Monday, May 30, 2011

Perfect storm of relaxation

It's Memorial Day, and I'm blissfully enjoying the vestiges of a fairly perfect weekend. Juliet and I have been up in Mount Shasta, spending time with her mom and her mom's partner, Mark. It's been a mix of eating far too well and too frequently, relaxing with books, taking walks downtown and in Ashland, writing, exploring the local caves, visiting with locals and extended family, and introducing everyone to the card game Citadels.

I feel like I've been soaking in a hot tub since Friday morning.

Granted, the drive back to Oakland may undo all this relaxed inner harmony, but I'm hoping not.

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Here's a few updates for the curious. In two weeks there will be public reading of two of my plays, courtesy of Triple Shot Productions. On Friday, June 10th, we'll be reading my new farce, "Mammals in Collision." I finally got the second draft finished on Friday, up here in Mount Shasta, and I've been collecting and confirming actors since then. On Saturday, Peggy Powell's new one act will be read alongside "All that and a Box of Donuts", with most of the original San Jose cast.

In other writing news, my little five pager for Theatre Pub didn't make the cut for their little fest, but I wrote and submitted a "first scene" for Unscripted Theatre for their next show. The Theatre Pub scene came fairly easy, as it had many restrictions on what could happen, length, how it should end, etc. I may try to catch the show when it goes up, just to see what did get picked. The Unscripted show was more of a challenge, since they want the first scene of a play, but they will improvise the rest of the play as they imagine I might have written it. It was supposed to be a genre piece of my choosing, and could have up to ten characters.

Now, while I may introduce many characters in the first scene (411, Harvesting the Lost, I don't introduce everyone at once, and sometimes the main character won't even show up until the second or third scene (In a Distant Country). That, and I don't usually start a project based on genre. Really, I think of genre more with film and novels than plays. So, I fretted and hemmed and hawed about what to write for a couple of weeks, and finally decided to play a bit with comedy-noir. I wanted to write a female private investigator, but didn't want to draw too heavily on Hal Savage's The Chinese Angle which I directed a few years back. So, I made it contemporary and made the lead heterosexual ... and deaf. As soon as I began to write the opening noirish inner monologue, I also discovered that my detective was also a frustrated meteorologist. Soon, I began to people her world in my mind and in my notes. The first scene would be her and her client, and other characters (but, in my mind, not all the characters) would be mentioned as allies, suspects, and potential leads. I tried to build the requisite sexual tension between client and detective, an existing lover to allow for a triangle, a murder to solve, and a menagerie for the detective to explore and investigate through the plot... while throwing in some jokes to set the tone.

The problem is... I really like these characters now! If Unscripted doesn't pick it up, I may have to write the whole play, or turn it into a webseries. Given that I already need to adapt All That and a Box of Donuts to webseries format, and have a short film with Tom Neely that I'm supposedly working on... I don't know when the story of Carol Stone might get told.

On top of all this, I've got an audition coming up for a tiny part with a large theatre, but one that would never the less eat up a good deal of time.

I honestly don't know how I'm going to do all this and still find time to play Fallout: New Vegas, Dragon Age 2, Arkham City, the new Bioshock. I also need to brush up on my job skills, and just purchased some books on Javascript, Photoshop CS 5, and HTML 5.

So, basically, I'm accepting offers by wealthy patrons, if you're interested.