My first novel — where I learned what it takes to write a novel, and where I discovered that it’s as simple as having the discipline to start writing and to keep on writing until you’ve finished a first draft. When you’ve done that, your novel exists. And everything beyond that is simply the process of making your novel better.

You start out here. You go there, nudged by something too powerful to resist. At some point, you’re pulled back, by something else too powerful to ignore. The place you left behind may be the same when you return to it, or it might be subtly or dramatically different. The same thing goes for you, too. (Let’s write about that.)

The title is a massive spoiler for the end of the show, which could have put everybody off needing to watch it. In practice, it whetted people’s appetite for the joyous appearance of a real live dog onstage, being fussed over by a loving LGBTQ+ couple — who kissed, more than once, in a room full of children, without the world spinning off its axis.

There’s a story lurking inside everything. Anything can be the gateway to a story, if only you’re prepared to look. That certainly holds true for a seemingly unimportant piece of paper showing four different meal plans for a man on the first four days of a very special week-long trip. There’s a lot more to it than peaches and bacon squares, that’s for sure.

If you could ask me for anything you wanted — and I could guarantee you'd get what you wanted — and all I asked of you in exchange was one modest gesture of personal self-sacrifice — something you could learn to live without — would you be tempted? Novel #4 charts the discovery of a cosmic power in the basement of an Oslo office building.

Novel #3, investigating a (fictional) spate of 11th Century child disappearances and a stylistic experiment with the English language before and after the Norman Conquest. Another exploration of how wonderful and how awful men can be — as well as the inadequacy of religion and how it always lets people down right when they lean on it most.

A queer sci-fi romance, set on two planets which may or may not be about to crash into each other. Unashamedly and unapologetically influenced by Ursula K. Le Guin, Novel #2 explores planetary and political systems — the collision course of ideas and ideologies — and the powerful impact of two bodies (heavenly ones and human ones) coming together.

Ghosts, guilt and gulping fish — a spooky short story for (close to) Christmas, set in Moseley Park and Pool at the height of midsummer, written for National Literacy Trust's Haunted Birmingham campaign.

A piece commissioned by Catherine O'Flynn and Liz Berry for their neon pink protest publication, which saw 35 writers (me included) each tasked with visiting one of Birmingham's threatened local libraries and pointing out the obvious fact that they're an essential resource, not an expendable one.

An exhibition built around letters of support sent to a primary school at the centre of a storm around if, how and when children should learn about relationships and respect, about sex and sexuality — and an object lesson about a community riven by pride and prejudice (and not in the Jane Austen sense.)

Through chair-mounted speakers around a six-metre circle of living grass, twelve older people told the moving, funny and humbling stories of their experiences living through the COVID pandemic — from moments of despair to the occasional cheeky hook-up — celebrating the power of hope and taking pleasure in small things.

Two companion pieces written to accompany a Zoom production of Caryl Churchill’s Bluebeard’s Friends. A panicked curator tries to wrangle the monstrous egos of conceptual artists in Bluebeard’s Art Club — and a frazzled director grapples with #MeToo and feisty Black Country feminism in Bluebeard’s On The Radio.

Two bites of the Orwell apple, one scuppered by COVID in Tech Week and one marking a defiant post-pandemic return to live performance. Same set, different actors, eighteen months apart — a permanently timely tale of who and what is considered expendable as the pigs make their unstoppable shift to the far right.

An alternative comedy commentary on the iconic prehistoric disaster movie by its true star — the T-Rex herself. Designed as a listen-along experience for home viewing, the dino diva spills the tea on her co-stars’ acting choices, racy off-camera affairs and having to gulp down goats when you’re a committed vegetarian.

What better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing than by putting on a nine-day cross-artform festival featuring 23 new commissions and with an immersive mid-scale dining experience as its centrepiece — all timed to start the very second the rocket took off and to end the very second the landing module splashed down in the Pacific?

MoonFest’s live literature experiment invited the public to contribute visions for the future, out of which I wrote a collection of nine short stories — including the dark underbelly of mushroom farms, sex-positive anarchists flying off to outlying stars, and bootleg tapes of banned TV shows where little kids enjoy a bit of ultra-violence.

A trip back to a seemingly haunted house in 1980s Derby was never going to be a straightforward retelling of the story of our lives. This award-winning theatrical wolf in sheep’s clothing pulled the wool over the eyes of audiences right across the UK, ensuring no-one ever looked at a KitKat or an innocent game of Guess Who? in quite the same way ever again.

Jake and Will Grimm spend a long dark night telling each other scary stories when their pre-paid electricity runs out. But the scariest thing of all is nothing to do with deluded werewolves, wicked stepchildren or narcissistic AI assistants, and everything to do with the horrors of the workplace and the question of precisely what is in Will’s bag…

An attempt to carve out a whole new sub-genre, the souvlaki Western. I freely borrowed from Sergio Leone for this saga of bitter rivalry between Greek and Turkish chip shop owners, exacerbated by a Bulgarian migrant playing both sides off against each other. I treated audience members at the one and only sharing to complimentary cones of Black Country orange chips.

Two stints as Writer-in-Residence with the Tasmanian supremos and their tiny travelling town, where visitors place figures in an ever-evolving landscape before swinging by the newspaper office to share the breaking news. The most rapid of rapid-response writing gigs — complete with pink toga for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Roman version.

The media thought it was an April Fool, but this project was absolutely no joke — a meditation on class and culture which translated sections of Hamlet into Black Country dialect before we filmed them on the mean streets of Cradley Heath, resulting in a web series which has received over 250,000 views.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s tales which inspired Akira Kurosawa’s Rashōmon formed the basis for a promenade piece around the book rotunda of the Library of Birmingham — a winding journey up and down travelators and along normally inaccessible balconies, perfect for telling a story of menace, marriage and murder.

The climax of Little Earthquake’s yearlong Young Producers project, where 100 Black Country primary school children voted for and then collaborated on this semi-musical adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, helping to appoint the creative team and leading the marketing campaign before hosting the show on tour in their very own school halls.

Poe’s story of murder in the dark revved up as a thrilling live Foley experience, with an almost wordless, entirely bloodless eight-minute dismemberment sequence conjured up with mime, manipulated sound and a whole greengrocery’s worth of fruit and vegetables.

A theatrical treasure hunt — complete with clues hidden in bags of popcorn and candyfloss, and a secret coded message on the base of a flock of Hook-A-Ducks — climaxing in an exclusive vaudeville show from Professor Harry and from Tuppence Change, the Living Half Lady with her repertoire of saucy songs.

When a Norwegian choreographer’s imagination meets Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, you get this — an international living library where books are committed to memory, ready and waiting for visitors to meet and read them. My journey memorising J G Ballard’s Crash has (so far) taken me from Birmingham to London, Brussels, Kortrijk, Oslo and Helsinki.

Four interwoven strands spanning four centuries in this bilingual tale of lunar landings and lycanthropy, the birth of cinema and the miracle of conception.

A 21st birthday party for Andy, struggling with an overprotective mother, an absent father whose presence still looms large, and a coven of cultists eager for him to come of age and fulfil his diabolical destiny. Rosemary’s Baby repackaged as a cupcake-fuelled, candle-blowing intervention for Andy and his audience to take charge of their own fate.

Celebrating the centenary of the first public radio broadcast, I trimmed down and perked up Oscar Wilde’s Salome as a play for voices staged live in a pitch-black auditorium, complete with Foley sound, songs by Dusty Springfield and Julio Iglesias, and a reading of that day’s Shipping Forecast.

Chekhov’s Three Sisters, chopped down to 75 minutes and populated with an ensemble of puppet and human actors, turning the spotlight onto the sister-in-law and showing how richly the snobby siblings deserve everything she dishes out to them.

In terms of having fun with language at the script level, finding out what works and what doesn’t in a rehearsal room and especially on stage, I couldn’t have asked for a better, steeper, more explosive learning curve than this. (The 2006 premiere had to be cancelled after rain leaked into the venue control room and the lighting board blew up when we switched it on.)

Poe as a jumping-off point for a sweet, sad romance, complete with live onstage bursting out of a grave (with a spectacular shower of soil, gathered from mole hills for the perfect crumbly texture), a (fake) hamster in a tiny coffin, and a clanging climax of brass bells ransacked from car boot sales across the Midlands.

Or, The Sex Plays, as they were often called at the time and since — all written during my years taking part in Transmissions, Birmingham REP’s vanished and much-missed programme for young writers. The germ of the first play I ever wrote, Asgård and Vanaheim, would still make for great drama even now: “what would happen if two sex addicts fell in love?”