Below is a precis of five stage play scripts I'm working on, plus links if you'd like to read them. They are all very much in the drafting phase, some very early at that. I'm sharing them mostly because the act of writing is intensely private and shrouded in mystery; as a writer, I feel it helps me to see how other writers work. Seeing the finished piece distracts from the truth of the damned difficult work behind.

THE SCRIPTS

Confessionals

A Catholic priest with a secret is forced to confront the reality of his situation when two figures from the past crash back into his life.

Confessionals has been fully drafted twice; you can read the second draft in full here.

Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet

A young homeless man thinks he sees another do a miracle and considers how he might use this mysterious power for his own ends.

My notes and script for Jesus' Blood ..., including the inspiration for the title, are here).

The Diet of Worms

A repressed and passive aggressive family are forced to air their dirty laundry for the first time when their estranged daughter returns with an ultimatum, a new Irish boyfriend, and a baby on the way ...

This script is now my primary focus; you can keep up with the draft here.

John Rambo's Nipples

Octogenarians Judith and Olive while away their days in a retirement home watching 80s action films, until a faded, alcoholic and thrice-divorced Irish country star becomes the latest resident and changes everything.

See here for the work so far.

Notes Following A Hanging

A man comes home to find his wife in the middle of hanging herself and saves her life, but since the event, she simply won't talk about it.

So far, I've got one scene and a rough outline, here.

A note on formatting

Scripts can be tedious to format. Having zipped between a lot of apps (a favourite form of procrastination of mine) I settled on using Fountain, a plaintext markup language similar to Markdown. I've long used markdown because it's highly-portable and allows one to use stripped-back text editors to minimise distractibility but allow for formatting. I've decided to use a hybrid of Markdown and Fountain for my editing, which is what you'll see in the live drafts, because:

• Markdown is more flexible; headings, for example, help me visualise the overall outline
• Fountain files can't be read by some editors, but most can read Markdown. This includes Obsidian, whose Publish service makes it easy to host my draft, because it updates automatically. When I come to redraft the script properly, I only need make a few changes to make it readable by a fountain-based editor. See Writing tools for more in this regard.