Category: Writing

April 24, 2003 /

Last night was the least stressful opening night I’ve ever been through, thanks largely to the way the stage is set up, I think. The musicians play behind what’s called a scrim at the back of the stage–a very loosely woven canvas that’s semitransparent straight onbut opaque from an angle. Because it makes the audience look fuzzy, it fosters the illusion that we’re behind some kind of two-way mirror and don’t have to worry about being watched. Even though I know consciously that the audience can see us just as well as we can see them, that still put me at ease enough to play as well as I ever have. This is neat!

It seemed to work pretty well for everyone else, too, and the music really sounded great. More credit for that goes to the writer than to us, but hey, he gets his bow too.

This is the big crunch week, in that I have no more free evenings to work until Sunday, and I’ve been struggling to keep up. I did finally get in an appointment to see my career counselor about a resume critique; we’d been having a little difficulty finding a time because, and I quote, “she’s got a mare due.” Only in Kentucky.

Anyway, she seemed to like my resume and my cover letter (the first one I’ve ever written!), so that felt good. It still bemuses me, though, how little one’s qualifications matter compared to the monumental importance of making them all fit on one page. My counselor’s a nice lady, but I honestly think she knows as much about line spacing and margins as she does about, y’know, jobs.

Another thing I’m behind on: sending out graduation announcements. Eek. I went to the library yesterday to copy pages out of my mother’s address book, which is kind of like a library in itself. There are sheaves of apocryphal driving directions, notes and updates, about five different styles of handwriting, and some entries that take up half a page alone because they’ve been crossed out and corrected so many times. It’s a fascinating object, and I feel like I should get a grant and do an archaeological dig on it.

Too many things on my head. Why is everyone getting sick? Should I bleach my hair again? And how the hell am I supposed to wrap up this entry?

March 6, 2003 /

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.

March 6, 2003 /

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.”

March 6, 2003 /

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.

November 20, 2002 /

I put a lot of my daily recorded life into correspondence with Audrey now, which means that I don’t write as much of it in here–partly because the urge to journal is satisfied, and partly because I’d feel guilty just writing the same things twice. I’ll try to make up for that soon; I think it’ll help once I (finally) write a backend interface for this thing so I don’t have to upload and update the SQL manually.

As seen camwise, I got Drew’s (old new) CD today, and what I’ve heard so far is shockingly good. I’ve mentioned his music in here before, and I always liked the cheesy low-quality mp3s from his old site, but the CD is high-res, listenable indie pop music. It’s kind of like a combination of the Flaming Lips and Rhythm Method. (What you say? You haven’t heard of Rhythm Method? Of course you haven’t! That’s part of the PLAN!)

Working backwards in time, the play is over and I have my evenings to myself again, which is as always a strange feeling. I’ll get back to my lazy habits soon enough, I’m sure, but right now I feel obligated to work from 7-10:00 out of sheer habit.

The final two shows were much better than Thursday and at least as good as Wednesday, and I came away from the end of the play so satisfied with what we’d done that I decided not to try out for the spring play. It’s going to be amazing, I know–it’s Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and it’s Patrick at the helm, so it’d be excitingly mad even if he weren’t adding enormous puppets and masks. Part of me regrets that Iwon’t be able to work under Patrick as an actor–it’s a hell of an experience–but I won’t act on that stage again. I had my time in the spot and I’m out. I’m really just looking forward to watching the show.

That pretty much brings us up to date. Anybody want a Swiss Cake Roll?

September 24, 2002 /

Whoops. I put together the entry just before this, about an hour ago, thinking that I didn’t have much besides internet stuff to talk about. I completely forgot that yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my very first online journal entry.

That does make it by far the longest-running journal of any kind I’ve had, but then the next longest was about four months, so it’s been that for a while. And of course I can’t say it was the first NFD entry, because it wasn’t NFD then, just the journal I put together for kicks and hid behind my webcam pic. The interface was pretty awful, but then I was modeling it almost exactly on Emma’s. Also, I was young.

Anyway, yeah, wow, a year. One hundred forty-six entries, for just over four tenths of an entry per day. Since I was trying for one every other day, that’s not too bad.

I’ve fallen down a few times recently, but at least now it’s for different reasons. Maybe running is the art of not slowing down, and walking is the art of just getting up. I haven’t kept anything going this long before, and I’m still going now, and there’s something to be said for that.

Here’s to a year.

June 30, 2002 /

The Handmaid’s Tale was everything I expected plus three. I mostly remember it as being one of the choices of summer assignments for Mr. Munson’s junior AP English, and even though my choices were good (Ordinary People and Catcher in the Rye), I can’t help but be impressed that he gave it to unproven high schoolers to read.

I’ve been trying to articulate this thought for like fifteen minutes now, and it’s not coming. It’s something like this: But. The fact that he had the balls to give rising juniors books like Handmaid’s Tale isn’t as impressive, really, as the fact that under him we read them and enjoyed them and understood them. Reason number five hundred sixteen I won’t be a teacher–I could never live up to that.

Anyway. The Truth was even fluffier than I expected it to be, actually, but still not bad. I’m most of the way through Enchantment now, and Card’s books are only getting talkier and I don’t like it. He wrote a book called Character and Viewpoint a long time ago, and while I still consider it one of the best books on writing I’ve ever read, he’s stopped listening to his own advice. I wish he’d show me what his characters are doing instead of telling me what they’re thinking. Ender’s Game works so well because it strikes a balance between those two. Enchantment is close, but no cigar. (Children of the Mind missed the whole damn booth.)

And Minority Report was really good, yadda yadda. I just wish, in a fashion oddly reminiscent of Vanilla Sky, that I hadn’t had to pee so bad for so much of it.

May 18, 2002 /

I don’t really guess I’m qualified for this. But sometimes you have to write, and sometimes you have to speak for thedead.

I was in love with Alycia Smith for a long time. She knew it, and she teased me about it, and then she was in love with me for a while but nothing ever came of it except friendship, because that’s how things like that work out most of the time. We stopped talking as much after I graduated–I came here to Centre, and a year later she went to U of L. We saw each other at church sometimes, on weekends home.

Maybe a couple months ago, she IMed me again out of nowhere, and we talked and it was sweet and beautiful and we were starting to get to be good friends again. I missed talking to her in real life. I was looking forward to this summer,and maybe seeing her again.

You know this is coming by now, I guess. She drove over the median sometime yesterday, or last night, and ran head-o ninto another car. She, her boyfriend in the passenger seat and the other driver were all killed.

Alycia would hate reading this. She was a much better writer than me, and she wouldn’t stand for this kind of cliche. Especially the part where I tell you that it’s sitting on my brain now, like I think I’m going to wake up; where I tellyou that she was alive, more alive than anyone; where I tell you that she of all people…

She lived a little outside the lines. She wrote brilliant sad stuff that yes, was amateurish, but showed every sign of blossoming into real brilliant mature poetry and fiction. She drew pictures with the touchpad on her laptop. She had sex with more people than are usually in one bed at the same time.

She had beautiful long black hair that she cut to a bob after high school. I asked her to mail me a lock when I foundout she’d gotten rid of it all, and she promised she would. She never did. She loved manga and black and Poe and girls and boys and English. She sent me a bunch of naked pictures of herself the other day, half as a joke. She’s beautiful in every one of them.

She beat me out of a spot in the Governor’s School for the Arts once, and I was a little disappointed but mostly proud. I went to GSP instead of GSA, and we left around the same time, and while she was gone she started writing me letters–stories and jokes and cartoons and brilliance. I got them all in a box from my mom one day, and I sat in the library and read through them and could barely believe that people like her existed. That was four years ago, less one month.

Alycia didn’t really want to get old. I always hoped her life would outlast her lifestyle. It didn’t, and now the people who loved her have only who she was to love, and not who she would have been. I wish it were enough.

April 10, 2002 /

So, um, this looks a little different. In case you didn’t notice.

Short Story rode (rode) again last night, for the first time since, um, last May. It was impromptu, and it wasn’t all of us–Darren was tutoring and Garret was in this “other city”–but we picked up instruments together for the first time in almost a year, and we sounded fine.The MC girl called for a second round of applause, and later that night there was a post clamoring for a Short Storyreturn on the Centre phorums. I think people liked it.

The thing is, though, that’s not what felt best about it. I’ve tried my hands at a lot of different ways of making music–choir, piano lessons, snare–and the fact is I’m not a natural. I accept that. But within what ability I have, it’s about the best high I can get. Saying “I play bongos” sounds a bit silly, which is why I try to class it up by saying “percussion,” but either way it’s raw and visceral and soulful and cool. I love acting because it entertains people. I love writing code when it’s for designs like this, or for games, because they entertain people too. But beating the hell out of my hands on rawhide is something I could just do forever, for no audience but four other guys on guitars.

That’s what felt good last night, down in the basement, guessing at how to play “Psycho Killer” and doing it live ten minutes later. The pretty girls in the dark didn’t matter. The applause didn’t matter. What mattered was that playing with my band still feels like dancing and knowing how.

March 8, 2002 /

Glorious, hellish, surprising, panicked, funny, awful, done. Except not really surprising at all. I’m starting to recognize that there’s a reason people rave about this kind of timed project–the artificial limits bring out ability you otherwise have no reason to use. Anyway, it was worth it, and this is what I got.

“Grant Marlowe Saves The Day”

That’s there to read only if you’re well beyond “bored” into “catatonic.” This is not to say it wasn’t entertaining; I was lucky to be assigned an incredible director and a great cast who made the play into more than I could have hoped for.

There is a full account of the whole process that led to the play, but it’s freakishly long and boring. I wrote that and I’m keeping it for myself; I don’t recommend it for human consumption. I just wanted to have a good record by which to measure all future periods of stress (“Rescuing my pregnant sister from a burning house with my arm broken in three places? I give it .6 Playfests”).

Also, my stomach’s all better now.