All Eyes on Me

Took a look at the script for Vivat Regina, Mrs. Hawking part 2, today. I’m still kind of emotionally (and otherwise) recovering from the cancellation of our Gentlemen Never Tell performance, but it’s my nature to look ahead, to try and keep up momentum. So I can’t help but start to imagine what’s next from here. Though we are likely to be able to reschedule GNT for a filming weekend if nothing else, I also know that we’ll be eventually moving on to part 2 of the main Mrs. Hawking series.

I hadn’t looked at the VR script in quite a long time, so I was a bit apprehensive. The part 1 script was VERY much below the quality of what we’re currently capable of doing, and required a fairly serious reworking in order to make it up to snuff. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that VR mostly holds up. Of course, its initial drafting was not quite as early in our development as MH was— I can’t exactly remember the gap, but there was at least a couple years. I found it wasn’t quite as bloated with unnecessary verbiage the way MH was, nor quite as obvious and surface-level with all its ideas. While I will definitely want to re-edit it before trying to film the permanent version, I was happy to see I didn’t cringe nearly as much as I was afraid I would.

Still, I will admit, it does strike me as less sophisticated than our later installments. Vivat still mostly only focuses on one plotline, with only a few other, closely related threads woven into it, as opposed to our more current stories that are significantly more layered. That also extends to the presence of ideas and themes, which the second trilogy does a more deft job with them, exploring them in a more complex way, and imbuing them into the interactions without necessarily being obvious about it. The really clever tricks we include later— the subtle groundwork of part 4 setting up Malaika Shah and Elizabeth Frost, the complex web of interrelated narrative threads in part 5, the deceptive Chekov’s gun for the climax and the multi-leveled conversations of part 5 —really are not equaled in parts 1 and 2. I haven’t looked at part 3 in a while either, though in my memory 3 is where we really grow the beard.

I think that’s okay, that the stories start simpler and grow more complex as the audience’s investment builds and they get to know the characters better. I’m happy that I don’t feel like VR has to be rebuilt from the ground up. But I definitely do want to polish it up, so that it feels like a proper lead-up to the later stories, a true step in the path to the really special work we do later. And of course it needs to be compelling for its own sake. At least it should be easier than it was with part 1.

MORE FAN FIC. Been feeling kind of guilty for how much time I’ve devoted to it compared to original wok this August. But when I posted the final chapter of The Favor, which this challenge helped me finish, it got over three hundred hits on its first day across AO3 and FF.Net. So I kind of can’t kick the habit when it means the stuff I’m writing actually gets read by more than a handful of people. Sigh.

This piece immediately follows Day #9 - Receiving Line, inspired by a moment in The Favor where a moment at Peggy’s funeral is mentioned. I thought I could relatively quickly dramatize the event, so I jumped in. As a matter of fact, this drafting tactic of writing a conversational moment as if it were dialogue in a play just to get the shape of it down is really effective for me. Maybe it’s because I’m better at drama than prose. But I was having trouble figuring out the order of ideas, what should be spoken when, and switching to dialogue only made it way easier. That’s a helpful trick to discover.

Of course, I have to make sure I commit to really editing the piece when it comes to converting it to prose. Can’t just slap some narration in around it and call it a day; it has to be shaped to the purpose. It’s too easy to dash it off. As this currently stands, it has a good arc, but perhaps it moves too fast. They move from emotional point to emotional point a little too quickly and easily. But that’s a common problem in these 31P31D scenes where I’m pushing to get them finished. In the prose edit I’ll have to see if it needs more, or if the narration can serve to soften the transitions. 

( Day #11 – Respects to Pay )

Periodically I remember how little I use this journal compared to how often I used to. I think I may be even busier these days, and I no longer have the interest in detailing my day-to-day activities the way I used to. But I do wish I was more in the regular journaling habit. I like having a record of my thoughts, if not my doings, particularly of the creative things I’m working on.

So maybe I’ll see if I can get myself back into it. I’ve had success in the past, when I wanted to implement a new habit, with the method of setting a ridiculously low goal that I know I can complete regularly. Write one page of the script a day. Read ten minutes of a novel every day. Go for a walk around the neighborhood every day. Perhaps if I set myself to write just a very small amount— even as little as two hundred words, or less —of journal content today, it could serve to rebuild the habit.

I imagine I will write about some stupid stuff, if pressed to record my thoughts on a regular basis. I won’t always have something interesting to say. But I think sometimes I don’t write anything at all if I feel like I can’t totally explore or say a whole bunch about my thoughts, and then what ideas I had got lost. Maybe I would have liked to keep those thoughts on record, if only to do something with later. I very, very frequently find that sort of things useful later, and am glad to have kept it as a starting point, if nothing else. So maybe it’ll be good for me if I set the bar very low, and give it a try.

We are now at the point where everything is shot for the digital, socially-distanced Mrs. Hawking shows at Arisia 2021. It was a huge amount of work, but I’m proud of what we accomplished so far. Bernie designed a portable filming kit that was a workable balance between usability and effectiveness, I designed a system to film each actor in isolation that could be cut together later and still sound like they are speaking to one another, and the amazing cast put it all into action with a lot of talent and hard work. Team Hawking, yet again, makes it happen. :-)

It’s at the stage of being edited together now, which is Bernie’s purview, and there’s only a limited amount I can do to help. Just as the filming was my primary responsibility, the editing is his. Things are going well, and I can use a bit less intensity for a while. I’m pretty tired, since the shooting period was like having to prepare and execute a small tech week every couple of days for two months, and I  just finished my grading for the semester. But I’ve never been great at sitting back patiently and allowing other people to do their part, when I feel like I should be working on the project until it’s completed.

I am trying to use this stage of the process as a time to take a break. I’ve mostly been well, but I have been going hard lately, and I find my emotional regulation is a bit shot. Minor frustrations have hit me harder than expected, and I find I’m more sensitive than usual to discomfort. It would probably do me good to regroup a little. To that end, I’m going to start rebuilding some of the routines I had before filming took over my time. I haven’t drawn pictures or read books as part of my daily schedule in those two months, and cooking basically never happened, so I’d like to put that stuff back in.

Of course, being me, I immediately want to work on something else, if I can’t do much to help finish the shows at this stage. I’ve been wanting to do another episode of Dream Machine for a while now, so maybe I’ll noodle on that. When I had a filming kit set up in my house, I found myself daydreaming about other things I could use it for, including snappier versions of that show. But I think I need to be a little easy on myself for a bit, at least until Arisia is over.

October Review Challenge, #23 - "What is your special talent as a writer?"

I think I may safely say, without fear of self-flattery, that I am at this point a pretty good writer. I'm lucky enough to have a little bit of talent, but over the last decade with study and practice I've developed that through work into some real ability. So at this point I'm pretty good at a number of things, among the building blocks of what tends to make a good writer.

But if I had to pick something special, that separates me from another good writer, I'd probably go with my ability to write convincing period dialogue. I mentioned in my Preferred Genre entry that I'm mostly into historical adventure these days, particularly with a setting of the long 19th Century. One of the tricks to telling effective stories in such a milieu is capturing a feel of the setting in how people talk and behave. And dialogue is the primary way characters in a drama inform the audience about themselves, so it's incredibly important to get right.


Photo by John Benfield

I have a knack for giving my 19th Century characters' verbiage the flavor of the time— but still keeping it accessible to the modern audience. This means I only use period slang very sparingly, as often it can get so weird as to be alienating. I find a combination of capturing a noticeably British idiom, while making the cadence a bit more pointed, does the trick for me. And you can't fall into the trap of "excessive formality" like many people do when writing "old timey"— that just makes it sound stiff and unnatural. It's a little hard to quantify, but I love British literature from this period, and it develops your ear over time. But it's one of the little things that makes me unique as a writer, that this is something you can count on from me.

October Review Challenge, #21 - "What piece turned out differently than you planned?"

Oh, jeez. All of them, really, to one degree or other. There's always a point in the process of writing any project where I am struck by how the actual product is markedly different than what I was imagining in my head. Or at least, how the demands of realizing the idea necessitate it taking shapes I had not necessarily thought of when I was dreaming it up. That is just fine, that is what it takes to bring something from dream to reality, but it is striking how far it can drift. And that isn't even taking into account the fact that I usually collaborate with Bernie, who will bring his own perspective to things and often sees stuff in different ways than I do.



A recent example is a fairly mild one. In episode 3 of Dream Machine, "Change or Die", I wanted to include a B-plot where Derek and Josie have to run a gauntlet of technical people in order to begin work on the new show. I had an idea to represent the various technical departments as warring fantasy tribes with their own quirks and customs that they would have to navigate and appease to get them on their side. I was picturing a sort of whimsical travelogue centered around jokes satirizing techies and technical theater, which for a sitcom B-plot is acceptable. But when I brought the idea to Bernie, he wanted to give it a structured PLOT— which, as you know, is very much Bernie's style of narrative —with actual stakes. It made it much tougher to write, especially given it had to sit into the subplot of a short-form episode. We struggled with it a great deal. But ultimately it made the piece have more substance to it, allowed it to speak to our characters and not just be purely for the jokes. This is Bernie's world, after all, and he had stuff to say about it. So I'm glad we went to the extra trouble, even if in the moment it felt like torture for no necessary reason.

Good partners make you better, I guess. :-)

October Review Challenge, #19 - "What’s a side character who turned out special?"

This is, without a doubt, Justin Hawking from the Mrs. Hawking series. He’s one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written. He is the charming, globetrotting elder brother of lead character Nathaniel Hawking, and designed to act as a foil to him. Where Nathaniel craves approval, Justin has turned not caring what people think of him into a lifestyle. Nathaniel is conventional, Justin is radical. Nathaniel is a mild-mannered monogamous father, while Justin is a bisexual libertine who’ll try anything once. It turned out I loved writing their interactions; I found giving them a push-pull between being there for one another and trying to get each other’s goat made for a very compelling relationship.

He’s just so charismatic and fun. He first appeared to needle everybody in part III: Base Instruments. I liked how he was sexy and fearless about it; again it made a nice contrast to the rest of the prudish and goody-goody cast. And I liked how he challenged them on their preconceptions, given his boldness in the face of social convention and his understanding of the artificiality and falseness of it. Still, we gave him a bit of extra dimension by revealing he’s sensitive to the fact that he’s the black sheep of his family, and Bernie suggested giving him a romantic history with Nathaniel’s wife Clara, to add an extra layer of complication.

I missed him since retiring Base Instruments from rep. He was played by Eric Cheung and Christian Krenek, each in their own way but both with a lot of charm. So, when Bernie and I wanted to go lighter and funny for our Hawking show this year, we decided it was finally time to bring him back— specifically in his own spinoff, the Wodehousian romantic comedy Gentlemen Never Tell. It allowed us to not only enjoy his fun and humorous qualities, it let us explore him a little bit more deeply. In this story, in addition to being funny, we let him confront his privilege as a wealthy libertine, and confront the fact that a lot of people see him as a user, as well as get to demonstrate his bisexuality in a meaningful way.

We’ll be putting that show up for the first time this fall. Christian plays Nathaniel these days, so Eric will be returning to bring him again to life. I’m really excited to be returning to him. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.


Photo by John Benfield

October Review Challenge, #17 - "What’s your most romantic line?"

So I actually love romance. I love the dance of two people who are drawn to each other and tracing the path of how it breaks down reserve and obstacles to find their way together. I really enjoy writing it into a larger adventure, though I tend to not like pieces that are solely in the romance genre— I recently realized that it’s because I feel like in pure romance I don’t get to see the characters as people pursuing their own needs and goals outside of the relationship, and therefore have a harder time understanding why they fall for each other. But when it’s part of a story in another genre, I adore it.

I love when characters say romantic things to each other. Just the right line can hit you in the guts and take your breath away. They can be tricky to write— I mentioned I find the “picking of the words” part to be the hardest part of writing anything —but I think I’ve managed a few.

The most explicitly romantic piece I’ve ever written is probably Adonis. The genre is alternate history epic, but the relationship between Diana and Aidan is the heart of the story. A goal of mine for that story is that they are not excessively articulated, as both characters are going through things they don’t really know how to talk about it, so there’s honestly not a lot of individual lines that are particularly romantic out of context. It’s more the whole gestalt that makes the feeling, I’d say.

I also like writing romance that is... a little fucked up. I’m not sure why that is; probably I get a little transgressive thrill. People who probably shouldn’t be together. Unrequited loves. Things where the power dynamic might be off, like with Aidan and Diana. So I get a kick when I can make the audience’s guts twist because there’s something devastatingly romantic about a situation where things are messed up. I think there’s something compelling about Aidan, almost destroyed at the hands of powerful women just like Diana, terrified of being vulnerable to her, wanting her so badly he cannot help but lay himself open to her. But the foremost example I can think of this is the sad case of Colonel Reginald Prescott Hawking, completely in love with a woman who could never feel the same, and who in trying to love, he did the worst wrongs anyone could do to her.

I think there is something absolutely heartbreaking about what those two did to each other. They were friends once, but his falling in love with her was the beginning of the end, because she could never return it. And in this incompatibility, they caused each other irreparable harm. But it was important to me to structure their scenes in part IV: Gilded Cages together, where it explains how things happened between them, to feel romantic in order to make the true point— it didn’t matter how romantic their interactions were, because she did not and could never want that from him. So I really wanted the romance THERE.

He has a bunch of lines that hit it, I think. When Victoria doesn’t understand why Reginald is so willing to do whatever she needs, his answer is a gut punch: “My God, Victoria. Don’t you know?” And when he tries to assure her he’s there for her, I had him say “Never doubt me, Victoria. Please.” It was my attempt to evoke Hamlet’s poetry to Ophelia, “Doubt thou the stars are fire / Doubt thou the sun doth move, / Doubt all truth to be a liar, / But do not doubt my love.” But one of the absolute most devastating ones is actually in a supplemental piece, where they are together for the first time on their wedding night, which Victoria dreads without being able to say why. He promises her, with all the adoration in the world, “I’ll be gentle. I promise.” And proceeds to commit the gentlest rape in the world.

I guess I ought to mention something that is romantic in a less fraught way. I’d probably pick Arthur in his marriage proposal to Mary in Fallen Women. It’s been a long time in coming, but as much as he wants them to be together, he doesn’t know if it can fit into her life, and in powerful contrast to the Colonel, he is resolved to not allow that to impose on her life. Instead of trying to take charge and fix everything for her, he asks her to show him the way, promising, “Lead, and I’ll follow.” A solemn vow of low to go wherever she goes, and be what she needs, while being certain to obtain her consent. That may not always factor into the things I find romantic, but it can sure pack a hell of a wallop when it does.


Photo by Dan Fox

October Review Challenge, #15 - "What's your most poetic line?"

This one's kind of tough. I feel like word selection is actually the weakest aspect of my writing— I'm better in general at the design portion of it, coming up with the ideas behind it, structuring it, shaping it. And as always, it's a hard thing to quantify. I have a whole lesson in my English classes about how the "picking of good words" part of writing is basically impossible for me to teach. How do you measure it? What rules do you apply? Especially when so much of it is contextual, and moreover a matter of taste. But every now and then, I do think I hit on something that sounds genuinely good.

I find myself struggling to find the perfect one, but let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. I'm going to think of things that made me comment "That's a good line," out loud to other people, at enormous risk of sounding like an egomaniac, when I heard them spoken. And a few in recent memory come from a particular scene in Mrs. Hawking part V: Mrs. Frost— specifically, scene 2.5, when Mrs. Frost and Mrs. Hawking finally face off in person after gunning for each other from a distance the entire play.


Photo by Daniel Fox

By this point, the audience has been waiting for the two of them to interact directly, so there's a lot riding on the scene, both in terms of the story and of the audience's engagement. So I wanted their interplay to be crackling. I got a lot of good ones in there, mostly from Mrs. Frost. She knows our hero well enough to see and speaks her weaknesses and fears, in order to cut to the heart of where she is most vulnerable.

She gives name to some of the discomfort Mrs. Hawking has dealing with Nathaniel. "It’s remarkable, you know— in the right light, he could be your husband. In the right light, he could be your son."

She knows the worst, weakest, and most pitiful of Mrs. Hawking, and reminds her of it. "You are still as powerless as when last I saw you, a girl trembling in nameless dread of your wedding night."

But I'd have to pick this one: "Fate falls hard upon a hero’s shoulders. Small wonder you’re always raging— at your father, your husband, and me. But you ought to be grateful. We made you what you are." It voices the great tragedy of Mrs. Hawking's existence, that most everything that she holds dear as part of her identity is the direct result of the worst things that ever happened to her.

But the thing that's really notable about these lines is that they sound good, in that unquantifiable way that poetry can. The rhythm is good. The music of the words. They stick in your mind. I'm not sure they're the most poetic I've ever written. But when I heard Arielle say them, I informed everyone in the room, "That's a good line."

October Review Challenge, #13 - "What’s an old shame in your writing past?"

So I have only recently gotten to the point in my writing career where I can stand anything I wrote from more than a year or two ago. I suppose it’s a good thing that I’ve grown and improved as a writer as time goes on, but my natural tendency to be ashamed of all my imperfections means a lot of my earlier work is intensely embarrassing for me to look back at. I’m the kind of person who at least once a day thinks of some stupid thing I did when I was a kid and cringes, so you can imagine how painful my more recent bad art is to me.

Most of the stuff I’ve made, at least as an adult— I don’t even try to look at anything made before college —there’s at least something about it that was okay. Even if it was only the idea. But the stuff I included thinking it was good sometimes is intensely embarrassing, like, WHAT WAS I THINKING? THAT IS OBVIOUSLY A DUMB SONG LYRIC YOU STOLE WHAT WAS WRONG WITH YOU?

I can’t bear to look back at my first real play, To Think of Nothing. It’s wordy, it’s a little overwrought with its pseudo-classical diction. I recently looked at Mrs. Loring, the play I wrote for my thesis, and... ugh. The idea’s okay, and there’s some okay moments. But it would need a complete overhaul to not be embarrassing. Even the first Mrs. Hawking play I think needs to be rewritten. It’s not all bad, obviously, but... it’s from eight years ago and it can just be so much better with our current level of skill. But I think the thing I’d have to pick is my first larp, Alice.


Photo by Mark Edwards

It was my goth reinterpretation of Alice in Wonderland. And again, it’s not all bad, and for a first larp, it’s got a lot going for it. But it was written during a really bad period and I put a ton of negativity into it, so it’s a bit on the ridiculous side of grimdark. It has too many characters, some of whom either didn’t get enough plot or got plots that I wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize were not compelling. And I didn’t know enough about content notes and that sort of thing to properly label it for some of the themes and subject matter. I exposed larpers to stuff they probably didn’t necessarily sign up for. I really didn’t know what I was doing, as writer and as GM, in a lot of ways.

I know it’s all a process. I know you have to move through the bad stuff to do the good stuff, that practice and learning from failure is the only way you get better. But still, UGH WHAT WAS I THINKING WHY DID I DO SUCH DUMB STUFF???