Hi, I’m Tom and I’m a Blog Virgin. With these well chosen words I welcome you to my first ever blog post. And if you begin to wonder what the hell I’m talking about at any stage in the next few lines, please be assured that I’m feeling the same way. Just be gentle with me. I’m a virgin.

I’m a fan of reading other writers’ blogs but I’ve often wondered: “where do they get the time?”. And now as I fire my very first missile into the blogosphere I think I may have cracked the conundrum. Writer’s write blogs because they’re doing what writers do best: Procrastination.

Wasting time, faffing (not sure of the correct spelling there), daydreaming, doodling and even cleaning – these are a writers’ favourite things. And writing a blog sure beats cleaning the bog, hands down.

And so, having wasted your time and mine with that preamble down to really meaty stuff… ooh that cloud looks like an elephant… Sorry! Down to the meaty stuff, the writerly stuff, the where I’m at and what’s going down stuff.

Well… I am in the final stages of the final draft of a play called “The Nose” for The Performance Corporation. It’s an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s wonderful short story of the same name. Jo Mangan and I had been searching around for adaptable material, having had such fun adapting Candide for the stage from the novel by Voltaire. And when we found The Nose it really appealed to both our warped sensibilities.

Published in 1836, The Nose is the everyday tale of Major Kovalyov, an ambitious civil servant whose nose disappears, leaving his face “as flat and as smooth as a pancake”. It doesn’t end there, “The Nose” has ideas well above his station and re-appears on the streets of St Petersburg posing as a higher-ranking civil servant. What ensues is the Major’s increasingly desperate efforts to win back his nose. Think of it as a funny version of Face-Off… except with a nose in the Travolta role, or should that be Nic Cage as the nose? I’m confused. You are too? That means it’s time for me to sign off from my very first blog. I have lost my blog-ginity, I have been de-flowered, I think I love you… Call me?