Truckin'

I finished a full length play this morning, which I started last week. I've finished several one acts, but none of the full length ones I've started. I had an enjoyable ritual going, which included letter writing. I think all my regular readers I know outside of cyberspace got one. I just dropped them in the mail. That's been fun too. Kind of boring letters, more along the line of travelogues. But they are hand written.

The script is a vampire story. A genre I'm new to. It's well used, and watching a number of shows, movies, even plays, I learned one thing. It's very fluid, so I can change the stereotypical things for my ends. I'm finding the process I'll use for this is much like my acting process. Wrote the story. For those who write as I do, I set up the characters and initial environment, had a couple ideas I worked to weave in and felt like I was going along for the ride. Next is script analysis, which I'm going to approach like preparing for a role. I know there are inconsistencies. I know I need to make the characters voices more distinct. The first write served like a first read. An introduction to the world of the play.

I've written and edited, written some more then editing everything again, and so on in the past. Except for short etudes, I've not written a whole piece before the editing. I'm feeling like I've given myself more control, while making the original write a lot of fun. Analyzing the whole thing and deciding on adjustments lets me work in aspects later in the play if I choose, whereas in the incremental model that very same aspect would be gone or working it in would be too late in the process. Changes can flow in both directions instead of just downstream. There are aspects of two of the characters which popped up in the last act, and they'll now be worked into the whole piece. Doing it incrementally I'd have never been able to do that.

I had leisure and got on a roll. At nearly fifty pages, I sent the first two acts to my friend K. She is a fan of the genre. Her delight in the Buffy series got me interested in the genre. Hence the rentals I mentioned a while back. I figured if she liked the piece at all I was on the right track. After all a genre fan should be a pretty good acid test. She read it in less than a day, getting caught up in the characters and story, wading through the as yet obtuse sections. She sent a follow up e-mail asking me to send her the rest as she was "completely enthralled." That helped me drive through to a conclusion. Certainly stronger praise than I'd even considered getting. Thinking on it, a nice xmas gift. I think I would have not finished, or more likely gotten very lazy or frustrated and not written something I could do more than throw out later. Now I think I have something satisfying which I can work with.

Now for a quick political observation. The conservative child at Princeton admitted at least a day ago he faked the attacks. Faux news is still running the headline Little Outrage Over Student Beating at Princeton University. It was national news and fox was upset it was not viewed as a hate crime. Why did they think it was news? Oh, they knew, it's just Rupert the Hutt roiling his rabble.