel bad about it if I don't. I just need to keep my eyes on my lane.
I'll also be loosening some of the metrics I use to keep myself on track. I talked about this in my early Patelograms and they were great to get me out of a rut but they're beginning to become restrictive. Not dumping them entirely, just slimming down to allow some more flexibility in life and be less beholden to a check list.
Finally, my next year will begin with a flight to New Zealand (first time in the southern hemisphere!) and with the biggest change of all: My becoming an uncle. I'm not great with being with my family but I am quietly thrilled about this. If it doesn't sound too morbid, it's another way in which my mum will live on - some of her genes expressing themselves in an entirely new being. My sister is one of the best people I know (even if it took me far too long to realise that). I hope to be a good influence on her offspring. The very least I can do is to get in there early and dissuade them from pursuing a life in the arts...
KITTY KORNER
Can I do a round up of the cats over the last decade? I will attempt a brief one. I first met Chill Cat in 2015 in my estate's car park when he ducked out from under a car to say hello. At this point I labelled him 'Nice Cat', for he was just very friendly and miaowy and continued to be so. Pretty Cat I encountered the year after, and it wasn't til 2017 that I met their brother (Hero Cat, RIP) or even knew that they were in fact boys or brothers.
They went from a pleasant, diverting surprise I'd get now and then on my way back home to something I started to crave. If they weren't there, I'd be a little heartbroken. Many a night I would sit in the communal space next to my front door, just thinking, and they'd come along and sit alongside and eventually on me. I was delighted. This became a source of soothing when my brain wouldn't quieten down. Just me in my trackies and hoodies, couple of strange cats tucked alongside me, wondering what I was doing with my life.
I'd often take a walk around the block at night to clear my head before bed. Before long, I noticed that Pretty Cat was following me. I suppose it was an excuse for him to do the rounds of his territory - scratching that bench, rubbing against this tree. Eventually, he figured out the pattern...and where I lived. This meant that whenever I opened my front door, they would slink out of their hiding places and wait patiently for me to begin the rounds. When I was going through the very worst of my depression, this was always a sight that would put a small but meaningful dent in it.
Though I've never owned a pet before, making the instinctive decision to adopt them when their owner sadly died has turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. Though there are only two brothers left, they are a constant source of joy and companionship. They have forced me to care about something beyond my work life and even shown me that I had something which I thought I'd lost long ago: The capacity to love consistently and be loved in return.
(If that's not too much to expect from a cat).
I leave you with this photo from 27th August 2015, the very first picture I captured of Chill. Please appreciate it - I went through quite a traumatic whizz through my past via a decade of photos to find it.
Hello Nice Cat. See you in 2020.
Vin x
If you're new to Patelograms and like what you've read, you can subscribe by clicking here.
If you're an old hand, thanks as ever for taking the time.
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