It's 11:59, and I am fresh (if fresh is the word) from spending twelve hours of my life in the Moser Theatre. On the plus side, it has a small amount of natural lighting. On the negative, it's an underground squash court, on one of the sunniest days of the year. And a bunch of angry middle-aged women think I've double-booked over their ballet class. Right now I don't care about the ballet class. I don't care about anything - my work, my sleep, my social interactions - other than Turn Again Lane, the musical I have been directing for the past four weeks; a script in whose success I have an almost obsessional vested interest, because it was written by me.

Those four weeks have required to me to indulge in a frankly embarrassing amount of self-publicity, to which this article is no exception. Some background, then: Turn Again Lane is a new musical, set in Oxford, with script and lyrics by myself and music by St Edmund Hall's Matt Kennedy, a Sideshow Bob-haired polymath whose soothing and intuitive understanding of directions like 'make it sound like Hey Big Spender' and 'I want the trumpet to go all fuzzy' have pulled the production (and specifically, myself) through more potential breakdowns than I can count. It tells the story of two Oxford students, Chris and Louise, who meet and form a tentative relationship among the detritus of books, banter and terrible romantic choices that constitute much of my experience of the modern city.

I say 'my experience' advisedly; a recurring question in the rehearsal process has been 'what would Richard O'Brien do?' Thespionage calls the script my autobiography, and the lead actor Jack Hackett's tendency to imitate my walk and laugh have become a nuisance at best. Jack's convinced he's playing me; I'm not so sure. Certainly the script taps into a shared frame of reference that's highly filtered through personal experience, but 80% of it didn't happen and most of the dialogue was never said; I'm not that funny out loud, and I don't burst into song much, either.

Where this becomes an issue with a script like this is when the inspiration for characters comes from amalgamations of real individuals; some, I'm hoping won't spot themselves, whereas others are too clearly referenced for me to avoid all but the most hand-wringing apology - wish me luck, reader. (And if you think you're one of the original hot girls in the EFL, as described in our marketing video, you're probably right - and hi, I don't think we've met.)

Minor crises, such as telling one actress I'd adapted a character to suit her personality and describing the same character as 'a drunken slag' have also - I hope - been averted. As with any casting and characterisation process, there's a mix of knowing exaggeration of personal traits and the free play of imagination that all of the cast are capable of; Jack Munnelly as Neil may not have the' massive lion penis' his character boasts of, but personally by this point I believe him.

Undoubtedly the script is personal, but my hope is that it will be personal to a number of others, while eschewing as much as possible the potential for what one friend described as an 'Oxbridge dry-wank.' By the fifth redraft, every time I saw a line that reminded me of the Oxymoron's 'RAD CAM!' cartoons I moved faster to delete it than Jonnie McAloon at a speed-dating evening. I'm not sure how much valency the production has outside of its original context - having first conceived it for an Oxide radio serial, it's fair to say I didn't have huge audiences in mind, though they would be lovely - but I'm banking that the sense of familiarity it aspires to engender will breed comedy rather than contempt.

I thought my love-hate relationship with the city, the university, and its inhabitants, was worth writing about because it's something I hope a lot of our audience this week will share; I also wanted to write songs about hot girls and pirates. Joking aside, I'm really proud of what our production has achieved and I'm looking forward to the first night with a mixture of abject fear and nervous excitement. It's at the Moser Theatre, in Wadham, at 7:30. Tickets can be booked at turnagainlane@gmail.com. I'm off for a maximum of 6 hours sleep. I'm hoping to see you there.