Lynn Coady is hilarious. I made it to her reading just in time, and she read an essay and an excerpt from her new book. Both were very funny. The essay was all the inappropriate things an author could (and should not) say at a reading. I laughed hard. The excerpt from Mean Boy was also funny, keeping on the theme of things writers shouldn't do in public. The event was at Laurie Greenwood's Volume II Books, and it was a packed house.
March 2006 Archives
Lynn Coady is a fantastic writer originally from the Maritimes. She's going to be at Greenwood's Volume II this evening to read from her new book Mean Boy. I met her a few months ago, and she's great. Her writing is awesome. She was nominated for a Governor General's Award. She's not a kids' writer, but I won't hold that against her. The event starts at 7:30.
Yesterday, my new books arrived and I'm thrilled. The cover looks awesome and it's just so cool to hold the book in my hand and know that this was something I created. It makes all the hard work worth it. I can't wait to get started on the third book. Here we go again!
Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins and The Recruit by Robert Muchamore are two very different books, but both highly entertaining.
Gregor is a New York kid who jumps into a heating duct to save his kid sister Boots, and they both fall into an underworld where rats, people, spiders, and roaches share an uneasy alliance. Gregor goes on a quest to rescue his father, who has been missing for many years, and all the while he has to feed and change the diapers of his 2 year old sister. It's the first in a series, and I enjoyed it very much.
In The Recruit, James gets into all sorts of trouble with the law, which makes him the perfect candidate for Cherub, a British spy agency that uses only kids as their agents. Most of the book is about training camp, and the last quarter is for James' first mission. It's also the first in a series. It's probably for older readers, but I enjoyed the action and I liked the characters. Well worth picking up.
I'm working on a polish of the script before the production residency in April. I think the story and characters are set. Now I just have to cycle through the draft and catch the dialogue bumps, places where dialogue is clunky or repetitive. It's amazing how a little time away from a script helps to give perspective. I feel like the draft is in pretty good shape overall, but I can see little bits and pieces that can be cleaned up. I'm sure that I'll find more bits to fix up at the production residency, but I just want to put my best foot forward now.
I just spent part of my afternoon with the grade 5 and grade 6 students of Lawrence Grassi Middle School, and they were a great audience. A couple of the kids had read The Mystery of the Frozen Brains, but everyone else was new to the book. I had a blast talking to the kids, and I hope they enjoyed my stories. The story of Magistrate Chen came from a collection of folk stories called Sweet and Sour. I hope the kids hunt this book down and read it.
I'm having the weirdest nightmares in Banff. They're all about failing at something (old university courses, bad plays, etc.). I don't know why I'm having these dreams, but it's freaky. And last night, I started to get the feeling that someone was watching me in my room, and I heard the worst sleep ever.
I heard from others in Banff that they've had trouble sleeping as well. Last night, I heard a story that the Aborginals in the area would perform sacred rituals here, but they'd never sleep here because something was too disturbing. Oh great, now I have to deal with mountain ghosts... hmm, maybe there's a play in this. I can think about it tonight as I try to get a good night's rest.
I don't have a lot of output to show for my week here in Banff, but what I do have is a solid direction for the play. I'm seeing it as a two-hander, one male and one female actor, who will carry two parallel storylines that mesh together by the last third of the play. The characters are pretty well-defined, and I'm coming up with great moments and details for the scenes (when I write them). I'm feeling good about the process, but I do keep thinking about story every so often. Before I head back to Edmonton, I'm going to try to write a scene just so that I can feel like I'm getting into the story/play. Not sure what will come of this project because it's purely a spec piece. I may have to walk away from it for a little while as I have to get started on the third kids' book, but I feel like I've done enough research and put enough thought into the story that I won't want to leave it for long.
It's interesting to track the development of this play idea. I'm still trying to figure out whether it's a one hander or a multi-character play, but the cool thing that's been happening is that I'm making choices that I normally wouldn't make. The beats of the story are deviating from what really happened, and it's making it easier for me to wrap my head around the play objectively. My big issue right now is to figure out if the grandmother (who may become a grandfather) committed suicide or if she/he was beaten to death by the Red Guard. The idea is if the grandson is searching under the belief that his grandparent committed suicide, then I have some story if he discovers the truth. But I'm not completely sold on the idea yet. I have to do some more exploration and thinking. The really cool discovery is the connection of glass making to the story... there are certain temperature points in glass making that shape the final product. In some ways, we have our own "boiling" points which shape our characters. I think the glass theme is going to fit in very nicely. Off to do some more brainstorming.
I'm trying an alternative way of approaching a new play, and that's the reason why I'm at the Banff Centre right now. I have 6 days to do some exploratory writing on an idea that is tentatively titled Glass. It's a story about my grandmother's death during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and my own home invasion. I keep thinking that glass plays a huge part in the play, but I don't know how. I'm doing some research on glass making, the Cultural Revolution, and I'm just taking the time to think about the characters and jot down notes. I don't have a formal outline for this play. Instead, I'm exploring. It's a very weird way of working, and it may fail in the end, which will confirm that my beat sheet/outline way of working is right for me. Why am I trying this technique? I guess it's because I'm trying to make writing feel fresh and exciting again. To be honest, I've been tired of writing lately. If you ate your favourite food every day, you'd probably get sick of it. I think the main reason why I'm tired is because I've been working on the same projects for a very long time. This week in Banff is a way to recharge myself. I hope it works, or else I'll be serving customers in Arby's next.
I just finished a second draft of my short cultural fable, The Monkey King, for Concrete Theatre's Sprouts Festival. I have to admit that this is a tough assignment, because I have to made the play appealing for kids age 4 - 12, and I want to capture the spirit of the original folk tale, but modernize it so that it has some relevance to the audiences of today. I'm going to let the script sit for a day or two, then I'll take one more look at it before I send it off to Concrete. Sprouts takes place in June, so I'll have plenty of time to get the script into shape.
Gordon Korman's first in his On the Run series is a pretty action-packed story. The son and daughter of CIA operatives are sent to a juvenile detention farm, and they must escape to find the man who can clear their parents' names and get them out of prison. The story doesn't take long to get started and once it gets going, it barely stops for a breath. I was taken along for the ride and I had a pretty good time reading the book. This is a good read for guys who want some action adventure instead of fantasy in their novels. However, I should warn younger readers that there's some violence.
Blue Balliett has written a pretty cool mystery story about art. The two heroes in the story, Petra and Calder, are great, and the plot is intricate just like the pentominoes that are used throughout. Blue has an interesting theory that there is no such thing as coincidences, and uses the book to explore her ideas. I'm not sure if I totally buy into her theory, but I definitely buy into her writing. She's spins a good story. What I loved about the book is the use of a secret code. Blue lists the codebreaker, but lets the reader solve the messages themselves. I was flipping back and forth to the codebreaker a few times. It was a fun read, and I was thrilled to see that the main characters were multicultural. This book is definitely worth picking up.
It's done! I've finished the revisions of the play. I'll do a quick dialogue polish and clean up the draft, then I'll pop the script into the mail Monday morning. The second half of the play was easier to write, because I was paying off elements that I had set up in the first act. It's easier to react to something than to create something from nothing. The big question I have to wrestle with is whether or not this is a valid adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' novel. I had to pare away chunks of plot and condense characters. I think I may rename the play Vengeance, so that I don't create the impression that this is a straight adaptation, but a reinvention. That said, maybe I should change the character names too... hmm, I'm going to have to think about this one.
I'm now into the second act of the play, and the revisions are going smoothly. I should be on target to finish the script in time for the Alberta Playwrights Network playwriting competition deadline. I doubt that I'll win, because I'd need another couple of weeks to really clean up the draft. However, the whole exercise was to finish revising the draft. Sometimes, a contest deadline is a good motivator, especially when a person is in a writing slump.
Anita Horrocks' Topher is a cool y/a book. It's a ghost story with really well-crafted characters. I got sucked into the story and couldn't put the book down until it was done. I particularly liked the little sister. It's an older book. I think it came out in 2000, but it's worth picking up if you like ghost stories.
The night was a blast. Stewart Lemoine wrote a classic comedy of murder and mayhem. Beth Graham wrote a sensitive piece about the creation of perfume sents from a young woman's tears. Paul Matwychuk speculated what would happen if Truman Capote tried to write a book about Ralph Klein "strangling" a Legislative Assembly Page to death. All the plays were hilarious and the actors were real troopers. The same four actors perform all four plays.
Oh, and my play was a political satire about Ralph Klein, flying books, decapitated Pages, quail hunting with Dick Cheney, and male bonding a la Brokeback Mountain. It won for best play. I have a second "Hurling" award to add to my shelf... except my cats got to it and it's already mangled.
I finished a short play for the Catalyst Theatre fundraiser tonight. Four playwrights, three hours, one opening line and one prop. The opening line was something like "He stopped drinking, but he still acts like he's a drunk. I wish things were different. I wish for 1988." The prop was a a tin foil sailboat hat.
I came up with a political satire about Ralph Klein tossing the book at the Legislative Assembly page. And when it was all said and done, I compared notes with another playwright... and discovered we had the same idea. Wow, it's embarrassing showing up at a party wearing the same outfit; imagine showing up at a party with the same script. It'll be an interesting night. Oh well, it's all in good fun and the important thing is that the people have a good time and donate to the theatre.
Yay! I just received an invitation to be a guest author at Calgary's Writers' Festival in October. I had contacted the artistic producer a few months back, and I was floored that she remembered my play, Mom, Dad, I'm Living with a White Girl, which she had seen 10 years ago in Toronto. Whew, it just goes to show you that this industry is very small and people do have long memories. Best to make sure that those memories are positive ones... unlike all the bridges I burned in television.
Wow, it's been a long time since this has happened to me. I stayed up late last night and suffered the consequences this morning. After clearing the snow off my sidewalks, I headed to my office to work... but instead I reloaded my MP3 player with new songs. I have absolutely no motivation to write today.
I think I'm shutting down and turning the rest of the day into a research and reading day. I'm a little worried that this throws me off my schedule to finish the Count of Monte Cristo adaptation by March 15 (a contest deadline), but I had a bit of a breakthrough yesterday that allows me to pillage the third draft for scenes. Of course, I know that as soon as I shut off my computer, guilt will set in and I'll turn it back on to work, and then I'll draw a complete blank and play electronic pinball for the rest of the day.
I wonder if successful writers have these kind of days. I sure hope so.
