Updates and Upcoming...

Who'd of thought that my first post for 2013 would be Easter Sunday...

Since my last posts were regarding Granite, an update would be worthwhile: the internet staged reading  and subsequent publication are still forthcoming, after a couple of setbacks in that process on the administrative end.  I do hope that good news is on the way on that front.

I have a couple of projects that I've agreed to and are in various stages of progress, and I will be updating information about those as time wears on - some of them are yet to be announced officially, some are more exploratory, so we'll leave those for now.

Here's what's coming up in the next few weeks.

Two staged readings during the Belhaven Theatre Festival next week:
Granite will be read on Tuesday, April 9 at 7:15pm along with a script by John Maxwell called Mary and Martha.  John and I will be a part of discussion afterward about writing plays that deal with faith.
The Long Surrender will be read on Thursday, April 11 at 7:30pm.

In the meantime, the next major project that I'm taking on is the 30-Day Writing Challenge for the month of April.  This is an inaugural event in honor of the late Jack Gilbert, who previously ran ScriptFrenzy, a one month screenwriting challenge.  This is a group of Frenzy-ists doing this in honor of Jack.

So, the plan is to write every day during April.  Which means this starts tomorrow.

I have decided that I didn't want to do too much pre-work, so I haven't been mapping the plot out, or anything like that.  But I do think that I'm going to write based on an idea I had last summer during the Glen East playwriting workshop with Arlene Hutton.  I have long since lost all of my notes on that idea, so I'm largely starting over, but the base of the story is a rocky return home for a small-town Mississippi girl who'd ran away to Chicago.

So, you're likely to see some updates on here - maybe not daily, but I'm going to try to journal through the process, post when I reach markers (act break, finished draft).  Who knows - if I finish a draft of one play, I may start another one...

Thursday/ Fish

As part of the playwriting track at The Glen Workshop at Mount Holyoke College this past week, we were asked to write a ten minute play.  My play is called Thursday/ Fish, and I've posted it on my Scribd.com page HERE.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out - it was inspired by an image of a mother and daughter cleaning up a pile of rubble which I found on Flickr.com's image archive.  I'm not exactly sure what I found so compelling in the picture, but what it inspired in the play was the resolve to continue on - to clean up and begin to heal by continuing to live on.  Tradition as a guide through tragedy.

The Glen

So, I'm attending a playwriting workshop this week at The Glen - East, hosted by Image Journal.  Arlene Hutton is our instructor.  Instead of our session being to get feedback on completed or in-process works (which most Glen sessions seem to be about), we are planning to focus on creating and developing new ideas for plays.  I'm looking forward to seeing how this all works - I've never done a week long workshop like this.

We are at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts - a beautiful campus with lots of New England charm.  Meeting a lot of new people, and have already had some very interesting and compelling late-into-the-evening-hours conversations.

Not sure how much time I'll have to scratch out thoughts for a blog this week, but maybe some insights or even some writing might get posted.

I did get a chance while traveling to read through the first draft of Long Surrender - some things turned out better than I'd remembered, and some need work.  Hopefully sometime soon I can get back to working on that.