All Eyes on Me

Ah, 31 Plays in 31 Days. I’m not sure if it’s the creative broccoli I make myself eat, or the vitamin I keep choking down even though my nutritional needs have changed.

Wow, how’s that for a metaphor? I’M A WRITER, YOU SEE.

Anyway, another one down. This is my twelfth year. I confess, it’s become more frequent lately that they are kind of a pain to have to stick to, but I am always happy to have done them once they’re done. I love seeing my long unbroken list of what I wrote, and I’m often very pleased to have created some of the pieces that I did.

This was another year where I was not excessively directed in what I worked on. I did a fair bit of scratching at the upcoming Hawking part 7, but that’s still very much in the planning stages, so not a whole lot was structured or definite. I mostly wandered between various major projects that interested me, from other parts of the Hawking story, to Dream Machine, to Adonis, to a bit of my Marvel fan fic. I even did a couple of scenes from an idea for a King of the Hill story set in the future of that series that happened to be rattling around in my brain.

( The stories I wrote for this year )

( The characters I wrote for this year )

As with last year, I wrote within a narrow set of projects and across a wide swath of characters. This year’s most frequent appearance was Dream Machine lead Leah Lucchesi with 6 scenes total. Following her was Meredith Barry, Clara Hawking, and Victoria Hawking with 5, Nathaniel Hawking, Derek Kaplan, and Steve Rogers with 4, and a total of five characters, Aidan, Elizabeth Carter, Jamie Carter, Ryan Dresden, and Justin Hawking, ending up with 3. Lately I also like to take note of how frequently I end up writing for certain actors. This time, Naomi Ibasitas has 8 between Leah and Rosaline Pembroke, Cari Keebaugh has 7 from Mrs. Hawking and Josie Carraway, Eric Cheung and Matt Kamm have 6, and Liz Salazar and Jackie Freyman have 5.

My actual drafting, as in, the choosing of the words to manifest the ideas, I feel was generally rather weak this year. Sometimes I feel that way in the writing and change my mind about it later, but as I looked back over all the scenes in retrospect I maintain that assessment. A little bit disappointing, but that’s what drafting’s for— just getting it out on the page, to be improved and punched up later. So I’m trying not to feel too badly about it.

I do think I ended up with a bunch of strong concepts for scenes and interactions. I had several pieces that were interesting from a character standpoint even if I didn’t manage much of a narrative arc. The irreverent screwing around in #23 - “Never Have I Ever” was charming and funny, even if the scene doesn’t really go anywhere. I liked the notions in #20 – “Cinched” even if I’m concerned I manifested them a bit clumsily on the page— I can’t decide if that bit with the watch works or not. #24 – “Shelley Duval” has some punch to it. I love the main concept of Meredith developing an imperious alternate persona as a way of seizing authority in #9 – “Marcelina Anastasia di Gregorio Tremaine”. #14 – “Another Young Girl” has a great thematic interaction between Mrs. H and her grandniece Beatrice. And just like last year, doing the Ember Island Players thing with #31 – “Counterparts” allowed for some enjoyable meta humor poking fun at the Hawking cast members.

Were there any scenes that came out strong overall? A couple. I think the one that came out the most spot-on in terms of arc and character was #21 – “Asshole”. It’s probably the single best crafted scene of the month, with two characters with long history and strong emotions about each other get honest and real. A close second would be #3 – “Rake and Coquette” which depicts Justin and Clara’s breakup. That I was pleased with because I was able to find ways to reveal failings in both parties in a way that was natural to the situation.

Favorite lines? #14 – “Another Young Girl” has, in response to Beatrice asking her great auntie why she doesn’t like her, “Oh, dear God. You are Nathaniel’s daughter.” #16 has the title line, “Your mother is in your bones!” I love basically everything Meredith says in character as Marcelina Tremaine. And #18 – “Blond Salvation” has several that I’m actually really proud of. “Hiding behind that gods-given face.” “How could you come to me? When everything I am was built on your back?” And of course, the title line, “I have seen salvation, and he is blond.”

So, yeah. Maybe not all my best work. But good, solid, useful stuff in there. Definitely something I can build on. No wonder I keep doing this year after year.

Okay, did a little better after not having much of any ideas for yesterday. Still another scene from Adonis, but the next part of the story, once the rebellion is underway and they’re trying to find allies. This scene would come before a scene from many years ago, 31P31D 2015’s #21 - Britannica Gloriana. I had this idea for a character who was the child of the conqueror of Britain who lived in a position of power and honor because of it, but had never accomplished anything herself and was bored and a little self-loathing. She’s meant to go on a journey in contrast to our other privileged heiress character, Pavilla, who is monstrously entitled, and decide to forge her own path. This scene shows Aidan approaching her, establishing her character, but also giving a chance to explore another concept that is consequential of the cultural gender flip— that Aidan’s personal charisma is a tool he’s obligated to use if he’s going to push the cause of the rebellion… but he doesn’t like it and finds it painful to do so.

It also has some lines I love and have wanted to incorporate for years.

( Day #18 - Blond Salvation )

And that’s my tenth year of this silly jaunt. :-) That’s pretty cool.

I didn’t have one particular project I was trying to use the challenge to help me complete, the way I have in recent years. Bernie and I decided we were not going to debut the next Mrs. Hawking play, but instead do a staged version of Gentlemen and a recorded version of the first one, so I was kind of on my own recognizance for what I felt like working on.

The projects I worked on this time:

Dream Machine - 9
Forever Captain - 7
Hawking - 11
Adonis - 4

The characters I included this time:

1. Ryan Dresden - 7
2. Steve Rogers - 7
3. Leah Lucchesi - 6
4. Nathaniel Hawking - 5
5. Mary Stone - 5
6. Aidan - 4
7. Clara Hawking - 4
8. Victoria Hawking - 4
9. Veronica Dresden - 3
10. Rishun Hayward - 3
11. Meredith Barry - 2
12. Cedric Brockton - 2
13. Devon Chambers - 2
14. Elizabeth Frost - 2
15. Tony Stark - 2
16. Jeremy Allison - 1
17. Zach Barry - 1
18. Miranda Barrymore - 1
19. Elizabeth Carter - 1
20. John Colchester - 1
21. Marlon Dresden - 1
22. Gan Jhao - 1
23. Hamba - 1
24. Justin Hawking - 1
25. Don Hayward - 1
26. Joxer - 1
27. Derek Kaplan - 1
28. Vivian Newell - 1
29. Pavilla - 1
30. Ken Rafferty - 1
31. Red Tyrus - 1
32. Malaika Shah - 1
33. Arthur Swann - 1
34. Zagora - 1

At first glance, this looks like the narrowest spread of different projects— just Mrs. Hawking, Dream Machine, Adonis, and Forever Captain. But really, I just didn’t really separate different pieces within the same series or umbrella this time in the manner I usually do. I worked on Hawking pieces from several epochs, three different Captain America fan fictions, three different episodes of Dream Machine, and at least two separate parts of the larger Adonis story. I think I did that because this time I wasn’t always certain which project each piece would ultimately belong in. But I do feel like I generated a lot of work that I will make use of eventually.

I usually end up writing about between thirty and forty different characters, so that’s fairly typical. Twenty male to fourteen female, which is skewed more in favor of men than usual. Ryan Dresden and Steve Rogers featured most frequently, with 7 scenes each, followed by Leah Lucchesi at 6, Nathaniel Hawking and Mary Stone at 5, then Aidan, Victoria Hawking, and Clara Hawking at 4. Nathaniel basically always makes it into the top five. While Mrs. Hawking still has the most 31P31D scenes of all time, she’s only in the top ten this year.

Last year I also started to pay attention to the characters who have actors associated with them. Yet again I’m writing a lot of scenes for Eric Cheung, as he plays both Ryan and Justin Hawking, totaling 8. Between Leah and Malaika Shah, that’s 7 for Naomi Ibatsitas, 5 for Christian Krenek as Nathaniel, 5 for Circe Rowan as Mary, 4 for Cari Keebaugh as Mrs. Hawking, 4 for Jackie Freyman as Clara. There’s also some roles I haven’t officially cast but have people I’d love to see as— like Arielle Kaplan as Veronica Dresden, and maybe double cast as Miranda Barrymore as well, which if you total those up with Mrs. Frost comes to 6.

Favorite scenes for this year? Hmm, I was generally pretty happy with what I generated. It’s in need of a lot of polishing, of course, but I feel like I was getting at good ideas in the overall majority of pieces. Occasionally I feel like I am just screwing around wasting page space, but that didn’t really happen this year. But I’m not sure what I thought was really head and shoulders above the rest. I thought there was some real power in #15 - No Regrets. #2 - Sit Up and Beg came out much wittier than I expected it would upon short notice. And even though I don’t even know if I can use #20 - Bannock in whole anywhere, I think it has some real tenderness to it. And #13 - Man Cave came out very clever and funny, actually close to the particular combination of humorous and vulnerable I was going for.

Favorite lines? I liked in #22 - Recon Mom, when Steve asks if Rishun can sneak two little kids past a strike team, her answer of, “Grant. I have two toddlers. Compared to a church or a toy store, this is nothing.” I also thought I was onto something in #30 - Brazen, with Justin’s “With that pink in your cheeks? I think I’d like to see it up to the roots of your hair.” Justin always gets good lines. But honestly the best is probably “They must have passed you around like a wineskin at a wake,” from #26 of the same name. It manages to be snappy, raw, and in the idiom I was going for— a very tricky thing to achieve. Apparently I’m into the naughtiest ones this time!

So, yeah. I’m pretty happy with the result. It didn’t feel hugely burdensome, and I got some nice work out of it. And looking at my chart of ten years solid is really, really satisfying to me.

Sometimes I write scenes not necessarily because I know I want something to happen in a piece, but because I want to figure something out about how the characters will interact. I frequently end up using these drafts not as a whole, but in pieces here and there across the story, because they establish useful ideas.

I’d love to work seriously on the next parts of the Adonis story. But it’s not a good use of time until I get the damn book edited. Bleh.



( Day #20 - Bannock )

I’ve mentioned before that I like attempting to do kind of a tricky thing in my writing— slant a character or circumstance to an audience to a certain problematic point of view, and then call to their attention how easy it was to fall into that unfair or inaccurate perspective. My hope is, not necessarily to shame or mock the viewer, but to encourage them to some self-reflection as to why they are vulnerable to seeing things in that flawed way, and maybe try to address it going forward. It’s a hard thing to pull off.

It’s been important to my work in two other places up to this point— Adonis, and Mrs. Hawking part IV: Gilded Cages. In Adonis, I want the viewer complicit in Aidan’s objectification, then make clear how it has hurt him, and have to challenge themselves to acknowledge the human tendency to reduce people to things. In Gilded Cages, I wanted the audience to like and sympathize with Reginald Hawking due to his charming, romance-novel-hero bearing, and then make them have to confront that we often want women to give such men a chance because we feel like they “deserve it”, but it doesn’t change the fact that his entire romantic relationship with Victoria violated her consent.

I’d like to attempt that same temptation to an unfair viewpoint, then point out the contradictory reality, with Veronica Dresden in Dream Machine episode 6. I’d love to have her come in and have the audience dislike her, stereotyping her as the nasty ex-wife being so, so hard on poor Ryan. But then point out that she spent years having to deal with him when he was not a good husband, father, or even person really, and that he’s not entitled to endless forgiveness from her. She has a RIGHT to her anger, and it’s unfair to cast her as the bad guy here. That can also force Ryan to confront his own responsibility and own more of what he needs to do going forward to make up for the person he used to be.

I think that could be some strong character stuff— if I can pull it off. This would be a later scene of episode 6, occurring after #2 - Sit Up and Beg and #1 - Nefarious Plan but before #10 - Come to Grovel. Leah won’t be in episode 6 too much— I like the idea that characters enter and recede from the spotlight from episode to episode —but I thought she might be the right person to engage with Veronica in this scene.



( Day #14 - Carrying Water )

I really do love the Libby app. If you haven't tried it, it's the app of the local public library system, and I highly recommend it. I love how it's helped me get back into serious book-reading in the last year, and its quick and easy access to the world of reading has helped me fall back in love with the wonder of libraries. But it has this tendency of delivering all the books I have on hold at once, so I hardly have time to read them before my loan runs out and they get passed along to the next person. So, if I don't want to get kicked to the end of the hold line, sometimes I end up trying to read several at once. To... varying levels of success.

After a nearly four-month wait, I finally got The Color of Magic, the first of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. I'd been told it's not quite as clever and deep as some of his later works, but I enjoyed Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms enough to want to read the rest of the series regardless. This one is cute and cleverly written, and I'm enjoying the parodies of familiar fantasy tropes. I'm about two-thirds of the way through, when Libby informs me that Mary Beard's SPQR has come available.

SPQR is a fairly dense nonfiction book on Roman history, one I've wanted to read for years, and occurred to me to put on my holds list in September. Fortunately the one I got was the audiobook, which is read by a pleasantly plummy-voiced British narrator that I could listen to while going about much of my day. I'm enjoying it very much, with its emphasis on meta-analysis of where our historical perspectives on Rome come from, and very interesting cultural context about what the myths ancient Romans regarded as history (Romulus, Aeneas, et cetera) reveal about them as a society. I'm not sure why it starts with an anecdote about the consul race between Cicero and Catiline— maybe as an example of how much of what we know about ancient Roman happenings come from people talking about their own involvement in them, and have at least some bias? —and then immediately goes into founding myths, but it's very good so far.

Then, of course, Mary Renault's The King Must Die comes available. I started reading this grounded narrative of the early life of Theseus several months ago. I'd wanted to since I was a kid, recommended as it was by the creator of Gargoyles, but my library back then didn't have it. I began it delightedly, and was especially happy that I think its style might be informative for how I could reshape my Adonis novel— something I really have to get back to revising sometime soon. But I only got about 15% in before it came time to shoot for the digital Hawking shows at Arisia 2021, and it took so much time that I put reading on hold. My loan lapsed before I could finish. But now that it's available again, I didn't want to wait a bunch more months, so I'm going to try to read it in parallel with The Color of Magic.

This is a lot for a short period. But at least it will get me closer to my reading goal!

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, #12 - "What is the most sympathetic villain you've ever written?"

This one I struggled with a bit. This was the second one suggested by my friend Jonathan, and I probably would not have considered adding it on my own.

Being the English teacher I am, I like to establish a definition for a concept before I use it. Antagonists are the figures in the story trying to prevent the protagonist from reaching their goals, but villainy I would characterize as when an antagonist has malicious intentions or is specifically supposed to be in the wrong. I frequently use non-villainous antagonists for the purpose of having conflict that’s not so cut and dried as somebody doing a good thing versus doing somebody a bad thing. It’s a great way to introduce shades of gray and complication.

However, I do love a good villain. Particularly when they’re genuinely wicked. To the point where if I want them sympathetic, I tend to keep them more toward the mere antagonist side, and if I let me them a real villain, they tend to be pretty nasty. So this makes it a little tricky to pick one who I genuinely want you to feel for.

There’s barely a villain to be had, with the exception of the intentionally broad General Hacksaw from part three, in any of the first four episodes of Dream Machine. Instead, most of the conflict there is interpersonal, between characters who are varying degrees of wrong but ultimately trying their best. Mrs. Hawking has a new villain almost every show, but most of them are supposed to be embodiments of various Victorian social ills— misogyny, class predation, systemic abuse or neglect —and so are rarely meant to be sympathized with. In Adonis, the majority of the characters are AWFUL, some to the point of being gross, to create a sense of the brutal world.

What I do frequently have is people who are responsible for some horrible act that was in some part driven by their circumstances. I frequently write about social ills, particularly ones that create negative environments that force people into terrible positions. So I do often make use of villains whose actions are not defensible, but who likely would not be forced into such desperate conditions if not for the unfairness around them. Without spoiling them, the solutions to at least two of my mysteries— Hawking IV: Base Instruments and The Tailor at Loring’s End —factors this in heavily. Even a character like Elizabeth Frost in the second Hawking trilogy, easily one of my wickedest, has to fight through the impossible position her class crushed her into, and the hugely unfair expectations placed on her as a too-young governess to a girl only five years her junior.



So of course I like making the conflict one that has more dimensions than just good-guy-versus-bad-guy. But no-villainy is a path I more often take than sympathetic-villainy.

October Review Challenge, #8 - "What moment in your work is most ahead of its time?"

This prompt was suggested to me by my friend Jonathan, when I was first brainstorming the list. I confess most of my work is not exactly cutting-edge; I am partial to very conventional narrative styles, and while my viewpoints tend toward the progressive, my subject matter is rarely that far out there. But the most transgressive piece I have, by far, is Adonis.



The central conceit is a gender-flipped ancient Rome, for the purposes of examining the destructive effects of objectification and instrumentalization— but where women perpetrate it on men rather than how in our world, it more often happens the other way around. The flip is to throw into sharp relief those things that we might take for granted, because we're so accustomed to seeing men perpetrate such things on women, but so rarely ever see the other way around.

It's a bit much for some people. Obviously a lot of people have a hard time even believing a man ever could be a victim of objectification or assault in that way. But others find it even more off-putting than when it happens to women— it violates too many gendered expectations, and the lack of inurement makes it too hard to take. But I think that's the point; by doing the flip, it doesn't let the horror of it just slide by because of your expectations. And I do think it's important to acknowledge that men can have their boundaries violated as well. Many men don't feel so vulnerable to it, but there are also many that do, and it's no less awful if their bodily autonomy is not respected. So while most of my work isn't that transgressive, I think this takes the most cutting-edge position of anything I've done so far.

Feeling a bit... creatively blocked, at least as far as my writing goes. I put my book, Adonis, aside while I was working on Fallen Women, the newest Mrs. Hawking play, and since then I’ve been preoccupied with the staging of it. But I haven’t done any writing since then, really, and more and more my thoughts turn to wanting to fix the currently disastrous state of that novel.

As it currently stands, it really isn’t very good. It’s maybe not garbage all the way through, but it’s overall fairly bad. I want to fix it, but frankly I’m not sure how. I’m having trouble conceiving of exactly what it needs. I tend to approach my editing with a high-level goal in my mind, and works towards that goal by feel. Like, “Nathaniel’s fear needs to be more in the subtext.” Or “the Ripper’s rant needs to be scarier.” Or whatever. But for this, while I know it’s not right, I don’t really know what right IS in most cases. I don’t have a direction for what I need the editing to achieve.

My friend Mark recommended Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King as a reference for how to tell this kind of story, an Arthurian epic set just a little bit later in history. I enjoyed the book a lot, and I do think it’s a good model for the direction I should take rewriting my novel. But I’m struggling at how to synthesize my impressions of this book into a goal I can apply to my own work. I’m not sure what to shoot for because I can’t quite figure out how to name the effect I’m observing and would like to replicate.

I’m stressing out about it. I’m afraid I can’t write this story as well as I need to. I know I need to go through the drafting process, but when I don’t know what I’m aiming for, I don’t even know how to keep drafting. I’m feeling pretty discouraged.