The jaw-droppingly amazing cookies Margaret and I made on Monday

Okay, background: this past weekend was Margaret's and my half-birthdays. (Yes, half-birthdays. I was 46 and a half, Margaret was 12 and a half. Really, it's not that complex.) Houston, God bless him, went to a shop in the nearest megamall we know of that imports various American (and British, although that's not really germane to this post) delicacies. He procured a big can of AMERICAN PUMPKIN as a component of our half-birthday gift extravaganza. Margaret instantly said, "Mom! Now we can make that recipe on Mugglenet!" Yes, the one for pumpkin cookies!!

They...were...astoundingly good. It's been a while since we had any pumpkin goodies, as we'd used up the cans of pumpkin our friends Kelly and Tim brought us some time ago. And, well, the stuff they sell here in Australia and refer to as "pumpkin" just...um...isn't. Not sure what it is, but it isn't pumpkin. So I, at least, was in severe pumpkin debt. Imagine my joy, then, to eat these remarkable cookies!

NOTES to those wishing to replicate this experience:

1. Only American pumpkin will do. Libby's brand, from the can, is absolutely fine. If you are not in America, there may be a store near you that wrings its profit from the tear-soaked hankies of homesick and lonely Americans, and you may find it there.
2. We added a half-teaspoon of allspice and a quarter-teaspoon each of nutmeg and cloves along with the cinnamon.
3. We also added about a quarter-cup of the pumpkin to the frosting, which was Margaret's idea, and it was inspired, I must say.

There is absolutely nothing like sitting down to a plateful of these cookies on a chilly, chilly day.

An interesting exercise.

I've just sent off a one-minute play to a competition (the GI60 — "Gone In 60 [seconds]" — comp.). As always, I'm absolutely certain I will win a place in the roster of shows performed, and I'm absolutely certain I've just embarrassed myself horribly. But all that's irrelevant, now I've hit the Send key.

The real point of the thing has been that I've done something with my writing I've never done before: written a complete play, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a theme, with character arcs (and, for that matter, characters), and it all takes place in one minute of real time. One minute. It was really hard. I like doing new things — new for me, at least — with my writing.

By the way, submissions don't close until May 1. There's still time for you to get your script in!

Yay!

It's official: I'm a 2008 Script Frenzy winner. (I'm not sure what happens when you click on the link, but I think it takes you to my user profile, which got automagically prettied up with new graphics once I validated my script. Winner! Winner! I like that. And I like it even more because it doesn't mean I beat other people, but that I achieved a goal. And I don't have to make anyone lose to do that. I love that part of the NaNo/Script Frenzy thing.

And another one!

Okay, I confess it. I'm a sucker for tiny kids who can really sing. Check out this kid here. (If you grew up in one of the mainstream Protestant denominations in the 60s and 70s, as I did, you could not have escaped this particular version of the Lord's Prayer. It's really rather a complex melody, nor is it made any easier by the high melodrama-and-schmaltz factor, but the kid does a stunning job with it.)

Script Frenzy sitrep and other business

1. I have enough words. I have enough pages. I have enough scenes, acts, characters, settings. I have a play. The Death of Albatross (first draft) is finished in plenty of time, and with plenty of bulk, for Script Frenzy. Yay! That means in the past seven months, I've completed one novel, drafted another whole novel, written an entire full-length play (my first full-length, by the way), drafted and/or finished a half-dozen stories, and written the lyrics to two songs (Houston did the music). I've also gotten one story actually accepted (set your timers to go off on July 1 so you can head over to AntipodeanSF).

2. I managed to clarify things with my favorite client — they're not winding things down in terms of my editing for them; quite the contrary. A big relief, partly for the money's sake, and partly for the self-esteem factors involved.

3. It's three a.m. (I'm so nocturnal by nature.) Pretty much prime writing time. No wonder I got so much done tonight! It's just like Clarion!

Good night, everybody! (Or good morning. The world is round; it's always morning somewhere.)

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

1. The Death of Albatross is going very poorly indeed. I have enough pages to win Script Frenzy, but I can't write a finish that I'm not desperately ashamed of. Today the wordcount actually went backwards, as, in a fit of despair and mortification, I deleted a page and a half. I've spent about six hours staring, typing, deleting, staring, deleting, typing, staring....

2. Some long-term (albeit occasional) contracting gigs seem to be closing down. How will I earn that occasional bit of money that has been quite helpful over the past year? (Anyone out there got any editing to be done? Reasonable rates!)

3. I have a hefty handful of pieces out to various markets, and the editors are not getting back to me. I know it's okay to query, but I can't shake the fear that querying instantly prompts them to move my story from the slush pile to the No Thanks pile. And either way, I'm wracked with suspense and distress.

4. My family and I are currently watching some episodes of Trek Original, and while most of the episodes are memorable, only some are so for positive reasons. At the moment this seems like sufficient cause for a dreadful emotional and existential crisis.

5. I'll be leaving for tonight's karate class soon. It's always a physical and emotional challenge, for a wide variety of reasons. Am I resilient enough to cope tonight?

6. When will it stop bloody raining?

However, I should not let the lack of certainty in my life throw me too hard (not least because it's bad martial practice). The rock-solid certainties — family, friends, a peaceful place to live, the opportunity to write — far outbalance the uncertainties. Determination, persistence — these need to fortify me so that I do not succumb to the compulsion to run in circles, scream and shout.

Accretion

I'm a bit discouraged at the moment. I'm waiting to hear back from quite a few markets and competitions, which is making me very edgy and uncertain indeed. I'm at another low point in my oscillating confidence in the various projects I'm working on (currently the biggest source of doubt is The Death of Albatross, about which I'm second-guessing myself dreadfully, even though that's against the Script Frenzy rules). One of the clients I've been counting on to help cover incidental expenses has decided they can insource the tasks they had previously outsourced to me, so I'm anxious about making up the shortfall somehow, while still preserving my writing time.

I have had a sort of motto, guideline, inner monologue for many years now: "What have you done today to advance your dream?" I've actually gone through a few dreams over the years about which I've asked that question, but it remains valid. So today I'm focusing on making sure I'm doing at least something to advance my writing dream. Every day. Drip, drip, drip. It adds up. Doesn't it?

I LOVE stories like this.

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey has been one of the constant sources of joy and excitement in my life. The first production I saw there (I was 15) was Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, and — not to be too melodramatic — it changed my life.

The current artistic director, Bonnie Monte, has begun a blog. The entry I read today concerns a young actor who put a video of himself doing a monologue from Hamlet up on YouTube (hero qualifications, point one). As a result of her seeing the video, Monte offered him an audition to STNJ's prestigious apprentice program. He showed up (hero qualifications, point two). He got in. So not only is he a hero, she is, too. (A note to those not from New Jersey: Camden, where this actor comes from, is a serious pit of hell.)

I absolutely LOVE stories like this.

Here's the video:

Another write-in and other artistic endeavors

It's only Saturday night, and already it's been a very artsy weekend indeed.

On Friday morning, Margaret and I boarded the train to make a truly epic journey all the way to Penrith — to the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre (which Dame Joan herself is apparently tickled to know is referred to as "The Joan") for a concert. But not just any concert: this one featured selections from Earth and Space, a relatively large work for mezzo, small ensemble, and electronics on which Houston and I collaborated a while back. The musicians (particularly the mezzo, the remarkable Lotte Latukefu) did a fantastic job, and it was well received. Which was nice.

Then, while Houston stayed in Penrith to do composerly things, Margaret and I heeded the siren call of the Illawarra and went back to Wollongong — but we did not yet return home. Instead, we went to a production of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, which was billed as a comedy but is really a quite depressing work, albeit very well acted in this instance.

Today, Saturday, Margaret and I headed back up to Sydney again, this time for another Script Frenzy write-in. I worked on The Death of Albatross, and Margaret worked on several stories she's been writing. Lots of words produced all around, and we both really enjoyed hanging out with my Script Frenzy buddies.

After that, off to Parramatta to meet up with Houston and his composerly friends, a dinner that ended up being significantly better than I expected, and the long, wearying drive back to Wollongong.

And now to bed. We have turned all the alarms off. We are not going to church in the morning. We are tired.

Lots of art can make you tired.

Another project!

Wollongong Workshop Theatre, the lovely people who produced "The Salad of Success" last year (dare I add, one of the two groups of lovely people who produced it?), are running a 24-hour theatre weekend in June. The object of the game is, the writer, director, and actors all meet at the theatre on Friday night. They receive the guidelines, including two "red herrings" that must be included in the script (I'm not sure what such a "red herring" might be — perhaps a phrase? Or a prop?). The writer begins writing. Come the dawn, the writer hands scripts to the actors and director. By performance time that very evening, the company is off book, and the performance is entirely rehearsed and polished, including the tech rehearsal.

I want to do this. I'm currently assembling a company (I already have two actors — Houston and Margaret — and I'm working on getting an actor/director; perhaps one more actor after that, but I'm not sure. Aside from that, there's not a whole lot I can do to prepare. No pre-writing is allowed, of course, although one is encouraged to have an idea going in of what one might do. I'm mystified as to how that can happen, personally, and rather than stifle my subconscious (see previous blog entry), I'd rather just rock up with a tabula rasa. Apparently there's some sort of Shakespeare theme — I'm looking forward to that.

There will no doubt be a blog post or two about the process!

The mindful writer — good idea or bad?

When one is in the throes of Script Frenzy, one is encouraged not to worry about making it good. Stories abound of absolutely ripper, stellar scripts that burst out fully formed, as Athena from the brow of Zeus, with little conscious effort at shaping or editing. On the other hand, there is no shortage of crap scripts (and stories, and novels) that get shat onto the page by people who think they're channelling Truth and Meaning through their own personal connection with the Mystical Beyond. And there are also scripts that are gripped so tightly by fearful and detail-minded writers that they struggle and then, limp and asphyxiated, die. The scripts, that is, not the writers. Not right then, anyway. We all have to die sometime.

Obviously, the question is one of balance: let the river flow, but watch what it's doing and where it's going; build the occasional levee; keep the audience in mind. A play is for communicating, after all, and you can't do that if you're not thinking about how people are going to listen.

I stumbled upon this terrific keynote address by playwright Morwyn Brebner that explores this tension between subconscious and conscious craft. She makes the point that a lot of what people read into a play as being the playwright's conscious choices may not have been — in fact, the true genius of a good playwright may very well be something she is not even aware of, but which pervades everything she writes.

My friend Rod has an interesting blog post on a similar subject, looking at a (rather massive) article on Ernest Hemingway, that symbolist beloved of high-school English teachers everywhere. Hemingway was not a fan of shoehorning symbolism into a piece. On the one hand, I agree that this puts the metaphorical cart before the horse. On the other hand, I myself am not a fan of the "let it flow, 'twill all be well" school, either.

I guess it's a question of doing the most skillful job you know how to do, avoiding the worst errors that really piss you off when you see them in others' work, and leaving open the possibility that you will, every now and again, give yourself a magnificent surprise.

Not so frenzied today.

Today I did a lot of housework, made a fabulous dinner (chicken minestrone soup and rosemary-and-salt foccacia, both from scratch), took my kid to karate (I, alas, am still off training at the moment due to a dodgy back), did a fair bit of emailing, listened to a couple of podcasts that seemed very important and related to my professional development at the time (and, indeed, may be), did even more housework, and played some solitaire.

What I did not do was any work on The Death of Albatross. It's now nearly 11, and I'm going to try to make a token stab at writing some words. My current streak of days-in-a-row-writing is at 16, and if I write anything this evening it stretches to 17, which is starting to approach my 2008 record (so far) of 19. Isn't this sad? Instead of writing, I'm blogging about how many days in a row I've been writing, but if I keep blogging without doing any counts-as-writing work, I won't get any more days in a row added. The irony is almost incapacitating.

I think I'm a bit tired. Must be all the solitaire.

I'm trying to relax.

As part of my martial-arts study, I'm keeping a particular focus on relaxation this month. I reckon I'm about as relaxed, on a day-to-day basis, as I've ever been. Houston disagrees, contending that I'm never actually relaxed. "Perhaps," I say, "but am I more relaxed than usual at the moment?" He says no, not really.

I keep forgetting to do the things I'm supposed to do to work on relaxing more. I thought I'd try a few minutes of sitting meditation each day. I think I've managed it two or three days out of the month so far. I figured I'd catch up on my deadlines for the month, and that would relax me; and indeed, I'm significantly ahead of the recommended quota for Script Frenzy and there are no pressing deadlines right now as part of my Training Coordinator duties at SES. But it doesn't make me more relaxed in and of itself — instead, I worry about losing my Script Frenzy lead or whether I've forgotten something important at SES that I was supposed to do. (Which lends credence to Houston's theory that I'm never relaxed.) I did have strategies for improved relaxation during karate class, but a back that is not healing particularly quickly has required that I explore ways to stay relaxed in the face of the dreadful frustration of not being able to train. (Although any martial artist who's been training as long as I have ought to be able to keep in mind the truism that not training is also training.)

All this talking about relaxation is turning out to be quite counterproductive.

A day off writing?

It's 10:30 p.m., and so far today I haven't written a word other than emails, blog comments, and now this blog entry. The night is still young, though. My current streak is 14 days writing without a day off; if I manage to fit in a few hundred words tonight, the streak will extend to 15. I'd like the sense of accomplishment, and the feeling that I'm staying well ahead of the Script Frenzy quota. But also, my brain is turning sulky. Shall I speak sternly to it, or shall I accept that sometimes it just wants a day off and should have one?

As I said, the night is young. I could get in at least two or three hundred words before lights-out.

Edit: I did, in fact, write nearly 600 words tonight. I feel better. Tireder. But better.

Script Frenzy sitrep

Today I had excessive amounts of fun at my very first write-in. (During NaNo last year, I missed all the write-ins because I was looking for them in Wollongong, and almost no-one from the Wollongong area was even doing NaNo, let alone being part of, or organizing, a write-in. This year, for Script Frenzy, I was wiser and got in on the Sydney action.) It was more talking than writing, by far, but a fair bit of the talking was about writing, which counts as writing. Doesn't it? In any event, I wrote eight pages, and another one on the train ride back to Wollongong.

More to the point, though, I got to hang out with a bunch of other writers as we struggled together to make the words happen. It wasn't as intense as Clarion — Script Frenzy is just for fun, after all — but it had some of that same siblings-in-arms feeling about it. And everyone was interesting and fun to talk with, and everyone was enjoying the melodrama of what we were doing. (And really, the melodrama is a large part of the fun.)

It's not too late to jump in and write your hundred pages for Script Frenzy! And, while we're on the subject, it's about time to start thinking about whether you can set large amounts of time aside in November for NaNoWriMo.

My brain is being turned inside out.

Kevin Rudd, Australia's relatively new Prime Minister, is currently in China. He spoke today at a Beijing university. IN MANDARIN CHINESE. (The page I've linked to includes links to video clips.)

Now, I don't know about you, but I grew up in America, and I've been living for the past 12 years in Australia. I am NOT used to hearing national leaders speaking a non-English language; on the few occasions I have heard such a thing, it's been a European language (French, Spanish, something fairly, well, white). It shocks me to the core to hear Mr. Rudd speaking casually and confidently IN MANDARIN CHINESE.

That's not to say it shocks me in a bad way. On the contrary. It inspires me. It also shames me — as an American living abroad, I live with a constant low-grade embarrassment and shame at the moment, but something like this really emphasizes that we've picked George Bush as our leader, and the Australians have (finally) picked someone with the kind of vision, and intellectual and cultural courage, to learn MANDARIN CHINESE.

My kid rocks.

We had the first parent-teacher conferences at Margaret's new school tonight. I will not trouble you with the details, nor would Margaret thank me if I did, but I will say that I'm extremely proud that my kid is known for having a fabulous work ethic, manners, warmth and friendliness, imagination, and an eagerness to learn.

Sometimes you just take a deep breath and hope you won't mess up a good thing (or a good person)....

Script Frenzy Update
I think a dead rat may possibly have saved my script. A dead rat in a can. Or maybe not. But it's more fun writing about canned rat than writing a bloody boring stupid weepy drama.

Or is that just me?

You know when you're working on a project? And you're just a little short of halfway done? And everything about it is loathsome, dull, sluggish, boring, embarrassing, trite, pompous, pretentious, everything you hate about everything in the world all rolled up in one hideous package that is YOUR PROJECT?

Yeah, well....

Drama, ewwwwww!

My Script Frenzy play keeps turning into a drama, no matter how hard I try to make it a comedy! I'm panicking. I don't like drama. I don't write drama. I don't read drama. How could this possibly be refusing to be anything other than a drama?

Maybe I can make it funny on the rewrites....

I love the Internet.

Although it's Sunday afternoon in Wollongong, it's actually Saturday evening in Washington, DC, and thanks to Better Living Through the Internet, I'm listening to my radio friends on WAMU: Hot Jazz Saturday Night has just given way to Traditions. (In the old days, Traditions appeared on WETA, at the same time as Hot Jazz — what a dilemma! Whew, I'm glad they've sorted everything out now.)

Nobody seems to be carrying Royal Instrument or Pipe Dreams anymore, although I think I can still get the latter on streaming audio. Again, I love the Internet! I can also listen to Car Talk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and many other favorites that I used to only be able to catch on our visits home. Most of them are even available on demand, rather than at the whim of whenever one NPR-type station or another decides to air them.

The homesickness never seems to abate entirely, but listening to my radio friends helps.

Script Frenzy Sitrep

The first two scenes of The Death of Albatross are written — somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes of stage time, as near as I, in my relative inexperience, can estimate. There is a standard format for stage plays that's supposed to yield about one minute of stage time per page, but I double-space my text (as it's just nicer for everyone if the thing actually gets read by anyone who isn't me, or — one can hope — performed). That means that my pages are significantly quicker to get through than others', and I'm stuck with estimating based on word count, which you're not supposed to do. Tough.

At the rate I've been keeping to for the past three days, I may even finish a substantial-enough first draft to win Script Frenzy as much as a week early! I'm going to push for that pace, because I want some wiggle room to write more if I get a horrible shock when sending my draft through the official page-count validator and find I'm 30 pages or so short. (Based on the organizers' rationale for switching from word-count to page-count for this year's Script Frenzy finish line, 20,000 words were too many for a workable-length screenplay, so I figure that would be roughly true for stage plays, too. In that case, if I aim for about 18,000 words, I should end up with enough pages.)

And that brings me to my Curmudgeon Fit for the day. I go to crit groups. I go to workshops. I do Script Frenzy. I check out scriptwriting software. And what do I find, everywhere I go? SCREENPLAYS! Bloody SCREENPLAYS! As if those are of course what every reasonable writer wants to write! "Oh...stage play. You're writing a stage play. How...quaint." One well-regarded software package I looked at didn't even HAVE a stage-play template (that I could find, at any rate, although it was easy enough to find the screenplay template, wasn't it? Wasn't it?). Just because playwrights have far less hope even than screenplay writers of becoming rich, is that any reason for the marketplace to ignore our legitimate needs? (Um...did I just answer my own question?)

Playwrights of the world, stand up with me and demand respect!