#open-mike

New blog post: Making a Move.

Every month, I organise an open-mike night called Hotchpotch for writers to read their work in front of an audience. For the last couple of years, we’ve been using a bar called the Tinsmith, who took us in when a previous venue closed. We’re indebted to them for allowing our group to…

New blog post: How The Live Scene is Doing.

This entry serves as a kind of companion piece to last week, where I talked about still being able to hold the open-mike night Hotchpotch. It did indeed go ahead, but with substantially reduced attendance. On any other night, we can normally welcome upwards of 30 people in the room, with more than half of the attendees taking a turn on stage. But last week, we saw less than ten readers. To be…

New blog post: Cleaning Up This Town.

Regular readers will know that I run Hotchpotch, an open-mike night for writers rather than musicians. Over the last 18 months, we’ve been holding it online and experimenting with different formats. Last week, it was confirmed that we were able to go back to our previous venue. For the foreseeable future, however, it won’t be as simple as just turning up with a microphone and some poetry. The…

New blog post: Making Trade-Offs to Keep an Event Running. I know I normally go for snappy titles, but I couldn't find a way to condense this one.

Yesterday saw another edition of Hotchpotch Presents… on Zoom. We had a marvellous time, and with a relatively small group, so it felt more intimate. This format is based upon the in-person writers’ open-mike night I would otherwise run, simply called Hotchpotch, with the difference that the line-up is decided in advance, rather than improvised on the night. In my own experience, our…

New blog post: Where We Go from Here.

Further to last week’s entry about our Hotchpotch venue, I’m pleased to report we’ve at least found a stopgap venue for July. I was out of Dundee at the time, so a big thanks go to our core group of regulars for helping me to take swift action.

As we look to August, we need to find somewhere that’s quiet enough to hear unaccompanied speech and that can host the group in the long term. Our old…

New blog post: Venues.

I often speak about Hotchpotch on this blog. This is an open-mike night I run, with an ethos of no judgement and no criticism.

Yesterday, we heard that the venue we use is closing down, so we currently have nowhere to hold our next session, scheduled for Monday 15 July.

A few of the regulars are working on a stopgap venue, and we hope a permanent place can be found for August. We’ve also…

New blog post: Two In a Room.

Last week, I was working in Birmingham, so I took the opportunity to see the TV writer John Osborne in Wolverhampton. The Arena Theatre wasn’t busy when I entered, but I didn’t expect to be one of just two people in the audience.

It must have felt frustrating for Osborne, especially as he plans to take the show on tour, but he didn’t let it show as he took the microphone. He was there to promote…

New blog post: When to Stop; When to Start.

In April, I began to redraft a novel that I originally wrote in 2011. In the intervening years, I’ve learnt a lot more about the principles of structure and how to raise the stakes in a narrative, so I was pleased with the way the redraft was turning out.

By Tom Murphy VII [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.0 (