All Eyes on Me

Been interested in working on fan fiction a fair bit lately. I think it’s because I can make my original work and have to beg people to give it a chance, or I can slap up a new chapter of my Captain America serial and get a hundred strangers to read it in one day. It’s a nice little dopamine hit every time I watch the hit metrics climb, and that’s something I can use these days.

I don’t really write porn, and with my preference for canon compliance I usually write het, so my work is not exactly fandom’s preference. My work is decently if not insanely frequently read, according to the indicators on my profiles on FanFiction.Net and on An Archive of Our Own. It’s tricky to compare popularity between the two, since they measure things differently. On AO3, a click to the story overall registers as one hit, whereas on FF.Net you get a hit for every individual chapter click. I supposed you could average the number of FF.Net hits over the number of chapters to attempt for something comparable, but I don’t know how close that actually is.

Ultimately, the piece that I believe has been read the most widely is Dad Body, an Into the Spider-Verse fic I wrote on impulse in three days, right after seeing the movie. As a crotchety old person, I found myself wanting less of the joke characters and more of the senior lead reaching out to his estranged ex-wife, so I wrote that. It is far and away my most popular story on AO3, which I expect is because I “got in early”— that is to say, it was one of the earliest fics posted for the film, when there was less competition among other stories for people who wanted to read Spider-Verse. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty good piece, but since it’s fairly grounded het marriage drama, it’s not the sort of things that tends to act as fandom catnip.

On FanFiction.Net, however, my "Steve returns the Infinity Stones" fic As Long as He Needs is my most popular, with several times as many hits as my next most visited. Not only that, there it serves as a modest— very modest —hit mill, in that it has averaged ten hits a day since its publication, and often entices readers to check out my other work in addition. At least, so I think, since there tends to be a correlation between when any of my numbers go up, the hits on As Long as He Needs also increase.

It’s probably my, for lack of a better term, most significant fic, in that it is a well-structured, self contained narrative that deals with an important part of the MCU narrative— that is, Steve returning the Infinity Stones, and coming to the decision to retire to the 1940s with Peggy. And I actually think it’s pretty good. It takes Steve through a naturalistic, in character process of making up his mind with enough structure from the time travel journey to give it shape. And while it could likely use a cut-down to combat my usual wordiness, I think it’s generally quite strong.

For the last year I've been slowly expanding a sequel story, His Part to Play, about his life post retirement. For this piece, I am resolving myself to try and practice certain things that do not come naturally to me. Firstly, it gets me writing prose, of which I have been so avoidant, in a circumstance where the stakes feel low. God knows I need that practice. Next, I am writing His Part to Play as a true serial. As in, I am periodically releasing a new installment of an extended, ongoing story that is somewhat episodic but mostly small pieces of a larger sprawling whole. I am doing minimal advance planning, except in the service of building to a particular struggle with general thematic points in mind.

And thirdly, I am permitting it to unfold very slowly. VERY slowly, even more so than I expected to. I know the conflict I am building to, and I knew it was going to take a lot of groundwork, establishing Steve’s new life in the 1940’s before he reached that specified point. I realized it would work a lot more strongly if Steve was quite well entrenched by the time it came, which meant there was a lot of ground to cover. His new identity as Grant Carter, the relationships he maintains, the lengths he goes to remain unidentified as Captain America, his marriage to Peggy, their eventual children. I’ve written twenty thousand words so far and I’m not sure when this part will be through.

But I am trying to make every such moment do three things— explore Steve’s character, establish the story’s themes, and foreshadow the issues of the main struggle. Some are weighted more towards one or the other. When Steve finally meets Daniel Sousa and puts that specter to rest, it’s mostly about his character. When he chats with a waitress who used to be a USO girl who asks him if he’s do it all over again, that’s a bit more foreshadowing. When he tells a dad who misses his fallen war hero son that he’s coming to realize it sucks that any of them had to be heroes, that’s more thematic. I'm actually pretty happy with what I've got, even if it doesn’t have the sharpness of a project I’ve carefully planned and edited.

I’m toying with the idea of making a pod fic— or basically, an audiobook version— of As Long as He Needs. Like I’ve said, I’m interested in making more projects, but I’ve got enough high-intensity ones in the works that I don’t want to take on something really involved. But an audio recording project might just be the right balance of an easy process to make a cool product. And, because of the fan fiction aspect, it won’t be a battle to find an audience. I’ve never directed an audiobook reading before, but I always enjoy having my awesome actor friends perform my work. It might be a nice little boost.

Mystery and detective stories are such an enormous genre at this point it’s funny to think that a short story by Edgar Allan Poe is where it all began. We credit this American writer, best known for his moody and often supernatural horror, with its creation thanks to just three short stories, relatively minor works in his otherwise well-known canon. The first among these Poe wrote is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” upon which we’ve based this radio play, recognized as western literature’s first example of a story built around an unsolved crime where a detective is working to find the solution.

Like most prototypes, Poe’s revolutionary three are pretty deeply flawed. He had yet to discover evidence-based deduction, and his protagonist is basically able to divine from his armchair the outlandish true perpetrator of the crime. Amusingly, Poe’s detective, Auguste Dupin, gets a mention for his ridiculous methods in a Sherlock Holmes story by his more famous literary descendant. This adaption for radio, which Jeremy Holstein very graciously invited me to work with him to create, attempts to manage some of those deficiencies, while still maintaining the spirit of the original story. We’ve also made Dupin and Edelle, and our version of Poe’s unnamed narrator, into women, to further freshen up Poe’s tale.

But even with the need for adaptation and updating, there’s something amazing in the sheer fact that one writer could create such an entire enduring and beloved literary genre just from a little experimenting outside his usual form. After all, from Dupin, think of everything else that grew— from Marple and Poirot, to Wimsey and Vane, to Spade and Marlowe, to Jessica Fletcher, Lennie Briscoe, Magnum, and Colombo, to Sherlock Holmes, who stars in the fabulous tale in the second half of our show, to my own Victoria Hawking. And as someone who spends quite a lot of time pondering the adventures of lady detectives in the 1800’s— you should ask me about Mrs. Hawking sometime —it makes me all the more delighted to pay tribute to where it all began. Except with more women, of course.

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!

We have just gotten through our first week of rehearsal!




Frances Kimpel and Samantha LeVangie, rehearsing as as Mrs. Hawking and Mary.

My style as director, as I've mentioned, is to have things fairly specifically planned out before I go into rehearsal. A personal artistic value of mine is a dynamic stage, with lots of interesting action happening at the right times. But incorporating the right amount of activity is a careful balance.

Read the rest of the entry on Mrshawking.com!

Mrs. Hawking, by Phoebe Roberts, will be performed at Arisia 2015 on Friday, January 16th at 6PM at the Westin Waterfront Boston.

"Rehearsals begin for Mrs. Hawking at Arisia"

Tonight is the first read through for Mrs. Hawking at Arisia 2015, which marks the start of our rehearsal period. This is going to be seriously intense. We don't have long between now and our performance on January 16th, and there's about week's worth of lost time due to the winter holidays. That does NOT make for a nice leisurely process of getting a play blocked, memorized, and sufficiently rehearsed so we don't all embarrass ourselves.



Read the rest of the entry on Mrshawking.com!

Mrs. Hawking, by Phoebe Roberts, will be performed as part of Arisia 2015, at 6PM on Friday, January 16th at the Westin Boston Waterfront.

Well, I held my last-minute and somewhat impromptu auditions for Mrs. Hawking at Arisia 2015 tonight, and I had a decent number of people signed up to read. The bad news was that about half of those people just didn't show up, despite requesting audition slots. Which honestly irritated the heck out of me. But the good news is I got just about enough to cast. That's ultimately what matters, but if I hadn't been lucky enough to see almost entirely solid people in that massively reduced number, I'd have been in real trouble.

I plan on having the list finalized by Friday. I still have to figure out where I'm putting certain people, but I'm fairly certain I know who I want to use. The only thing is I could use one more man for a small henchman role. It would still be speaking, but it would be minimal rehearsal. I'm not too worried about it, as it's minor enough that I could probably find somebody last minute to step in and it would be fine, but I will need to iron that out.

Thank you very much to those people who did audition, and I'm excited to debut the cast list for the very first performance of this play.

Being stuck in the house trying not to let the bad thoughts take over, I decided to get to work on preparing the Mrs. Hawking script for the Bare Bones reading. The real work will be in improving the actual text, which will require serious thought. But there's also preparing it so that it can be read in the circumstances of the Bare Bones form.

I will be able to pick six actors for this reading. That means multi-casting pretty carefully to keep the characters straight, and to keep anyone from having to talk to themselves in a given scene. The biggest challenge is in the stage directions. Because it's such an action-oriented play, a lot of the stage directions have to be read in order for the story to come across. But frankly six actors is the absolute minimum required to just cover the characters. So as a solution to that, I'm creating a rotating "narrator" role. The stage directions that need to be read will be indicated by formatting the directions as lines under the name Narrator, but it will switch between three, so no actor is double-cast as Narrator in a scene where they are playing a character.

I'm planning on choreographing the reading similarly to how PMRP productions work if you've ever seen them-- the actors will all sit in chairs along the back of the stage until they are in the current scene, at which point they will come up to stand at the front and read. Whoever is the narrator at the moment will act similarly, except they will have a designated narrator space to stand in at the far side of the stage's edge. Practicing the rhythm of coming out into place and returning will be an important part of rehearsal.

I will need three men and three women. And I would love it if you came out to audition. If you would be so kind as to lend your voice to this, go to the production website here and sign up for an audition slot. I would be very grateful for your help in bringing this piece forward.

Finally got some more info on my upcoming production of Work-Life Balance! Our two performances will go up in the 7pm block on Saturday the 15th and the 4pm block on Sunday the 16th at the Roy Arias Theater at 300 West 43rd Street in New York City. I checked out its website and it is a small but legitimate theater in Times Square, which is exciting. We run less than ten minutes, and will be going up alongside a number of other ten-minute plays.

I have also assembled a cast and crew. Wondra will be played by the lovely Charlotte Oswald, while my dear Jared has agreed to take on the role of Bantam. Steph will be co-directing with me, and has also been going above and beyond carrying out many producer responsibilities as well, and Bernie is going to advise on technical concerns. This should be a pretty undemanding show as far as the tech goes-- nothing like the prop-set-sound complexity that The Late Mrs. Chadwick had --but I will be glad to have somebody knowledgeable like him keeping an eye on it, considering the things I'd forget about.

Costumes are the only major issue to take care of. It takes a little thought to assemble a believable superhero outfit. For Wondra I bought a long-sleeved blue leotard, and I think Charlotte will also wear purple tights and this neat purple costume belt that I bought for a larp outfit exactly because it looked so superhero-y. I'd also like to make a symbol of some kind, probably also in purple, to put on the leotard's chest. Boots and a domino mask will complete the look. I've not entirely figured out Bantam's look yet, but I think the foundation of it will be Jared's black flight suit, and I think I found a neat fighting cock image to turn into his logo. Steph had an idea of using body paint to do masks on them, which is a particular skill of Charlotte's.

We have our first rehearsal tomorrow night. I'm really excited, so I'm going to make sure I'm prepared as much as I can be. We don't have much time, so I want to hit the ground running.

Today I got word that in one month I will have the opportunity to put up a play at a venue in New York City! Earlier this month I submitted one of my ten-minute plays, the superhero-themed Work-Life Balance, to the Short Play Lab having a showcase in the Roy Arias Studios at 300 West 43rd Street in NYC. It will go up on Saturday, December 15th and Sunday, December 16th. I'm not sure of the times yet, as it could be one of two blocks each day. This is extremely exciting for me, as it is my first time being selected from a juried script call.

For this call, I am responsible for putting the production together and bringing it to the venue. So that means I need to cast, rehearse, and costume this thing in a hurry. I've only got one month to put it together, but I only just heard I got accepted, and at least it's a short play. I am currently investigating who I'd want to cast that is available for this period, and who can make it to New York on those days. It's a responsibility I wasn't expecting to have right now, as I thought the next few weeks would be a reprieve for me, but it's worth it to have a script of mine put on in a real venue. At least it doesn't require any set or props-- I just need to wrangle a couple of actors for rehearsal, and figure out how to dress them up as superheroes.

Thank you to everyone who offered congratulations on this happening for me. :-) I was starting to get discouraged, so this was a real pick-me-up. Wish me luck getting everything together!