All Eyes on Me

This week I got to hear an advance edit of an audio drama in which I played a semi-important role. It was an interesting experience— I thought the piece came out very well, with some great performances in a fun script, and some very effective sound editing.

It was the first time in a long time I’ve played a substantial acting role in something. I used to be more of an actor than anything else, and I still really enjoy it, but in the last decade I’ve moved far more to the other side of the curtain. I prefer the control one has over the story as writer and director, and honestly I’m better at those anyway. But I still like acting, and I used to be not-half-bad at it, so I appreciate the rare occasion I can fit it into my schedule to perform in something.

Most artists are critical of their work, but since I’m a good director and only an okay actor, it’s hard not to fixate on how I’d LIKE my performance to be but may not actually be able to make it. Usually one of my strengths as a theater artist is my ability to evaluate a performance, figure out what’s going on in it and what it possibly needs, but it’s tough to look at my own objectively. And I go back and forth on what I think of the job I did here.

Don’t get me wrong, I think I did okay. Respectably well, definitely not embarrassing myself. I don’t sound like a scrub. But pretty much every other actor in the piece is definitely more skilled than me, so I think I suffer a bit by comparison. Still, I tried. The role required a London accent, and I worked very hard on it to prepare. Cari was even kind enough to join me on a long car ride where we spoke like Cockneys for the duration so I could practice. I was playing a straight man role in a fairly silly comedy, so my two big goals were: one, to not be working so hard at the accent as to inhibit my acting, and two, to keep my readings dimensional and not one-note with exasperation, which is a real danger when you’re playing the serious person responding to the insanity around them.

I think I mostly succeeded at not letting the accent flatten me. But as for managing the latter, I attempted to bring in a touch of amusement to leaven it. The character does have a sharp wit, so I tried to use that to make it sound like I was willing to at least sometimes roll with the madness rather than just push against it. I’m divided as to how well it came through. Maybe in some places, but not in others. Of course, it could just be that the director preferred different takes. Maybe I would have gravitated to other ones than those selected— of course, my attempts may not have worked as well as I hoped, or the vision could simply be different.

Anyway, I’m very glad I got to do it. I enjoyed the process and the challenge, and it was really nice to do a bit of acting again. Even if I may have been the weak link in the chain, just because everyone else was just so good. When it comes out, I'll be sure to point people to it-- and you can judge my performance for yourself.

Color sense really isn’t my best skill. Right now I’m working on an art project where I need to come up with color palettes for individual items, consisting of at least three or four colors each, and I’m struggling.

While I’m very interested in color and can see minor gradations in it, I find that I am mostly drawn towards very basic combinations when required to put them together. You can see it in my dress sense; while I think I’m pretty good at putting together outfits that look nice, they are almost always limited to just a few tones. I’m lucky that I look good in most colors and do wear a wide variety, but in any one outfit I gravitate towards one vibrant shade with a few neutrals, or various shades of all one hue. Like, teal with black and white, or various shades of oxblood with dark gray. It looks fine, but often it’s more interesting and sophisticated to combine several bright colors that compliment each other in unexpected ways. I also do this in my costume design, where I assign a general color to characters and otherwise only permit them neutrals, and often default to obvious palettes like red versus blue.

I’d like to get better at that, particularly since I think it would suit this project, but it’s hard. Right now my strategy has been to Google combinations and see what other people put together, hoping for inspiration. Maybe this kind of research will help train my eye so that I can get better at coming up with these things myself. Anything to not just default to a bright with two neutrals, or lots of tone-on-tone.

I saw The Substance this past weekend, and I am sorry to report I didn’t really like it. Not that it was bad, exactly, but I don’t think it was effective. At least, if it was trying to tell the story I was expecting. SPOILERS AHEAD.

From the marketing, I was going in for a story about a woman whose fear of losing her value as she aged leading her to destroy everything of ANY value about herself. I was preparing myself for this film to, for lack of a better term, trigger the hell out of me, or at least give me big feelings. This is, in theory, a horror movie for me, exploring ideas that I VERY SPECIFICALLY find scary. My fear of aging and becoming ugly is well-documented, after all. But it really didn’t work for me, because I don’t feel like it captured any of what that fear feels like.

To begin with, it is not a subtle film. That’s not necessarily a criticism, but I will say I did not care for it. Anytime a character was remembering something that just happened to them, the moment would be superimposed right on top of things, like it didn’t expect you to make the connection. The misogynist male executive was depicted as loud, gross, and over the top as possible— from having him rant in so many words about how old women sucked, to yucky closeups of him chomping on shrimp. And that’s to say nothing of how over the top the voyeurism of the camera was on Margaret Qualley’s body. I was kind of hoping to see a depiction of pervasive, insidious anti-aging bias is woven into the world, particularly for women, particularly for women in the limelight. It just seemed a bit too easy to have a very yucky man straight-up tell Demi Moore that fifty is too old— especially when she’s so beautiful that she’s able to pass for younger than fifty when she’s actually sixty-two.

Again, I get that this extremity and exaggeration was a deliberate stylistic choice. But to my sensibility, when you create a fantasy of a real experience, you are trying to use the fantastical elements to express true ideas in a manner that makes them stand out even more strongly than they do in life. So it wasn’t that I was expecting this lurid sci fi horror extravaganza to realistically depict the mundane indignities of getting older. But I felt like the representations should be clearly alluding to emotions and experiences that were recognizable enough to evoke horror. But I only saw one moment, maybe one and a half moments, that felt like genuine expression of the struggle of aging.

The first and realest was when her growing insecurity over her appearance in comparison to Sue while getting ready for her date led her to second-guess herself so badly, she not only ruined her appearance, she collapsed entirely. As someone who has wiped off fifty percent of all lipstick she’s ever applied in her entire life, because of staring in the mirror and genuinely being unable to tell if it looks good or clownish— as someone who has wondered if I ought to just get that tiny little poke of flesh at the corners of my jaw “taken care of” before anybody but me starts to notice— I felt that.

The only other one that came close, and to me used the extreme fantastical exaggeration effectively for once, was when her trollishly twisted self stood beside the portrait of herself in her glory days. The comparison— of having been perfect once, having known what it was like to have been beautiful, but intensely aware of how fleeting it is —shivered me, because it evoked a terror that runs genuinely deep. I’ve been lucky enough to have kept my figure up to this point, but my face has visibly aged, losing some roundness around the jawline and loosening up just a tiny bit at the jowls. Even as I exult over the fact that I can still wear a bikini I bought when I was nineteen, the changing shape of my face reminds me that it’s all just a matter of time before it all goes away. No amount of beauty you once had protects you from what’s to come.

It also didn’t manage to capitalize on its compelling premise. The idea was that you use a medical procedure to make a younger hotter self, and trade off weeks of getting to go out and live life. When the selves cannot split time and resources equally and become jealous of each other, they destroy one another. But I think they just didn’t build it out right. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll would maintain consciousness when he became Hyde; he had the same memories and awareness, just like everything about himself and his personality were different. He felt Hyde’s experiences, he knew what Hyde did, because— as was ultimately the point of the book —Hyde WAS him. In The Substance, main self Elisabeth and alternate self Sue shared no consciousness at all, and under most circumstances weren’t even able to meet each other. It wasn’t really like having an alternate self; it was more like having a child you had no relationship with, and no ability to develop one.

It really made it hard for me to see what the advantage of the process was— you miss out on half of your life, you don’t get to personally enjoy any of the benefits of being the young hot self, and you don’t even have any ability to develop love or affection for the other self to make you enjoy their success vicariously. The company that makes the Substance has to continually remind Elisabeth and Sue that they are one, but… they don’t feel that way, to us or to them, because they’re really not. The process really doesn’t facilitate anything that would make them feel that they are.

It made me wonder if maybe it was more a story about jealousy, or living vicariously through your child. But that lack of relationship between them left a lot of even that premise on the table.

I also didn’t quite understand the purpose of the extremely sexualizing camera angles constantly used on Sue. At first, I thought they were trying to establish the excitement of suddenly having an amazing body, and delighting in checking it out. That made sense to me. (Although for the record, if Margaret Qualley is hotter than Demi Moore, it’s only by the tiniest bit, which is saying something since Qualley is 29 and Moore is 62.) But they persisted with the objectifying closeups on her until almost the end of the movie. We get several sequences of her dancing shot like porn movies, with a particular focus on her ass. As I said, this is not a subtle movie, but after a while I didn’t get what it was trying to say by carrying it out so persistently. We knew by that point that she was hot, so… what? I thought eventually they might use the extreme objectification to make her body seem grosser and grosser, the way human physicality can become when you chop it up visually and get too close on the details, but by the time they were ready to do that, they actually started making her body itself fall apart. So it honestly started to feel like fan service to me, which seemed very out of place in a movie like this. If anybody has an idea of what they think it was trying to accomplish, I’d love to hear it.

There was also one element that cracked me up— the intense masculine voice that narrated the commercial for the Substance also was the one who answered the phone anytime Elisabeth and Sue called the company to complain. Poor guy, he probably auditioned for an acting gig and got stuck with a customer service job!

Well, it’s that time again!



Another August, another 31 plays written in 31 days, a month-long writing challenge where I write one new dramatic scene for all thirty-one days. I’ve done it consistently every year since 2012, and even when it’s felt like a hassle or not the best use of my writing time, I’m always happy to have done it by the time I’m through.

I’ve found that the challenge is the most productive for me when I use it to force myself to draft for a specific planned project. While I don’t have anything as outlined as I prefer to when I start drafting, I do have a few things that I have been turning over in my brain that I could use motivation to actually put on paper. I’ve got an episode of Dream Machine, some shorts for Little Monsters, some Texts from Avengers Tower, a scenes for prose fics and original pieces, and of course, Mrs. Hawking part 8. If I can direct the creative energy it takes to come up with thirty-one scenes in a month— and it takes a fair bit —it will accomplish a lot for those projects.

As I’ve done for the past number of years, I adapt the rules of the challenge to my own purposes. I can write scenes of larger work instead of full plays, and the length doesn’t matter as long as the scene has a complete arc. The scene also has to be fresh drafting, not just an edited version of something I’ve already written. It’s a lot of work, but it’s served me well over the years, if only to generate some interesting pieces. But it’d be really nice if I can make some progress on important stuff, rather than just fill out my little listy list of what I wrote year after year.

In the past several months I made a change to how I use social media. I put limits in place to block certain platforms that were actively chipping at my mental health, and to ensure I couldn't spend more than two hours a day on social media in general. I'd been increasingly developing the habit of compulsive scrolling and refreshing, and I really hated how much time I was wasting on dumb shit I didn't care about. I put in the blockers and gave the password to Bernie so I couldn't get around them. I've had abortive attempts at this in the past, so this seemed necessary to actually make it happen.

It was a rough transition. I've been having some mental health issues off and on since March of this year. I feel embarrassed saying this, seeing as in the last year so much of my life has been not only good, but a serious improvement over how things had been previously-- I got a new job that was a huge step up in my career, I moved into a new house, Bernie and I get to live together now. I don't mean to be ungrateful or unappreciative of all those great things. But I keep falling into intermittent low moods, and anxiety spikes hit me out of nowhere and sometimes keep my awake at night. A rough period was the precipitating event for the social media diet, since it seemed to be aggravating the condition.

For a few weeks after, my brain seemed to go into intense dopamine withdrawal, unable to focus on or get interested in anything. I felt like a lump and do anything was a struggle. It was especially rough in stressed out moments where I could feel the addictive behaviors coming out. But eventually I evened out. I no longer feel so under-stimulated, and some days I don't even hit the two hour limit. I'm certainly relieved at that.

But I was hoping I'd feel better in the day to day. I've been long concerned that social media aggravates the depression, and I was kind of hoping that cutting back might improve my general sense of wellbeing. I don't really think I've experienced that. I was also hoping it might help with my engagement issues, my trouble to get interested enough in anything to pay attention to it. But no luck there either, at least not that I've noted.

It's pretty disappointing. This has always been my problem-- I've always been good about changing my behavior to make things better. But altering how I FEEL, finding any way to change my emotions, I never seem to be able to manage.

Still, there are tangible benefits. I definitely waste less time, which always led to a huge sense of self-disgust, so I'm glad to be experiencing less of that. I've been reading more and more books, and having a much easier time doing so. I had years where I was barely reading any long-form anything, a huge source of consternation and shame, and I've vastly outstripped my reading goal for the year already. It may be a sign that it's improving my ability to focus. That I will definitely take.

Maybe it needs more time. Patience is not my strong suit. But, as a show I'm fond of says, it gets eaiser. But you have to do it every day.

That's the hard part.

I think it’s time I make some decisions about putting up art in my house. I expect Bernie and me to be there for a while, and it feels like mine in a way that previous places haven’t, so it feels possible and worth it in a way it never has before.

In the past I’ve had trouble putting up art, even in personal spaces like my bedroom. It always felt like such a difficult decision to make, to decide on what actually to devote wall space to. I would get stuck on “is this THE piece I want to have on my walls all the time?” and since I was never sure what was “good enough,” I’d be unable to commit and never put up anything.

But if my creative life has taught me anything, it’s that if you get hung up on trying to do it perfectly, you freeze up and never do anything at all. So I think I need to just… pick art that I genuinely like and not worry if it’s THE ART THAT I AM COMMITTED TO FOREVER THAT REPRESENTS ME TO ALL GUESTS IN MY HOME. I confess I DO want my art to create a certain home environment, which makes it harder to just pick stuff, even if it gives me joy. For example, I don’t particularly want to cover my place with fannish stuff, as I don’t really like the impression that makes. But the drawing of Peggy and Steve together post Endgame that Isaiah gave me as a housewarming present makes me smile every time I walk past it, so I’m really happy to have it up.

I guess it’s a balance to strike. I don’t want to be one of those people who picks art based on what other people think, or what best coordinates with the upholstery. But I like the idea of the space being tastefully curated. I have for a long time dreaming of living in a house that looked like a grownup lived there, instead of the perpetual college kid I have at times felt like.

I guess I need to just… get some art, see how I like it up, and if I don’t like it, take it down. Yeah, it means I can’t break the bank on anything. But as long as I don’t do that, I can always just change stuff and try something else! Have to remind myself of that.

Just finished my very last bit of student feedback on research papers. With that, I am finally done with my fall semester. Took me long enough!

This also concludes my first semester as a full-time faculty instructor at Lesley. My feelings a bit complex on it. I’m very grateful I had the opportunity; it was a really good career step for me. I also think I did very good work. I worked extremely hard and I’d say pretty successfully to support my students; with the level of intervention I was able to put in, everyone in my classes passed except one, with many others helped in other sections as well. I’m proud of how well I did on that level.

But I have to admit, it was harder on me that I thought it would be. That level of proactive outreach and direct student intervention was a lot of work— I think in some ways because of being an introvert. It was a lot of bothering people and intense personal contact. And I never did really figure out the right boundary to draw on making myself available to students. Unless I had a preexisting appointment of some kind, I mostly just met them whenever they could, even if it was outside of my office hours and inconvenient. It took a lot out of me, to the point where it made me feel like I wasn’t up to the task.

I did have maybe two weeks in there where I felt like I was getting the hang out of it— but it was very late in the semester, much later than I expected, and then preparation for finals crashed in. During that time I had so many students who needed help I was doing almost double the amount of meeting hours, and it threw off all my equilibrium again. So, I don’t know, maybe I did actually reach a turning point and the last handful of weeks were just worse; maybe it won’t feel so hard without that volume of kids. But it was kind of discouraging to feel like I had to work SO HARD just to get the job done. Like, if I were better at it, it wouldn’t be so hard.

I’ve been thinking about what, if anything, I may be able to adjust for this coming semester. There are limitations to what’s in my control, but if there is anything, I’d like to find it. I think the trouble is this position is temporary until I can prove it’s worth the money, so I feel such pressure to go ABOVE AND BEYOND so they’ll let me keep it. So drawing reasonable boundaries on my time and availability is tough, for fear that I won’t end up being useful enough. It’s good for me to have this job, so I’d like it to continue. But I think I need to change something about the way I do it. Unfortunately, that may not be an option until (unless) the question of whether I’m worth it is resolved.

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.

Recently I was talking about my inability to estimate the word count or even chapter number of my prose, and usually I guess wildly too low. Not a big deal, but could be frustrating when it comes to planning purposes, when you have a lot more work to account for than you thought! For example, The Hemingway Trip, my current WIP fanfic about Steve Rogers and Howard Stark’s friendship in the midcentury post Steve’s retirement in Endgame, grew to several times longer than I expected, with what I then guessed was 10,000 words rather than 5,000, and 8 chapters up from a proposed 4. But I was finally on the last chapter, so I was confident I knew where it was going to end up.

Well, guess what? I had to break the final chapter into two. Now there’s going to be NINE chapters total— GOD HELP ME IF THAT CHANGES —and probably more like 12,000 words.

WHY AM I SO BAD AT ESTIMATING THIS? 🤣 I’ve written several hundred thousand words of fan fic total at this point— you’d think I’d know my own writing habits better than this at this point!

Every time I get stuck, I end up having to remind myself of what I already know— I need to rely on process to get me writing again. It works every single time, sooner or later, and at this point you’d think I would be able to just zip to it immediately and not waste any more time than I have to!

In both my writing and my teaching of writing, I believe really strongly in developing a process. Inspiration can be fleeting and difficult to control, but if you have a series of steps to work through and questions to ask yourself to prompt ideas, you always have a means to move your creative work forward. I teach this in my classes, and use it in my own craft. But sometimes when I get busy I get stuck, and trip as much as anyone over not feeling like I know what to write next.

I’d recently kind of put my current fan fic in progress The Hemingway Trip aside. Partially out of being busy, and partially because I had a lot of trouble shaping the part of the conversation that was supposed to come next. The arc of it just wasn’t coming, and I put the two chapters containing it on hold for several months. But I have developed a trick bag of methods to try when I’m not sure, and I should know by know that sometimes they’re the only way out of a block.

First, I try to write the bad version of the idea. If you can’t do it the right way, do it the wrong way. Shoot for complete rather than good. You can always fix and develop a piece that exists; you can’t improve nothing at all. Garbage draft first, edit later.

But sometimes I can’t do that! I don’t even know what I’m shooting for with that part, so I can’t even do the bad version because I don’t know what I’m trying to achieve. So I strip it down to lower the bar further. I’m a dramatist by training, so for me I’ve found it’s easier to write out conversations as pure dialogue, as if they were a scene from a play or screenplay. I can add in narration and action later, but if I’m just trying to work out the trajectory of the interaction, simplifying it to dialogue only often makes it easier.

So I tried that— and it still wasn’t quite working! The arc of the dramatic action wasn’t manifesting. The characters were not progressing along the journey in the right way. So I had to take it one step even farther back! I had to just write an OUTLINE of what was supposed to happen. This story by way of example, involving Steve Rogers post-retirement to the midcentury, has him talking Howard Stark through what basically amounts to a midlife crisis. So I wrote stuff like “Here’s where Howard deflects. So Steve had to push harder. Howard finally confesses. Steve reacts with a shock and disapproval that hurts Howard’s feelings. Howard responds with anger at feeling so judged. Steve has to then modulate his response so as not to alienate his friend.” In serious projects, I NEVER get to work without a fully fleshed out outline, but even in these lower-intensity projects it’s sometimes the only way forward.

From the outline, I could work out what emotional beat was supposed to happen when. Knowing the pattern of the action, it became possible to figure out what they should say and write out the shape of the dialogue. Once I had the dialogue nailed down, I could flesh out the action and narration around it. Then I had a rough version of the scene! A bit more editing polish and I had a new chapter! Then another, both of which I’ve posted over the last two weeks. I’m happy with how they came out too!

It never ceases to amaze me how much a process helps. It really provides direction for what to write when you’re not being fired by the pure surge of inspiration. I really have to remember to just immediately start working through it whenever I get stuck.