Edmonton Journal Article
Yay! My winter driving article made it into the Journal today. For those of you who missed it, here's the article. And now back to sleep for me.
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Yay! My winter driving article made it into the Journal today. For those of you who missed it, here's the article. And now back to sleep for me.
I'm shutting down until the New Year. Have an most excellent turkey slaying day and a wonderful pie-in-the-sky resolution day.
I'm staring at the CD of the producer's cut of the radio play. Yay! I fast forwarded through the radio play, and it seems to flow pretty well. Sadly, the scene that got the biggest laugh has been cut, but the scene didn't forward the main story, so I can see why it had to go. It's a good reminder that just because I like a scene is not enough reason for it to stay, especially if it doesn't add to the overall story. The entire process of producing this radio play reminds me a lot of my TV days. You write a good story, but you have to be aware of parameters that have nothing to do with the creative and everything to do with the business end of things. For example, we had to double cast some roles because the CBC couldn't afford to hire all the actors for every role. The final cut had to time out to about 28 minutes to fit the schedule. Again, as I've said over and over, these are only detriments if you let them be detriments. I prefer to see them as opportunities. The fact that we had to cut the show down meant we cut away some of the dead lines and just keep the pace moving. The double casting mean that some of our actors got to cart out their different characters. It's all part of the process, and if you embrace the process, you'll be able to shine. If you fight the process, you'll just being bitter and unemployed as a writer.
Well, the campaign is at an end, but what a great experience. I had a blast answering questions on the website, and I hope the students got a better sense of what it takes to write a book. The organizers were kind enough to share the web stats with me, and I thought I'd post them here for posterity. The coolest thing is that the website was visited over 100,000 times. Here are the stats.
110,000 web site views
10,500 unique web site visits
2632 entries for the Funky Pickle Pizza parties
860 messages in the forum
143 reviews written of Graffiti Ghoul
60 stories written online
Thanks to the Edmonton Public Library, Child Friendly Edmonton, Edmonton Oilers Community Foundation, Funkle Pickle Pizza and CBC for their support. And a huge thank you to all the students in Edmonton who participated in the campaign. Hope you enjoyed The Mystery of the Graffiti Ghoul, and I hope you keep an eye out for The Mystery of the Mad Science Teacher in April 2008.
Phew! It's done. I went through the script and cleaned up the messy dialogue from multiple changes while I was in Banff. I also worked in a cool bit where I accuse the audience of being sheep for handing over cellphones and letting themselves become potential victims. I'll see if the speech works. If not, I'll just cut it in previews.
Cycling through the script, I kept remembering the audience's reaction at the staged reading. Even with scripts in hand, the actors could get the audience members to jump to key scare moments. I kept thinking if we could do that to an audience in a reading, imagine what we could do once we have all the bells and whistles.
Anyway, I'm pretty excited about the play and I hope it gets another chance at life in 2008.
For now, it's time to start shutting down for the holiday break. If I get a second wind, I may start pulling Forbidden Phoenix apart and putting back together the second act, but I'm running on vapours right now, and I think I'm better off just taking it easy for a couple of weeks.
Ugh. The galleys are off to the publisher for corrections. Caught a few mistakes and typos. The only way I can describe the process is that it's like doing inventory. You have to make sure everything is accounted for and you have to double check everything. It's really boring work, but it's necessary, because if you don't do it, you'll never know what you have.
Needless to say, I'm a very cranky guy today. Tomorrow is going to be a bit better. I plan to polish The Bone House and send it off to one of the actors who is going to pass it to an artistic director in Calgary. Hopefully, something will come of the show.
I just received the galleys for the third book to proof. This is my least favourite part of the process. I hate proofreading, mainly because I'm always afraid I'll miss something. I have a friend who is a very keen reader and I've asked him to go through the galleys as well as me, in the hopes that 2 sets of eyes will catch all the typos. I think on Graffiti Ghoul, there were about 3 typos that didn't get caught for the first printing. The publisher fixed them for the next printing, but it's always irritating to find mistakes once the book is in print.
Weird thing today. I signed on to do a cameo appearance in the Alberta Ballet's performance of the Nutcracker. I was a party guest. Had to wear jazz shoes, tux and tails and a bowtie. A lovely ballerina was my stage escort, guiding me away from flying feet and twirling bodies. My feet felt like two giant watermelons as I rolled from one corner of the stage to the other, pretending to know the other party guests. It was a lot of fun. I did it mainly because I thought that this kind of experience would never come around again. The one thing I found hard to do was to fight my natural instinct to do schtick on stage. The dancers were the stars. The last thing I wanted to do was steal focus, but I did think about trying to join the dancers at one point and do some very bad dancing in the background. Good thing common sense took over.
I'm back in Edmonton after a scary drive. A guy in a pick up truck past me on the right and nearly took me out. Then he passed a guy in the left lane by going on to the shoulder. Why is it that the worse drivers tend to be the ones in pick up trucks?
Anyway, the reading was really informative. I knew that the play worked from the first production back in 1999, but I was a bit worried about the changes and how they would hold up. Looks like the sword box replacement is a winner. No one shuffled during it, and it seemed to tell the story I needed.
Some really cool discoveries. Not everyone likes to be frisked. We set a couple of audience members on edge as soon as they came into the room. One person just glared at our actors through the rest of the presentation, and I think she was theatre savvy. Very interesting experiment in personal space.
The one thing that I really learned from the reading is the cliche "a picture is worth a thousand words" holds true. We flashed a couple of particularly gory slides as part of the intro, and two audience members questioned why were were exploiting the victimization of women with the play. Oddly enough, I had made a conscious choice to make sure that the play only described the slayings of men. The middle section is about a woman being chased to her parents home where she finds her parents dead, but nothing happens to her, while the following scene involves the killing of a man. I suspect the nature of the image that flashed on the slide put the audiences into a certain frame of mind... and for the production, we'd have to experiment with the pictures to make sure we have one that suggests horror, but doesn't overpower the text. Plus, I'm concerned that if we show too many details, we lose the impact of the audience's imagination, because they'll picture the slide when we intimate the details of the killing in the blackout, and I find that nothing can ever top an audience's imagination.
Overall, I was pretty happy with the read... and the reason why I say that is because some of the audience members HATED the reading. Their negative energy was palpable (according to my actors). Others loved the tactile nature of the show. When you have these two extremes, you know that good or bad, the play is pushing buttons.
I've got a few more tweaks to make to some of the dialogue, but now it's a matter of finding some funding to get this show up and running in either Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton, The important thing is that the script is in fighting form.
Last day of rehearsal. Tomorrow, we do a staged reading for an invited audience. The actors have really taken things a long way. I have no major story questions left. The only way I'd know more about the script is if the actors got off book and the director started to block the show for real. That's pretty good progress for a workshop.
Today, I think I made three line changes, just to clarify a couple of beats. This is a piece of advice that I have to remind myself every time I do a workshop. Turn over the script and just listen to the words. Sometimes following along on the page makes you forget that an audience is hearing the words for the first time. When I listened the the script I found out way more about the text and was able to make adjusts to solve the tiny niggling questions that might come up during a performance.
I'm really impressed with both the actors who signed on to play Eugene and Gabrielle. They are dynamite. The actor playing Jacob originated the role, and he's just as good now as he was the first time around, except now he's bulked up and is an intimidating presence, which adds a whole new dynamic to the show. Very cool.
We got so far in the workshop that we were even having discussions over the impact of gruesome slides. I'm really liking the process with the director, Brian Dooley. He's very open and very knowledgeable. I can tell that he did his homework coming into the first day of rehearsal, and he's kept me honest with the script, but at the same time he's not trying to pull it apart and put it back together as if he were the writer (I've had that experience before and it's no fun).
Anyway, we did two runs today. Tomorrow, we'll start late and do one more run before the reading and it looks like everyone is comfortable with the text and the tech gack that we've added. Now all we need to do is figure out how the thing works with an audience. We didn't have time or props to work the blackout, so I know that this is one element of the staged reading that will not work, but I also have the confidence that I know the blackout was one of the surefire bits that worked in the first and second production, so we don't need to workshop that. Besides, when we work out blackout bits, the only way we know for sure what works and what doesn't is when we do it in a real situation with real audience members. As Brian said at the outset of the workshop, the audience is as much a character in the play as the actors. The only difference is that the audience doesn't know their motivation or objective and we have to herd them along without giving away the fact that this show is meant to manipulate them.
Okay, I'm going to try to relax tonight. Hopefully, I'll get enough sleep to give me energy to drive tomorrow night. We don't start until 11 am, so I'll be able to sleep in.
Update: Just got an e-mail from the director and producer of Fulcrum of Evil. They're telling me that they have the final cut and it sounds great. The CD is going off to Toronto for approval. I hope the folks like it enough to greenlight the series.
I'm tired now. Didn't sleep at all last night. I do not like the altitude at all. Barely crawled out of bed and made my way to the workshop.
Today was a hard butter day. Lots of tech stuff being worked into the show. I'm shocked at how technology has made it easy to make a reading look pretty impressive. We're incorporating slides and music into the staged reading. Now the process is much more about performance than it is about the script. In fact, there was only one line change today. The rest of the workshop was all about making sure that the text flowed with the tech stuff. The actors are fantastic, and my director has been doing a bang up job of ramping up the tension.
I have no story questions, but I do have some things to watch for at the reading. We build the tension right from the top with the actors frisking audience members and taking away their cellphones before they can sit down. In the first third of the play, we'll be asking people to move from their seats. In the original production, we didn't have the cellphone bit, so it was relatively easy to move people. I wonder how hard it will be for Eugene to move the audience this time around. It's a question that I won't be able to answer until there's an audience who goes through the process.
Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the workshop. There's been a burst of creativity in the workshop, and we've come up with some brilliant ideas for scaring the audiences. Tonight, we finished with a short session in a dark room, trying to scare each other with found props in a lounge. I had a great one with a plastic shower cap soaked in warm water. One of the actors found two ping pong paddles to make a gunshot noise. As we tried to scare each other in the dark, I was reminded why it's called a "play."
I'll be happy to get back to Edmonton so that I can sleep, but I'll be sad to leave such a creative environment. One more day of rehearsal and then we try to scare an invited audience. I can't wait!
Oh boy, this was a rough day. I thought that once I had sent off my Edmonton Journal article I could just spend time working on The Bone House. Turns out that my e-mail inbox abhors a vaccuum. As soon as I cleared out my work, another swack of e-mails with work-related requests came flooding in.
First off, I had an update from my director on the radio play of Fulcrum of Evil. Turns out that the play is running about 13 minutes too long, and the producer has to find a way to tighten things up. Tonight, I cycled through the script and came up with about 15 cuts, which could shave about 8 minutes off the show, leaving the producer to find 5 minutes worth of dead air to tighten up. It was weird to flip tracks from serial killers to dictators, but I'm glad that I brought my radio play script to Banff (I brought the script for this very reason). So most of my night was spent poring over the script to find lines that could be cut. I just wished I was in the studio to hear the lines so that I know how the scenes flow with the cuts.
Second major job was to proof and make notes on the book cover for The Mystery of the Mad Science Teacher. My publisher sent a pdf of the new cover with the copy for the back cover. I was really worried that the copy gave away too much of the story and had to make notes to revise the back cover copy. Plus, I had a few notes about the colour of the back cover and the spine. I don't know if the publisher will listen to me about the graphic stuff, but I really do hope that they'll pay attention to my notes on the copy.
Third, I had to get back to work on The Bone House. Today, we cycled through the rest of the play to work out the units. Everything tracked pretty cleanly. There were more minor wording changes and a few line cuts, but we're all pretty confident that we have a script that works. At the end of the day, my director and actors sifted through the internet for sound effects and images to help enhance the our staged reading, which is scheduled for Friday.
I'm feeling pretty good about the script and the performances are really coming to life. Now all we have to do is raise the money to produce the show. Sigh. Why is money always the biggest hurdle in putting on a show?
Anyway, it's been a very productive day, but I'm glad to see the end of it. I'm debating whether or not to go for a run before bedtime. Banff is beautiful, but the altitude screws with my sleep patterns. I haven't had a good night's sleep since I got here, and now I'm having the weirdest dreams about arguing with bank tellers. I'm hoping a run will tire me out so I can sleep through the night.
Okay, now I'm into the hard part of the workshop. We're breaking the play into beats, where there are major shifts in objective. It's exactly what the director and actors would do in rehearsal, but it's very specific work. The actors are keying in on phrases and words to clarify what they are saying and doing. Already, my actors have flagged some 10 - 15 words that need tweaking and about 4 sentences that need to be cut and a couple of paragraphs that need to be rewritten. I think the script is about 95 per cent of the way to being ready for rehearsal, and it's the last five per cent that is so tough to work on, because it's all detail work related to moments.
Once we get through the script, I'll have all the notes I need to get it ready, but the unique thing about The Bone House is that things may continue to change after performance, because the play relies on audience reaction and participation. We can guess how the audience will react to some parts of the play, but we won' know for sure until we do the show for a group of people.
On Friday, we're doing a reading for invited guests at the Banff Centre. I'm feeling a bit weird about it, because the play is so not an opera or a piece of theatre. It's basically a show meant to get younger people excited about theatre. On the one hand, I'm really impressed that the Banff Centre recognizes that theatre has to reach out beyond the traditional, but on the other hand, I keep feeling like someone's going to walk into the workshop and kick us out for doing something experimental.
Anyway, all is going very well, and I'm starting to think this thing can get a few productions.
Phew! What a day. We started late because we found out that our final actor was arriving this morning and not in the evening, which meant that we could hear the play read with the entire cast if we started at 2:00 pm. So, I spent the morning trying to work on my Journal article. Then I got to hear the play in its entirety after 8 years. Wow!
With the revised segment, I think the flow is way cleaner and has the potential to really frighten an audience. There were a few minor notes about wording and transition, but the major transitions were working very well. Everyone seemed to be really on board with the changes. We read the play twice and then broke for the day by about 5:00.
I headed straight to my room and incorporated all the changes we talked about. Now I'm going to sleep on the changes and take a look early tomorrow morning to make sure everything tracks. Then I'll print out the draft and bring it in to rehearsal so we can work through the play beat by beat. We don't have our Eugene until later in the day, so we're starting late again, but we'll take the time to record the "video segments" on audio so that we can get a sense of them without having our actors double up.
There's a real sense of excitment as The Bone House starts to come together again. I'm so happy to have this bunch working on the script. I'm getting good solid questions that help me clarify my play rather than distracting notes that turn the play into something else. I had a previous bad experience, which I do not care to repeat ever again.
Phew! I haven't done that in a while. The cast read the first third of the play and we had a great discussion about what the play is trying to do and how to maximize the terror factor. The new segment, which replaces a hokey scene using a sword box, still created a big problem... which was that it made Eugene an actor. At that point, the audience thinks this is a play. The actor playing Eugene said that he was pulled out when the story theatre section came up. Our director argued that the immediacy of the scene kept the audience engaged. They were all good points, and the discussion about the segment was pretty indepth.
But at the end of the discussion, we hit upon a key thing. The show is being built for today's 20-somethings (and younger), and they have a different relationship with video than my generation. I remembered from my school visits how kids could shuffled during my talks, but they'd all be glued to the TV as soon as I played a clip. We decided that going with an all video segment would still hold the audience and allow us to preserve Eugene's authenticity as a lecturer.
So, in a fit of inspiration, I ran off to lunch, scarfed down a quick meal, and spent the rest of the break rewriting the segment. I brought the video segments into the afternoon session, and we had a good read of the scenes. Everyone thought that the scenes hit the mark and did what we needed them to do. We now have a scene that reveals the horror of the Midnight Cowboy, keeps Eugene's credibility, and gives the audience something different to watch. I even found a cool moment to build on the video segment. As always, if you take a note as an opportunity, you'll almost always find something very cool. I'm very happy with how this day went.
We spent most of the afternoon watching The Blair Witch Project to get a sense of how a "real" video should look. Lots of bad camera work and rough acting. All in all, I think we had a very productive session. Tomorrow, we look at the last third of the play and on Monday, we look at the middle section when our final actor arrives. She's doing a show right now, so we have to wait until late Sunday for her arrival.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we come out of this with a solid draft that we can take into rehearsal.
Great day. I chatted with the producer/actor of the show this morning about what worked in the original production and what we wanted to adjust. It was a pretty thorough discussion of the thruline for Eugene Crowley, and it helped me solidify what I wanted to do with the script. At times, it was hard to let go of the old, but I think we need to do it if we want to remount the show for a brand new audience/generation.
This afternoon, our director and the actor playing Eugene showed up. They were completely new to the project and gave some very cool insights about the script from an outsider perspective. The cool thing is that after my morning discussion, I was inspired to make some changes to clear up motivations and build up the tension. I know the changes were slugged in and will need to be massaged, but it's a good place for us to start with the full on read tomorrow morning. Our actress shows up Sunday, but she's only in one section of the play, and we can work around her. I'm looking forward to revamping the script. I just have to remember to let go of the old in favour of a good idea... provided it supports the story I wanted to tell. In other words, hang on the structure, but play with the pieces that make up the structure. If the changes start to erode the foundation, then it's too far, but if they improve the foundation, keep them.
Oh man, my brain is totally fried. I was a dramaturge on another playwright's script and I foolishly tried to work on some of my own writing when I came home. Bad mistake. When, when, when will I ever learn my brain can't hold that much info any longer. The space taken up by the other writer's script gave me no room to focus on The Bone House or my Journal article. I guess it's the guilt that my parents instilled in me. I always feel like when I'm in a meeting, that's not work. I've got to adjust my way of thinking so that I don't feel guilty for spending my day in a workshop or doing a school visit. That's just as much work as sitting down to write... at least that's what I'll tell myself to feel better. Hmmm, I'm starting to wonder if writing is my career or my obsession.
Weird. It's done. I've finished a revision of this 8 year play. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but most of it held up pretty well. I had to change dates, and I had to revamp a scene, but I think the script still has some juice left in it. By that I mean it has the power to scare an audience. However, I'm going to keep an open mind when I head into the workshop and see what can be improved and where in the script I was kidding myself. The new bit is pretty rough and raw, but I think it might have potential. I'll take one more look at it tomorrow before I print the workshop draft.
Oh boy. I took the weekend off, and now I'm in trouble. Today, I was booked in a workshop for another playwright, and I also have to do a workshop on Wednesday. That means I have Tuesday to finish the revisions to The Bone House and crack off another Edmonton Journal article. Yikes! Sometimes, procrastination is the root of all ulcers. I'm going to get up early and get cracking on the play. If I have enough energy, I'll get to the article, but I'll most likely work on the article in Banff. Thank goodness for e-mail.
Just received another update from my agent. We have our first rejection from a publisher. He said he liked the idea, but he was already publishing a picture book about Bigfoot, and he was concerned the two projects might be too similar. The fact that Bigfoot is showing up in a picture book is a good sign. Now all we have to do is find a publisher who hasn't already jumped on the Sasquatch bandwagon yet.