Events, dear girl, events

I know, I know, I say I'm going to update more regularly and then I vanish for a fortnight. The wireless card in the increasingly battered laptop I've been toting around since 2009 has started, HAL-like, to emit a series of increasingly disordered commands before it finishes up with an off-key rendition of 'Daisy', so I can at most get on-line for five minutes before the thing seizes up. I *could* have updated from my phone and if I were on the move I would have (what's the point of having a snazzy stylus-thing attached to it otherwise?) but using the phone to file when I'm in the house just seems annoying somehow. Call me old-fashioned but I prefer the feel of keys under my fingers. Even if, as now, I'm having to file from Newcastle Central Library, which has its own internet issues but at least allows me to get on here from something on which I can actually type. I'm assured I can buy some kind of device at maplin's which'll restore the laptop to full working order and I'm gonna do that in due course but for now. here we are. Here is not where I'm going to be later this month. I'm doing two major gigs in November, Forked in Plymouth, which I'm really looking forward to because it means I get to perform on the same bill as Joelle Taylor, and Jawdance in London which I'm looking forward to because, well, it's Jawdance. I did the open mike there once, back in, I think, 2011, and it was an amazing night - the first night when I got to see Anna Chen perform (thus inaugurating the continuing tradition of me using every opportunity I get to try and convince North East promoters, thus far unsuccessfully it has to be said, to book her for an event up here), and the first time I saw the film of Innua Ellams' poem 'Candy-coloured Unicorns and Converse All-Stars', which was, in a somewhat indirect way, an influence on my own film, 'Letter to a A Minnesota Prison'. Which is, coincidentally, also being shown in Plymouth this month but at a Forked Special on Monday, not the same night I perform there. But get to it if you can because, as well as my own film, all the other films are amazing as well. On a personal level the film I'm most jealous of is Deborah Stevenson's, mainly because it opens with a long tracking shot with no words over it, whereas me, Degna Stone and Laura Degnan were essentially hacking 'Letter...' to pieces in session after session to make the whole thing fit the running time. Silence? Atmosphere? Luxury! One day I probably ought to write up a full account of the process of putting that film together, a process which involved a lot of meetings, some strange experiences in London, a walk-on appearance by everybody's favourite money-grubbing American transphobe and, at one point, me spending entirely more time than I would have wished to hanging around Peterlee Bus Station. One day, yes, but this is not that day. Today is basically about me saying come and see me in London or Plymouth if you can, the gigs'll be mint. So, y'know, that thing that I mentioned in that previous sentence there, do it. Please? Thanks.