Bear Faced Bloggery

 A Traveller through Time ... sounds like a great title for a piece from a Specfic writer, doesn't it? Conjuring a mental image of some deliciously Whovian flight of fancy; an exploration of strange worlds with even stranger inhabitants, or a dip into the far reaches of our own history, and the extraordinary voyage of discovery that may be found there. So I'm sorry to have to tell you that today's little mental ramble is going to be far more prosaic than the title might lead you to expect. For we are all, of course, travellers through time - all on a shared journey to one inescapable destination - and what we do with that journey depends on an extraordinarily complex set of factors: ambition, opportunity, character, family background, desire, environment, mental and physical wellbeing, education, luck... the list goes on and on, yet in the words of the old adage, what it really comes down to is how well (or otherwise) we play the cards we are dealt. Sometimes the choices we

It states on my website ( www.kbwillson.com ) that I write an occasional blog. Well, the last time I wrote anything on my blog was over a year ago, so unless I want 'occasional' to become 'annual', I guess it's time I rectified that! As I type I am, like most of the rest of the world, in lockdown, though there are signs that governments are beginning to ease the strictures that we live under, and I just hope this is the right thing to do. Our Prime Minister advises caution while apparently rocketing headlong toward a return to normal which risks undoing all that has been achieved thus far. But hey, what do I know? I'm just a performer who writes. Speaking of which, I can't say that I've found lockdown particularly difficult, aside from the total lack of work (and therefore income). Under normal circumstances, my work tends to be at weekends with the occasional evening, so I am used to spending most days at home, the only real change being the inability t

Sound the trumpets! Hoist the flags! Pop the champagne! My second novel is finished! (Or as finished as it can be, given that the lot of the writer is constantly to edit, tweak, substitute words, rearrange sentences, cut bits and add bits... for goodness sake, why can't we just let it go?) I am well aware, of course, that my first novel is still doing the rounds, trying to find a publisher, but we can't let a little thing like that stop us from forging ahead with other projects, now can we? To give it its due, this current manuscript should rightly be referred to as the first, as the early part of it was written a good many years before its younger sibling, but way back then it was, at 45,000 words, novella length. I sent it to an agent who liked it, but asked for substantial rewrites which I felt I simply did not have the time to do, what with trying to forge a career in the theatre and everything. So it got shelved, something that now, of course, I bitterly regret, as had

Patience is a virtue, they say... and they could well be right, but having just been through an extremely busy period in what for want of a better phrase might be termed my 'day job', I have been unable to do any writing for several weeks and that, as anyone who feels the compulsion to write will appreciate, is a BAD THING. In fact, as I look back over the busy-ness of these past few weeks, I find myself musing on the way in which time evaporates and weeks rocket past, lost amidst the whirlwind of everyday life. All my life I have worked in what might be described as the 'Creative Industries', and as I take a swerve into yet another, i.e. the world of the fledgling writer, it becomes increasingly apparent to me that we who 'create' for a living are held in an almost continual state of anticipation. Once a piece is finished (and I use the term loosely... there is an argument to be had over whether a piece is ever truly completed) we offer it up to whichever pe

Welcome to this, my first attempt at Blogging! To those of you who don't know me, let me introduce myself... my name is Kevin Burke. I have lived with that name all my life, through good and bad, thick and thin. At school it did me no favours,  (though there was also a Pratt in my class, so I'll leave you to ponder on who got the most ribbing) but this inevitably led me to mount a fierce defence of the name whenever it came under fire. There have been several times in my life when I had the chance to ditch the name, but perhaps because of the struggle I'd had with it throughout my formative years, I have always stuck with it. When I fulfilled my ambition of becoming an actor I had the great good fortune to be able to keep my name, even though had there already been a Kevin Burke registered with Equity, the actor's union, I would have been forced to change it. Then, when I moved into the world of entertainment, I passed up the opportunity to take a stage name o