As I have no work to do until the first of January apart from the podcast, I have started to kick my heels and play about with some ideas that may not see the light of day until 2016 if they ever come to anything at all. My obsession (I prefer ‘interest’) with A Christmas Carol has led me to start writing a new version of the story with a modern day slant. The story has been re-made and tweaked into several different variations on the concept; Scrooged being the most successful but also included in the canon are such things as Ebenezer, a western starring Jack Palance, An American Christmas Carol starring Henry Winkler in a story set in depression era New York, and terrible TV movies like A Carol Christmas. It isn’t something that you can do in a totally fresh way (although my short story Bowie Day takes the basic rule and runs away with it) as you still need the basic bullet points of meanness set up, ghost visits, and redemption.

I have far too many projects on the go in 2015 to even consider this at the moment so it will sit in my drawer of unfinished ideas (Drawer of Unfinished Ideas is the title of my autobiography in my worst nightmares) until such time as I can do something with it. Perhaps in quiet moments throughout the year I will keep returning to it and adding bits before putting it away again. Obviously I don’t want to give too much away but I am taking the story apart and fixating on the time travel aspect of it in a way that hopefully won’t fuck it up completely. To properly do justice to my idea I will have to devote all of my time to it which of course is impossible as I will first need to make lots of notes regarding character set up and situations, this will need to involve Post-It notes all over the walls and pages of notes.

As an early Christmas present to myself I have bought myself another pile of blank CDs to move some stuff onto and place in my archive. This was mainly the podcast and the American radio show as they fit on the disks without having to edit them as I will need to do with the radio editions of The Sunday Alternative. After this I managed to do a little bit of writing for some of the things that I hope will be moving forward next year so at least I have done something useful today.

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