not falling down

Back from the convention, very tired after a twelve-hour drive and still needing to do CS homework. My account of this year’s 24-hour playfest is visible thus; more forthcoming after I get through tomorrow.

And yes, I missed you. I hope you’ve been well.

There’s too much in the play, and I know that now. I tried to write thirty pages into nine, which is maybe challenging but still self-defeating. There’s just too much in there to wrap up in ten minutes.

Yet the production was dirty, gritty, flawed, perfect. My faith in my director was not only well placed but exceeded; she took a mess of a difficult script and made it funny, funny, funny, headkick. It was better than I had any right to hope for. It was exactly right.

The critique afterwards was honest and accurate, with more compliments than I expected and a clear and firm analysis ofthe problems–again, that it’s overstuffed. That was pretty much the only thing they found wrong, though, and I was a little surprised by that, but it gives me hope. Last year I wrote a real ten-minute play, spare and tidy and clean in form. Afterwards I was worried that I couldn’t write anything longer, but now I have something that’s going to be a one-act, and it’s going to be full.

I’m still too close to the play to rewrite it while I’m here, but rewrite it I will. I think when I have a real ten-minute and a real one-act I can start sending them to competitions. Maybe going to grad school for comp sci doesn’t mean leaving drama behind after all.

Meanwhile I’m going to read a lot of Atwood and play Diablo on my borrowed laptop (shh!) and maybe go to a workshop or two. I make the joke that I’m the one who doesn’t have to do anything here, but I don’t think that’s true now. Everyone else is networking, interviewing, getting ready to earn their pay at this; I’ve got a play and a half and the email address of a director who’s going to shake the world up in a few years.

I’m not going to post the play as I have before, because it’s not done yet. When I was twelve, I read about David Eddings in Something About the Author and I still remember a quote that disturbed me: he said you had to “write a million words, the best you’ve ever done, and then throw it all away,” before you could consider yourself a writer.That scared me, because even then I had a hard time letting go of anything I’d written. What if the best you’d ever written turned out to be the best you ever would?

He’s right, though. Maybe this play is part of those first million words, and maybe it’s not, but I’m going to throw it away and start over and do it right, and then I’ll let myself post it. I’m looking forward to that.

I got her, Michelle, the director I wanted. My instincts were right, this time: she’s a genius. My director is AMAZING. We (where by “we” I mean “she”) talked about the play for almost an hour, during which she came up with better and more interesting character profiles and staging and motivations than I could have imagined. Her mind moves like water on hot grease. Synergy. This play has the potential to be incredible; I wanted to kick people in the teeth, and that may just be what she’s going to do.

I’m exhausted, ecstatic, emotional. Obviously I’m in a heightened state; I haven’t slept since we left the Days Inn yesterday morning, a low-contrast memory. But I’m excited too, and something in me is trembling. Doing this hurt. Last year I felt fatalistic about what was going to happen that night. This year I feel terrified, and joyful, and I ache.

I’ve written happy and sad before, but I don’t think I’ve ever managed to clearly transmit pain until now. I think The Laramie Project was the most important thing I’ve ever done. I think this was the hardest, and I think I did it right.

Twelve hours of sleep until I watch it come to life.

Having it read aloud was like being naked.

I’ve never written anything I count as drama before, and this play is dramatic. The cushion of laughter was still there, at the beginning, but it didn’t help because I knew it wasn’t achieving what it could yet. I wanted to make it hurt, which meant I had to make it feel good first. It hurt me. I can’t tell yet if it hurt anyone else.

The directors are picking out plays in the next room, and I’m still nervous, because there are one or two of them I’d love to have pick it and three of them whom I dread. I could babble on here about how I made mistakes for the cold reading and why I want whom I want, but I’m going to turn this thing off. My fingers hurt. My play is done, and it’s barely started.

It’s called “One Eye, One Tooth.”

I kind of forgot to mention this, but I’m in Virginia. SETC again, and the 24-Hour Playfest again, and I’ve just finished the third draft of my play, which is pretty close to final. I’m an hour early, which may mean that (end-of-the-world joke of your choice).

I’ve got enough caffeine in me to power a small country for a week, so I need to be doing something or I’ll be fidgeting and bothering the senior playwright who’s going over my piece right now: thus the entry. I’m as nervous as I was last year, because there’s no safety net. Doing comedy is hard, but writing tragedy is harder, and I think I wrote a tragedy. Or at least something that hurts.

Tony called me out last year for only writing comedy; he said he thought I had it in me to write deeper, darker stuff. I don’t believe my comedies have any less depth just because their tone is different, but the challenge irked me anyway. They do that. So this year I wrote something with a bite to it. It’s the play I couldn’t write fall term, and if you were around you know what that means, and if you read the play you might figure it out.

Or you might not. I have to edit now, I think. I don’t want the ending to feel tagged on, especially because it wasn’t.

• From the Department of Xtra Ultimate Hyperbole +3!!!
  
  Like everybody else, I’ve been getting these for a long time, and I think they’re either starting to lose it or are realizing that the content of the subject has very little to do with whether somebody accidentally clicks through. Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit, and they just believe their own marketing.

• From the Land Where Escape Sequences Run Free
  
  The content of this one was mostly an image with a SRC tag that was, again, almost entirely escape sequences; it was followed by a couple .edu URLs, neither of which exist. This reminds me of an old book about spaceships I had when I was a kid, which featured some paintings of “inexplicable salvage” at the end–imaginary empty craft that had been found floating between star systems. This is like one of those: a lonely voyager, adrift, incomprehensible, its purpose forever lost to us.

• From the ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha Guerilla Marketing Group

  This one’s a little different. The content makes me pretty sure it’s spam, but for some reason–to foil antispam software, I guess–it includes a chunk of well-known (to me) fiction at the end. For the record, it worked; this is the only piece of junk that’s gotten through unscathed to my xorph@xorph account since I installed SpamAssassin.

  From: Feel Younger
  Subject: Strengthen your immune system

  Now – Powerful Anti-Aging Breakthrough

  Claim….Ýours….Nów
  As_seen on Oprah, ÇNN, CßS, and_NBC
  Free Óne Months’s Supply
  Feel Better, Look Yonger, Lose Weight_Nów

  I want to have more energy in the new year

  Say good by from us, show me.

  “Pages one and two [of Zaphod's presidential speech] had been salvaged by a Damogran Frond Crested Eagle and had already become incorporated into an extraordinary new form of nest which the eagle had invented. It was constructed largely of papier mache and it was virtually impossible for a newly hatched baby eagle to break out of it. The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no truck with it.”

  Candidate dozed off during interview.

I totally forgot I had saved copies of these, but it turns out I do still have at least the five captioned bootleg Two Towers screencaps to which I linked. Hooray! Anyway, I uploaded them, so this entry works again.