All Eyes on Me

Had a couple disappointments recently that have knocked me down a bit. The big one was being forced to cancel Mrs. Hawking's spring shows at the Watch City Steampunk Festival. It was the right decision, for the sake of keeping people safe by not gathering during the spread of COVID-19, but I'm pretty bummed. I work hard to make it so that Mrs. Hawking sticks in people's minds, but a lot of the times it feels like it doesn't really stick with anyone when it's not right in front of them. I worry about what progress I've made being lost if we go that long without having a show. I know it's a small thing in the grand scheme of things, when so many people are suffering way worse, but this project means a lot to me, so I'm still sad. We're going to do something else in the interim, but I haven't settled on what it will be yet.

We also got word that our pitch did not win the contest we entered. It's not the end of the world; the prize was to get a year free of a program that gave you access to film industry professionals, with the possibility of getting signed to representation. It was cool to get as far as we did, but it would have been nice to get in, as it’s pretty expensive normally. It was just a disappointing thing to hear to right on the heels of the show getting cancelled.

I’ve been trying to sort of jumpstart myself. I was doing pretty well in quarantine until this. So I’ve been trying some stuff to jolt myself out of being down— specifically, trying some projects that are really outside my typical style.

More on that soon.

We came to Arisia 2020, we saw, and we conquered. Mrs. Hawking VI: FALLEN WOMEN was a success. I burst with pride at how we have yet again managed to top ourselves. I feel like the feedback this year was not only positive, but extremely enthusiastic. I was never before stopped in the hallways so many times as this by people who wanted to tell me how much they liked it.

Now I am slowly putting myself back together after the Hawking Arisia shows. My life always kind of falls to the wayside during tech week and performance weekend, but I’m pulling it back together bit by bit.

I am cleaning my house. There are so many things to put away from the show, and I can’t stand when my space is crowded by stuff. It’s an undertaking, but mostly everything is now back in its place. I even managed to get all the costumes back into the costume closet after cleaning, despite there being ten more from this round of production than the previous. The whole place requires a good scrubbing, from the surfaces to the floors, since I’ve neglected it since the show down to the wire. But I can’t really dig into that until all the properties are out of the way.

I am also getting back to my schedule. My workouts, my reading, my drawing. Carrying set piece filled in nicely for working out, but now I’m back to my typical exercise at the gym. I wrote recently about how I’ve gotten myself back into books by making myself read at least ten minutes a day by setting a timer, and found that worked very well for me. I’ve also started listening to audio books as I go about my day, and I’ve torn through quite a few classic British mysteries— Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey —that way already. And I’ve drawn my daily portrait. I think even losing as few as ten days of practices kind of set me back, but I have seen general improvement over the sixty or so I’ve done since I started. That pleases me immensely.

Work has started back up. I had a ten-or-so-day period where the show was over and my classes were just getting going where I had little responsibility, and it was nice, but that’s ended now. I only have two classes this semester because the other two were yet again cancelled due to low enrollment, which means I have to return to tutoring. I’m very grateful that’s still an option, thanks to my very wonderful boss there Bill, but I’d prefer just to be teaching classes. That suits me better and puts me in a better financial position, but it’s so tough to make happen for the spring semesters. I guess at least I won’t have as much to grade.

And I’ve got to get back to writing. After an INSANELY productive period, maybe the most prolific of my life, from May 2018 to August 2019, I lost all that steam and barely wrote anything from that time up to now. I have noodled on some things and scribbled down some ideas, but very little actual generation. It’s not the end of the world, as I was busy with work and producing the newest Mrs. Hawking show. But it’s time to get back into the swing of things. Bernie and I want to give some thought to the next Hawking while we’re riding high from the success of part six— especially since this is the first time in a long time we didn’t know exactly where we wanted to go. I have to editing work to do on my pilots. And I really need to dig into editing my novel, which in its current form is embarrassingly bad, but I got some recent feedback from Nuance and Mark I want to try to do something with.

I’m hoping to take this recent positivity and carry it forward.

Classes started for me this week, and since I still measure my life in semesters due to teaching college, it's a good time to take periodic stock.

I have five classes total, three at Lesley, two at North Shore, and one of the Lesley classes is online. They're all classes I've taught before, so I can reuse lesson plans, but I have to convert them into online materials for the last one. It will be a lot of grading, probably the most I've ever had at one time. But it'll be nice to be making a little more money, and I'm glad I can take a break from tutoring. The fact that I will not have evening classes is also something I'm grateful for, as I was really struggling with the summer teaching schedule I had.

I am almost done with the new Mrs. Hawking play, installment number six, though I am still mulling on the title. I was surprised to find that my early readers found the draft to be noticeably cleaner and closer to finished than previous versions, especially since I absolutely hated it in the drafting process. Maybe I really do have zero perspective on that in the midst of it. But I'm feeling much better about it now that I've gotten feedback and really useful, actionable suggestions for improvement. I think I should be able to finalize the draft within the next week or so.

Good thing, because now is the time to start preparations for the next round of Hawking production. We'll be debuting this new one this coming January, along with the reprise of last year's part V: Mrs. Frost. It's always a lot of work, but I like getting to build a new show, especially since the last few have interacted so interestingly with the previous show. It really lets us get a sense of the evolving story.

I've got a bunch of other writing projects to get going too, as soon as part 6 is settled. I need to edit the pilot of the Mrs. Hawking TV show in response to an executive I spoke to, which is my next big priority so I can get it to her in the next few weeks and she can look at it. I also want to work on editing my Adonis novel. Right now I'm concerned my worldbuilding efforts are coming off like a Wikipedia entry, or else are completely empty. I'm not sure how to fix that problem yet, but I know it will take some serious work.

I have started reading Bernard Cornwell's The Winter King on recommendation of my friend and writing mentor Mark. He thought it would serve as a good example for what I'm trying to do with my novel. I need to figure out how to give reader the scene-setting they need without drowning them in exposition.

My health is mostly good. I have been working out a lot and am in very strong, fairly sleek shape, though I've been eating a ton of sugar. Since the semester has started, I've made a resolution to cut back on the Coke and chai lattes, which are always my worst habit. I have been a little broken out on my chin, though, which makes me worried my beloved Curology treatment isn't working as well anymore. But it could also be due to the fact that I've been in a period of relatively high anxiety for a few weeks now. It's not at its peak anymore, but it's been a problem, leaving me pretty seriously burnt. Not a good way to start a new semester, but I actually think my schedule change will help. No evening classes and no long periods of having to sit in one place are much better suited to my lifestyle.

So overall I'm okay, except for the anxiety. I'm trying to get started on the right foot and make sure I'm not letting it make my good habits fall by the wayside. If I stay organized, I'll handle everything better.

I've not been talking a ton about this, except with a handful of people I trust here and there. But I recently hit a fairly significant milestone on a writing project I've been working on for a while now, so perhaps it's time to discuss it. For the past several months, I have been seriously working on turning my screenplay Adonis into a full-length novel.



The screenplay is one of my very favorite things I've ever written, and I think there's something truly special about it. I've gotten almost uniformly good feedback from those who have seen it, both from friends and from film industry professionals. But those same professions have basically all said the same thing: "This is really good, and probably nobody's going to feel like they can make it."

That has been... discouraging to hear, to say the least. But I understand it. It would be expensive to make, for one, being a large-scale period piece. Roman epics, even slightly unconventional ones like this, are not really en vogue right now. And the subject matter is transgressive on some levels. Nobody in the film industry is taking risks on any original IP these days anyway.

But I believe in this story. I think it is strong and powerful and meaningful. I love the characters and the world Bernie and I have created. I really want to get it out there somewhere. And a suggestion/response I've gotten from many people who've been exposed to it has been, "Have you ever considered writing this as a book?"

The suggestion always kind of annoyed me. I didn't really WANT to write it as a book. My degree is in screenwriting; that's where my real skill lies. I was resistant to the notion for a very long time— not least because I was very, very doubtful of my ability to write it as well as I wanted to. I had little practice in prose, and even less skill.

But I want this story to go somewhere; I really don't want the low likelihood of production to stop it. And I finally got some real practice in prose writing when I worked for Evil Overlord Games, writing for their interactive visual novel game Susurrus. I generated some actually good stuff for that in the prose form, under tight deadlines, in not-insignificant quantity. So I finally gave in and decided to give it a shot. I started it like two years ago, mostly noodling, still pretty resentful of the fact that I felt I needed to do it. But in the last several months I've gotten serious about it, determined to at the very least puke out a first draft to see if I even could.

It has been... difficult. I have never been more resentful of the challenges of writing prose than in this process. I like to joke, "Wait, I have to TELL you what happens? Like, you don't just, OBSERVE IT and FIGURE IT OUT? HOW PEDESTRIAN." But honestly I kind of do feel that way. I am very good at this point at constructing the shape of a story, then providing a human, believable voice with the right kind of dialogue to suggest how a good actor needs to fill in the rest. I love when the audience divines meaning not by being told it, but by observing the expression in the lines of the actor's face. But in prose, nothing is there unless you convey it with the words somehow, and my words always seem too clumsy or on-the-nose. I like spare, subtext-heavy writing with sketchy but evocative details that invite the reader to fill in the gaps with suggestion, rather than explaining things straight out.

And my prose is currently... not that. It feels so overwrought, overcomplicated, too literal, too formal. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; often I feel like even my casual writing style in this journal tends that way. I kind of hate what I've written so far. It just feels so lousy, way below the kind of ability I feel like I can demonstrate in my preferred forms of writing. I am trying to trust in the drafting process— utilize my usual recommend process of vomiting out a draft, worrying only about making it complete, and planning on going back and revising in stages later. And while I pretty much always hate my first drafts these days, this one feels even worse than is typical. Especially because, unlike my plays or screenplays that seem to be shitty in early form, I have no previous examples of novels I have written to assure myself that I am at least capable of turning them out decently in the end.

But, as I have reminded myself time and again, the only way out is through. I need to just get the draft together without obsessing over the quality. Like everything else I've ever written, I have to make it EXIST before I can worry about making it GOOD. I am managing to push myself. I just broke 40,000 words the other day, which was kind of a benchmark for me as I was under the impression that was the minimum for novel-length. My friend Mark— a writer and artist I greatly admire, who was once my teacher in grad school for the one prose class I took while there —told me that publishers expect adult pseudo-historical books to be more in the 50,000 to 60,000 range, so I'm not really there. But still, I'm not quite finished yet, and progress is progress. It may be the longest single, continuous piece I've ever written.

I still hate it. It is going to need a LOT of editing before it doesn't suck. I'm not sure how I'm going to make that editing happen, as it's burdensome and difficult for people to give you feedback on a long piece, and I can't use my typical strategy of inviting people to a reading dinner. Maybe I'm silly to expect book publishing to be any less cutthroat and treacherous than screenplay pitching, but I figure at least more books tend to get published than movies tend to get made.

So I'm doing it. Giving it my very best shot, even though I'm scared and not optimistic. I've got over 40,000 words now, which is not nothing, and while they mostly suck there are a few I don't hate. I worked pretty meticulously over the prologue, which I posted last year around this time when I first got truly serious about doing this, and I'm actually pretty pleased with the sound of it, and the subtlety and irony I managed to convey. Maybe with a similar amount of care and editing I can make the rest of it up to its level.

Who knows? Maybe after banging myself against the treacherous business of the performative narrative arts, my future lies in the vulgar pedestrian prose world after all. And then it'll get made into a movie many years down the line, when the model for my hero is well and truly too old. And they'll cast some twenty-five-year old underwear model who wants to transition into acting, and rumor will get around that it was written originally for Chris Evans, and as a lark he'll come to the premiere, an accomplished silver-fox movie director. And while I won't get to nail him while he's young and perfect, our later-life hookup will be some consolation still.

I'm a dreamer, you see. It's why I take risks with my art. ;-)

Here is the script I submitted for this weekend's twenty-four hour charity play festival hosted by Theatre@First! It went really well; I actually think it was overall the strongest program Giving@First has done yet, scripts, acting, and directing.



For previous festivals I wrote about monsters, with "Love Is Dead" about a necromancer trying to online date, and "The Creature From the Backlot Lagoon" about a real-life movie monster. I even joked to my cast when we were paired up, "Knowing me, I will write about either monsters or Victorians."

What I ended up doing wasn't exactly Victorian... but God knows I already am drowning in the costuming, so that's the aesthetic we went with. I pulled an old scene fragment I did in 31 Plays in 31 Days 2016, cut the opening scenario out of it, and improved and expanded it into a ten-or-so-minute sketch. I've been describing it to people as "basically if Noel Coward did Weekend at Bernie's."

I've had an idea for a while for a full length comedy of manners version of that premise called, appropriately enough, "The Body." For me the humor comes primarily not necessarily from the characters trying to conceal the corpse, but from the meta-level of having a full-length play where an actor playing a dead body is onstage THE WHOLE TIME. I love the idea of the audience being like, "Oh, my God. He's just... dead there. He's just going to be dead there and flop around for the entire time." And him laying onstage inert until curtain call, upon which time he rises to take the final bow. So it was fun to do a small test of the idea in this setting.

I had a great cast too! I've worked with Sara before in the Hawking shows and she's always great. Kat was new to me, but demonstrated that she was very talented. I've seen Jason Merrill and Andrew Harrington work before, so I was excited to get to work with them. I was a little sheepish to cast Jason as the corpse, but his physical humor was SO GREAT and was a huge source of comedy for the show. And Maggie French, the director, was thoughtful and amazing; I'm really lucky we got paired up. She brought in the great idea that the con artists were the ones ultimately being conned.

So I'm pleased with how it went! As always, it's very wordy like my first drafts tend to be, and some of the lines are tricky to say because of the weird diction I was going for. But the cast managed to pull it off. The script is behind the cut, if you're curious.

( Don't Panic - Giving@First February 2019 )

This is my one weekend between the end of Mrs. Hawking parts III and IV at Arisia 2018, and before I have classes to plan for Lesley's spring semester. Which means I am taking the opportunity to put my house, my affairs, and my life back in order while I have half a chance.

I have completed probably the most challenging and honestly satisfying period of my life. I taught three classes, worked part time at a writing position at Evil Overlord that I love, and put on the strongest program of Mrs. Hawking shows I've ever done. I'm enormously pleased and proud of myself. It was a lot of work, but I did very well! And I'm not even as exhausted as I expected to be; thought I still came down with a cold immediately after, maybe I managed to take better care of myself this time around. And I had such wonderful help from cast, crew, and lovely friends. Thank God for them.

But a lot of things have fallen by the wayside in the meantime. Non-work and non-project chores have been shoved aside, and my house is always a disaster of props and costumes in the immediate show aftermath. But I am taking this weekend where I have no shows and no classes that require work to address it. I'm trying to get my practical stuff back in order. And I'm struggling a bit as OF COURSE we had MORE STUFF for this round of shows than we've ever had, so storage is beginning to become a problem. A round of culling is certainly in order— any costumes from my collection that don't have potential for Mrs. Hawking shows have to be seriously reconsidered.

I did good. I feel good about it. But alas, things don't wait for me while I'm off conquering the world.

Mrs. Hawking is returning to Arisia this January!



I am delighted to announce that Team Hawking is undertaking preparations to begin putting together our next round of production for Arisia 2018! We will be continuing our tradition of performing the two most recent installments, the part we debuted the previous year as a lead-in to a brand-new story, in order to make hook audiences into the flow of the series. So we are proud to present Mrs. Hawking 3: Base Instruments along with Mrs. Hawking 4: Gilded Cages, in its very first public peformance!

Soon we'll announcing the cast, featuring an array of both familiar faces returning to their roles as well as new stars bringing their talent to the table. And we'll make sure to keep you up to date on scheduling, development, and process as it unfolds. Until then, I hope to leave you all in anticipation of the next direction the Hawking story is about to explore!

And make sure to join us at Arisia 2018! this January the weekend of the 12th-15th at the Westin Boston Waterfront!

You may recall that this summer I am for the first time participating in a show with the Post-Meridian Radio Players, a group I have long admired but never had the chance to work with before. This summer I am directing an audio drama version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which I helped PMRP artist-in-residence Jeremy Holstein to adapt, and which has the distinction of being history's first detective story. Our version also has the leads gender-swapped, so our detective is a female version of Dupin, as well as the narrator in the form of Dupin's companion Edelle.



It's exciting to work in this different form-- never directed a complete audio drama before --and it's lovely to have a much lower-key theatrical project than I've usually been occupied with of late. I'm also working with some great actors, some great people in the Mrs. Hawking cast as well as a bunch of lovely new people.

So I'd like to invite you all to the performance! Here is the link to the Facebook event. There's a link to buy tickets on the page, or they can be bought in the door. My show will start first at Responsible Grace church in Somerville, to be followed by Jeremy Holstein's excellent adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia," which features the only appearance of the beloved character Irene Adler.

Hope to see you there!

MJ Rodriguez as Luna, from Instagram @MJRodriguez7

Thanks to a ticket generously offered to me by niobien, I saw "Trans Scripts, Part I: The Women" at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge this week. It was described to me as kind of like the Vagina Monologues, in that it was a series of personal narratives of real people that were turned into dramatic pieces, but in this case from transwomen. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I found it to be a really excellent show, where you literally laugh and cry.

The thing I thought made it so strong was it dealt with a wide diversity of transwomen. They really did demonstrate how personal and individual a gender journey is, even within those who are ultimately exploring the same identity. Some were butch, some were femme; gay, straight; young, old. Some knew that they were women their whole lives, some came to it as a later step of their personal evolution. Some had no problem with sex work, some strongly disapproved. Some cared about the physical reality of their bodies, some felt their truth transcended it. Some wanted to be out and proud as trans, some just wanted to be able to walk down the street without anybody noticing anything about them. These various aspects in various combinations gave each character her own specificity, which conveyed an incredible humanity. That was the best part of it to me-- that everything was so human.

You may be inclined to think that was just because it was drawn from actual people, not made-up characters. But I think it was because the piece seemed to be put together in the interest of telling the stories of THESE WOMEN IN PARTICULAR-- not representing TRANSNESS AS A CONCEPT TO ITS COMPLETE DIGNITY TO THE WORLD. If you know what I mean. There did not seem to be a lot of concern of "Are we taking all the precautions to be as correct as possible for educating the people?" A lot of trans narrative I've read, including personal ones, are very concerned with this, sometimes to the detriment of the story because it turns it into kind of a dry, technical lecture.

Now I totally understand why people end up doing that-- transness is so widely vilified and misunderstood, there is definitely a need to prevent misperceptions, stereotyping, and anything else that could damage the ability of actual trans people to live their lives. But I kind of appreciated that the ladies were not trying to give me a gender studies lesson, but rather to just talk about themselves, their journeys, their feelings, their lives as trans people. The transness informs every part of it, like, trans life in practice rather than just in theory.

Honestly, there were probably a lot individual positions represented that some people would find problematic. Many of them used controversial terms to describe themselves. One woman's first step on her gender journey was becoming a really accomplished drag queen. Another resented the idea of other transwomen who weren't willing to commit to genital surgery. But I kind of liked that the piece didn't judge any of them for it. Not because I necessarily thought all of their positions deserved to be beyond critique, but because their imperfections and vagaries made them that much more human. These were NOT object lessons on gender theory-- these were the stories of real people's real lives.

There also wasn't a huge emphasis on negativity. They DID talk about some of the dangers trans people faced-- they mentioned the murder rate of transwomen of color, for example, but not much other violence, like sexual assault, for example. I wonder if they should have talked about more. But on the other hand, it reminds me a bit of how there are no lesbian date movies because lesbians in film always die, so it's nice to be able to give a lot of time to happy stories of marginalized people. And they did talk about struggle, in a lot of very personal and individual ways.

I believe five out of the seven actors were actual transwomen, while the remaining two were played by men. That kind of surprised me. I wonder if any of the actresses had a problem with that, though from perusing their social media and stuff they all seem to be very proud of the project, and there were also transwomen involved in other aspects of production. In theory, I believe it's basically an actor's job to pretend to be something they're not, but with so few roles for trans actresses, I sincerely hope it was because they just couldn't find enough of them to fill all the roles. For the record, all the actors were great.

Overall, I highly recommend it, and I'd even be open to seeing it again, in case anyone would like me to go with them.

We are officially on the schedule at Arisia 2017!



The MRS HAWKING shows
By Phoebe Roberts

VIVAT REGINA
Friday, January 13th at 7:30PM

and

BASE INSTRUMENTS
Saturday, January 14th at 4PM
Sunday, January 15th at 12PM

In Grand Ballroom B

At the Westin Boston Waterfront
425 Summer Street, Boston, MA 02210

Please come join as at Arisia 2017 this January and come see our shows, including the debut performance of Base Instruments!

Vivat Regina and Base Instruments by Phoebe Roberts will be performed January 13th-15th at the Boston Westin Waterfront Hotel as part of Arisia 2017.