This weekend, I was lucky enough to be in the Southend Improvathon 2026, the seventh year that it has been run and the seventh year that I have taken part.

The improvathon has come to mean an awful lot to me. When I first started learning improvised comedy in 2011, it was to fulfil a promise to a friend who had signed us up on a bit of a whim. In the process, Sam Sexton was dragged along as well. We were both indifferent to it from my recollection.
Through that initial course I met Lee, Bish, Ali, Ross, John, Debbie, Luke, Dan, Haley et al. In subsequent courses, the group grew. All of us with an interest in being creative, being silly and having fun.
Then in 2018, the Southend Improvathon was announced and we were all keen to see what that would entail. 24 hours locked in a function room at a local football club where we made the most fantastic memories and friends.

Over the years, our numbers have grown, the production has become all the more impressive and we have garnered in-jokes the likes of which I have never witnessed elsewhere. This SICU (Southend Improvathon Cinematic Universe) now spans old Hollywood, space, the wild west, the fantasy world of Middle Mirth, high school, magic school and as of this weekend, the shark-infested Shamity Island.

What always surprises me with these shows is the level of talent, grit, determination, sleep deprivation, blood, sweat, tears and bubbles that they require. Each go around the sun, we unlock and level up, we laugh and cry in ways that come to mean everything. It’s a mad thing for a group of adults to do but that is what makes it what it is. To down tools, to forget what makes up the rest of our lives and to get in trouble, go on adventures and fall in love with these fine people is certainly what I needed.

There are very very social events I like to commit to be the Southend Improvathon will always have my heart. Thank you to everyone who made it what it was. In particular, the friends who came along to support, my partner E who packed my lunches and ran interference when I no longer had cognitive function, Ali James for steering this behemoth into dock, Chris, Jonathon and EJK for directing their hearts out. John Oakes for always trusting his feet, Jess and Cat for holding me up and holding me accountable. Matt, Sam and Pip for being incredible scene partners in particular. Jessica, Katy, Chess and everyone else who kept us ticking over and playing nicely. All the musicians who came to provide such a wonderful environment for us. Thank you to Gaz for the photos, Rob and Rhys for all the tech magic. Thank you to Lisa for handing me a tissue when I broke down in tears at the end of it all. Love to EJK for locking eyes with me to tell me everything.
My thanks to my soap buddies, Lottie and Sam, for propping me up and to every single player who stepped out on that stage.

What a mad, wonderful, stupid thing to do. Love you.
I hope to see you next year.

Thank you for asking. Thanks for being patient.

We are about a year out from TCOA being in your grubby, greedy mitts.

In the meantime, I have been working on a rewrite/redraft of what I’m hoping will be the next one out there.

Then today, I got an update from my publisher, with three options of copy/blurb for the book as well as a writer’s questionnaire.

When I mentioned this to my partner, she said; ‘Well that’s perfect, you love talking about yourself.’ She’s not wrong.

I have 35 questions to think about and will take my time on it in the hope I get to talk a lot more about the history that brought this story to life. It all feels a bit fucking real. Hooray!

This week I celebrated my birthday. It wasn’t a banner one so don’t worry if you didn’t message me to wish me your warmest regards. We are saving that for next year. What I did do was take some time with some of my favourite people to enjoy my favourite subject, me.

On Sunday, we went to the arcades on Southend seafront, and spent roughly fifty quid on games, winning tickets that we collectively exchanged for a 5D frog puzzle – the fifth dimension is frog.

Then we went for incredible dim sum at The Pearl Dragon. This is me and my partner by the way, and then two of our other favourite couples who have had the distinct pleasure of seeing me through many highs and lows over the last decade (plus).
We were very well looked after and (for once) nailed the order size. The most joyous part of the evening was the Lazy Susan that we swung in each direction to get our sticky fingers on dumplings, soups and rice dishes, shout “Susan” to give others the heads up before it was sent into motion.
For the first time in my recollection, I got to pick my own birthday cake so a Spiderman cake with a suspiciously placed sparkler was brought out. I love the nostalgia of an icing covered jam sponge. There’s nothing quite like it.

I took Monday off (I’m like Garfield or Brenda Spencer) and we went out for bagels and then to see Hamnet at the cinema. I cried a decent amount and was surprised to discover that William Shakespeare, like me, had a little earring.

On Tuesday, my partner took me to London for Vietnamese food and entertainment, at first courtesy of the insane old women who were seated right next to us (complimentary use of the term insane there) and then a How To masterclass where George Saunders was interviewed by Richard Ayoade.
To be able to step away from the usual dross that people pour in my ear and listen to two very intelligent people talk about writing and culture was a high point of my month. It left me so inspired that I haven’t stopped writing since.

This has been one of the most exciting and exhausting years for me. I celebrated the publication of my book in two different countries, got spun on a Vietnamese coconut boat and learnt to make a passable flat white. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

January

Went to see Dr Strangelove in the West End. Had my book published in Italy. Grew a hideous beard. Went for a delicious high end tasting menu but had to get KFC on the way home. Moved house for the fifth time in five years. Let Dry January continue into Feb.

February

Got tattooed. Went to Oxford for Super Bowl weekend. Took Emily to see Six in the West End. Experienced an amazing use of free will by taking thirty friends to play laser quest. Lost mini golf to Wiggles. Lost my mind to new board games.

March

Got a new sofa (and haven’t got off it since). Took ownership of a cafe. Went to see Off Menu Live (again). Swam a lot. Rediscovered my love for wholesalers.

April

Started a book club. Lost my goddamn mind at Southend’s 48 Hour Improvathon. Worked some shifts at the cafe and met a lot of lovely people.

May

Visited our friends at Sababa. Trip to Cardiff where the highlight was seeing *Thunderbolts. Watched The Trolleyboys smash up The Half Moon. Went camping. Experienced my first gong bath. Co-hosted a hen do.

June

Invested in a walking pad and made it my personality. Wrote a letter to Mel Brooks. Spent a day writing at Metal. Took my married dad friends dancing. Trip to Cardiff where the highlight was a Reuben sandwich. Co-founded the Chippy Tea Preservation Society. Failed to learn to ab roller from standing to laying.

July

Took part in the only organised race I bothered with this year. Lovely trip to Margate to see my boys (The Libertines). Co-hosted a vegan BBQ.

August

Went to Vietnam with my best friend. Watched four films on the plane. Cycled through an organic farm. Had flashbacks in the forest. Ate my first ever banh mi. Learnt to make rice pancakes. Had a suit custom-made. Got an overnight train to Hoi An. Considered giving up everything to live in the mountains.

September

Spent the night on a junk boat in Halong Bay. Flew home. Had a meeting with HarperCollins that may well change my life.

October

Signed a deal that may well change my life. Trip to Cardiff where the highlight was the fish tacos. Got invited to a Springsteen listening party. Spent Halloween explaining who I was.

November

Went to see Jobsworth live. Switched my focus from cardio to weights for bulking season. Celebrated E’s birthday. Had the pan of our childhood.

December

Was the murderer at a murder mystery. Ordered a Weeping Tiger for the table. Attended my first Southend Creatives event. Partied with some yogis. Celebrated Hanukkah. Went to see Oh Yes It Is with the GGs. Finished edits on two books. Celebrated Christmas. Started work on the next book.

Listen, having a few days of respite at the end of this year has meant an awful lot. There’s still a long way to go and a lot of work to do but hey, what a journey.

This month, I released my eighth album, These Cowboy Blues. It’s now avaiable in all the places you get music.

TCB is inspired mostly by a conversation with my good friend TS about what a Paul Schiernecker country album would sound like. What ended up happening is that I filtered my own music through with some cowboy references in the lyrics and little else that could make it a country album. All the same, it was a lot of fun.

This album consists of ten songs, which I’ve spent the last year working on. The underlying message is about recovery and personal growth, continuing to fight your corner and not giving up when things are a little tough.

I make music for the sole purpose of enjoying the process of doing it. That’s an unusual thing (for me at least). It’s a catalogue of a time and a recognition of where I am at. Having self recorded and released a number of them now, that’s how I see this. It’s an opportunity for me to share where I am at and look to spread a smile every once in a while.

Good evening.

A week ago, I announced the news across social media but it’s only here that I’ll give you the full details for those who are nosey enough to continue.

After years of graft, and I’ll get into that, I have signed a publishing deal with HarperCollins for the release of The Counterfeiter of Auschwitz.

If this was an award-winning biopic, we would open in a sepia-toned flashback.
A young Paul Schiernecker sits at the family computer, staring intently at the dirty clunky keys and beginning a story.
He prints it out on perforated paper and stares at what he has created.

For as long as I can remember, I have written. To paraphrase Rob Auton; I’m here for the human experience. I’ll sit back at parties and watch other people. It’s been both a strength and a weakness, almost imagining that all these flawed characters are my own creations and that I can squeeze something true and creative out of them. When I was young, I’d write plays for my brothers to perform with me. Sometimes I’d ask them to commit these to cassette tape. Other times, I’d ask if they could perform them in front of our parents. The most memorable of these being my reimagining of Grease: The Musical (including oversized bomber jackets and choreography to die for).

At school, I read everything. I was one of those kids who was sent into the year group above to read from their bookshelves when I’d devoured everything offered for my peers. As they say, the best writers are avid readers.

I studied English for as long as I could. In a conversation with my college tutor (the wonderfully deranged Elsa Harwood), she begged me not to study Law at university because my talents were in writing. Nevertheless, I persisted. I was a bad university student but it did give me three years where I could develop some good friends and some bad habits. I’d stay up late writing songs, scripts and stories only to miss 9am lectures. I was also drunk, a lot. I smoked like a chimney and was a performative male before the term had really emerged. Still, I was writing.

When I graduated, I joined forces with two friends and we wrote and filmed our first feature film, which is one of two IMDB credits to my name to this day. It didn’t cause the impact we expected but scratched an itch I had.

Then, I got a job and tried to be a functioning human. I worked in data entry and got the nickname “Spider Fingers” from my brilliant manager, Paula, because I typed at such a rate that… my fingers looked like spiders.

Once I had developed into something that felt like a career, my focus was drawn back to writing again. The problem was that I couldn’t work out how to finish a story without the help of a tutor or any definition of it. Through therapy, I talked about my perfectionism (since determined to be undiagnosed OCD) and fear of completing anything for fear of it being done. Since then, I’ve not been able to stop.

I wrote my first novel, Situation One, in a year. I wrote the next one, Visions of Violet, in a month. Situation One was a Bret Easton Ellis rip off about my first year of university, told from multiple perspectives. Visions of Violet had a very bizarre ending which was far too close to the twist in the Robert Pattinson film Remember Me. It wasn’t good but I was writing.

I wrote Visions during the first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that I took part in. For all the trash developments that have emerged about that organisation, it did me well for a decade, ensuring that I was putting together a draft and then spending time after getting it into a presentable state and sending it out to agents.

Back then, you had to print out the first three chapters and post them to agents. Then, you’d wait three months and they’d post them back to you with a decline response that was often photocopied with your name scrawled at the top. I have kept every one of those rejection letters, knowing that they would be funny in time.

In 2020, when the world got flip turned upside down, I recognised that it was an opportunity for me to write. I was living alone in a small top floor flat, only really communicating with people on Friday nights when someone would organise a quiz. I was running 5km every day and drinking a bottle of wine (at least every night). It was in these circumstances that I started work on what I called The Counterfeiter of Auschwitz. In its original iteration, there was no framing device and the deaths of characters were at odds with what I now recognise as being good plotting. In addition, I stuck vehemently to historical fact, often including long paragraphs on the background, spending days researching the warring factions and the camps. My search history for the period was worrying.
It felt different to anything I had written before and I was reading a lot of Vonnegut at the time, which definitely helped. The tone of my protagonist, Georg, is my favourite thing about the book, based on my great grandfather’s way of holding court when we visited his residential care home.

By September, I had not only written but had edited a manuscript. I sent it out to ten agents, picked based on their specific asks. Fortunately, these submissions were now made by email. Within two days, I had a request for the full manuscript. Using this as leverage, I emailed the other agents and told them I’d had a request for a full. I had six requests for the full. In ten years of writing and submitting, this had never happened. Something was different about this story. I needed to write all of those stories to get to a point where I could tell this in the correct way.

By January 2021, I was in conversation with the gentleman who would eventually become my agent. We talked about a lot of reference points and potential changes but what really got me was that he understood what I was trying to do. He got the tone. He loved Georg!

A year later, I signed to my agency. It felt monumental. It still does. I am amongst fantastic company with them. Everyone I have spoken to and dealt with there has shown me such care and attention. It’s where I should be.

After a lot of edits, we got a pack together and my agent sent it out to editors at various publishing houses. This was 2023. I know because we had been on a date to see The Whale and were in the pub when he called me to discuss it.

From there, time moved slow and fast.

A publisher in Italy picked it up first. They offered an advance. I’m not going to be crass by talking numbers but I felt like I was getting away with something. The publisher ended up taking the Spanish release when they expanded their business.

Then the rights in both Slovenia and Romania went. Again, amazing. Still, my mother kept asking when she could read it in English.

In April 2025, I received a call from my agent to say that it looked like a deal was on the table.

In October, I had a lovely call with the person who is now my editor at HarperCollins. She was so complimentary and again, seemed to get what I was trying to do. I cried on the call. This is very much the dream coming true.

Because I know you’ll ask, it’s currently scheduled for release in Spring 2027. There are still edits to do and I am learning so much as we go. It’s so exciting. I am so grateful to the team behind me.

In therapy, I always talked about the realisation that Matt Damon had on winning an Oscar, and how outside recognition doesn’t match internal self worth.
I am so proud of where I am at and what I have achieved. It wouldn’t be possible without the incredible support system I’ve had and continue to have. The internal self worth is self worthing. That doesn’t mean you can stop congratulating me.

One of the many joys of being a child of divorce is that there seems to be an endless pile of shit in both my parents houses that they want out of their possession but not out of our collective possession. As the eldest child, keeping a well-stocked Schiernecker Museum has fallen to me.

An interesting item recently came into my possession though, amongst the tchotchkes and knick-knacks. An old 78 record from Pier Kiosks with my paternal grandmother’s name on it as well as the words “April Showers”. A bit of research showed that this was a remarkable item from the days when you could go into a recording booth and cover a well known song. In this case, April Showers by Al Jolson. If you’ve read Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, you’ll have a better visual of it being used as a plot device.

As a writer, the overly romanticised version of events was that I had stumbled across the only audio recording of my grandmother, Daphne. Aside from grainy VHS recordings, I don’t have anything. She passed away when I was eleven, before she was ever able to see the men that me and my brothers would grow into. I still see her in the faces of little old ladies, massive glasses balanced on her nose, always in a shawl.

I tried to play the 78 on my record player, the saddest record player in the world. I’ve previously written about that. The needle wouldn’t reach. I tried mounting it and still nothing. I’ve shlepped that record around various local stores but they couldn’t play it. Eventually, I found a lovely man who said he could digitise whatever was on the record. I carefully wrapped it up, posted it and waited.

This week, I got the record back with a note. There was nothing on the acetate aside from the piano backing track of April Showers.
I’m left with more questions than answers.

How is that possible?

Why would Daphne have kept a record that, presumably, didn’t take? She was a deeply sentimental woman so maybe just the memory of going to the recording booth was enough for her. Perhaps she was too shy to sing.

What other disappointing remnants of personal history are at my disposal?

I did warn you with the title. Deeply unsatisfying ending.

If you want an idea of what it feels like to try and organise my life right now, here is a perfect example.

My partner arranged a Christmas party at her cafe. I wrote “Christmas Party” in my diary.

A few weeks later, some old school friends of mine (who are all dads and therefore notoriously difficult to pin down for a good time) wanted to arrange a Christmas get-together. I went to write it in my diary, saw that the date said “Christmas Party” and assumed I had somehow predicted it.
In truth, I don’t know what I thought had happened. I was just pleased I didn’t need to put anything additional in my diary.

A few weeks go by. I get invited to a Christmas party for creatives, freelancers, lovies, you know the sorts. I go to write it in my diary. My diary already says “Christmas Party”. Still, nothing about this triggers as being odd to me. I accept the invitation and tell them I will be there.

I’m now in a situation where I have made plans with three different groups of people for, in case it wasn’t very obvious, the same date in December.

I am doing my best to be organised but even that can sometimes fall to pieces.

While I have been told it makes me look like a Facebook Mum saying “too many snakes xx” and waiting for the deluge of people to ask “what’s up, hun?” only for me to say “I’lll DM you, babes”, I have some big news. News so big that I’m not going to talk about it until the ink is dry. Ink dries fast in 2025 right?

At the start of this year, E and I declared that it would be our year. It’s seen a lot of mad shit happen including the publication of my novel in Italy and Spain and her opening her first business.

Now, some news has come along that absolutely blindsided me. I’m going to dangle that possible carrot in front of you all for a little longer. Just know, I’m a very happy boy.