Post reading thoughts

I guess I owe myself some reflection after the reading of Self-Inflicted Wounds the other night.

It was nice to hear it read and to experience it from beginning to end. Especially nice in that there weren't any glaring bits that got in the way. Yeah there's some repetition, things could be condensed a bit, but overall I wasn't unhappy with the results.

I worked very hard on this play for a long time, and I'm not exactly sure what to do with it next, but one thing I do plan to do is let it rest for a bit. Give it time to breathe and come back to it in a few weeks with fresh eyes and see what I make of it. (I say that but damn it, when you're working on something it just keep muscling its way into your life at the oddest times - I had a thought about the piece while walking the dogs yesterday ... and it might not be a horrible idea . . . ok I'll tell you . . . the thought came to me of starting at the end and working backward, or if not strictly backward, then in a sort of shuffled idiosyncratic trajectory . . . might be more work than I want to do, but once planted seeds sometimes grow!)

It's also kind of an awkward length - too short for a full length (maybe) and too long for a one act (maybe). It's 35 pages and I wanted to get a running time on it the other night but I forgot to look at my watch at the end so I don't know. If you figure a minute and a half a page 35 pages would be in the neighborhood of 55 minute to an hour . . .

A little early for those considerations anyway. I need to work on it. Mostly the aforementioned redundancies. But it's funny . . . most of the time when I work on cutting a play it ends up longer ... the great work continues!

I've also been noodling around with a new idea . . . a series of vignettes under the organizing principle of 'Blind Dates'. Little two character scenes wherein I explore people exploring each other . . . it's a fun break from the intensity of Self-Inflicted Wounds.

What's really fun about Blind Dates is that I've been sitting down to write without a plan and just coming up with these things. The characters do the talking and I just write down what they say. It's fun. Nice little writing exercises and who knows . . . maybe it'll end up becoming something.

Coming up to the final meeting for the year of the Fringe, and the week after that the final reading night. I'll miss the Fringe this summer (but not the shlepping) but we have our scouting trip to the Edinburg Fringe Festival in August and work on Breaking the Code starting soon with a November production date . . . so all ahead full!!!!

Keep writing!