I finally got round to finishing my blog post for Seren Books about my time in Paris this year. If you'd like to read this feature, it is still the latest post on the Seren blog:
http://www.serenbooks.com/blog/in-hemingways-footsteps-jaki-mccarricks-tells-us-about-her-summer-in-paris
Just as I was getting back to work on my novel, I suddenly thought of a new idea for a TV series (as you do). I am calling the project X TOWN and have just submitted the pitch for this to my agent. The piece follows the lives of a bunch of people living in a border town in Ireland and sees how they have weathered five years of recession. (A logline for the piece could be Pure Mule meets The Ice Storm.) These folk are 'the left behind' and some of their lives have been wrecked by the bust - in many, often quite subtle ways. I look at the new gender imbalance in X TOWN (title comes from the Xerox sign as you enter the town of Dundalk from the Inner Relief Bypass), a result of the 'male drain' - byproduct of the recession - with husbands and boyfriends leaving for Canada and London (to find work in construction and subsidiary industries etc), and how this has impacted upon life for those who have stayed. My main characters are mostly women, with my chief protagonist a woman who returns home from working in London to find her husband has been having an affair. In X TOWN I explore the strangely sexual climate of recession. In my research for my play Belfast Girls I discovered an interesting statistic: during the Famine the 'bastardy' rates in Ireland (horrible term for levels of illegitimate births) went up 180%. So, it seems that during hard times people have a lot more sex (an evolutionary trick perhaps?). And this is explored (thoroughly!) in my new drama. So I will keep you all up to speed with the progress of X TOWN.
I am also hoping to finish my play Bohemians in the next couple of months so there may be some readings of this early next year. And without saying too much here, in case some of you are interested - Belfast Girls is getting its American Premiere in Chicago next year. A whole three-week run. I intend to be there for at least a fortnight, hopefully with my significant other. I have never been to Chicago before and I simply cannot wait!
More soon about the novel.
http://www.serenbooks.com/blog/in-hemingways-footsteps-jaki-mccarricks-tells-us-about-her-summer-in-paris
Just as I was getting back to work on my novel, I suddenly thought of a new idea for a TV series (as you do). I am calling the project X TOWN and have just submitted the pitch for this to my agent. The piece follows the lives of a bunch of people living in a border town in Ireland and sees how they have weathered five years of recession. (A logline for the piece could be Pure Mule meets The Ice Storm.) These folk are 'the left behind' and some of their lives have been wrecked by the bust - in many, often quite subtle ways. I look at the new gender imbalance in X TOWN (title comes from the Xerox sign as you enter the town of Dundalk from the Inner Relief Bypass), a result of the 'male drain' - byproduct of the recession - with husbands and boyfriends leaving for Canada and London (to find work in construction and subsidiary industries etc), and how this has impacted upon life for those who have stayed. My main characters are mostly women, with my chief protagonist a woman who returns home from working in London to find her husband has been having an affair. In X TOWN I explore the strangely sexual climate of recession. In my research for my play Belfast Girls I discovered an interesting statistic: during the Famine the 'bastardy' rates in Ireland (horrible term for levels of illegitimate births) went up 180%. So, it seems that during hard times people have a lot more sex (an evolutionary trick perhaps?). And this is explored (thoroughly!) in my new drama. So I will keep you all up to speed with the progress of X TOWN.
I am also hoping to finish my play Bohemians in the next couple of months so there may be some readings of this early next year. And without saying too much here, in case some of you are interested - Belfast Girls is getting its American Premiere in Chicago next year. A whole three-week run. I intend to be there for at least a fortnight, hopefully with my significant other. I have never been to Chicago before and I simply cannot wait!
More soon about the novel.
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