All Eyes on Me

I feel sick. I can't believe this is really America, that this is really what the justice system has become. I thought that better people would prevail in the light of the evidence, but no, it's all just one awful thing after another.

I am going to the Mike Brown Day After the Verdict protest tomorrow with morethings5. It's at 2400 Washington Street, Roxbury, MA at 7PM. I've never done anything like this before, and I don't know if it will do any good. But it's something to do to show that this is not okay. Maybe if enough voices cry out against it, something could change. I don't know. But I don't want to do nothing.

For some hope to hold onto, it's a Missouri grand jury that refused to indict. That means that there's a chance that the federal court may say differently. Maybe the outcry could help that. I don't know. I only know no justice, no peace.

So I've decided I'm just going to post the draft of Lame Swans I handed in for school. As I mentioned, the images are not edited a carefully as I would like them to be, but I won't have time to work them over any time soon, and I'd like to share this mostly-completed work with you. The models who did so much for me deserve to see the results of their Labors. I'll post one scene of the book a week or so.

( Scene 1 - "The Lake" )

I have been mostly absent from this blog for the last week, which I hate doing, but I was so busy getting ready for this past weekend that I had no time. This past weekend was our trip to New York City to put on our production of Work-Life Balance, my original superhero ten-minute play!

It was a great trip. Our merry band consisted of myself, my tireless co-director/producer Steph, and our stars, Charlotte as Wondra and Jared as Bantam. We left Friday evening and drove to Long Island, where Steph's lovely family gracious allowed us to stay with them for our trip. The Karols were incredibly kind and supportive, excited to see the show, cheering us on, and making breakfast for us both days. We were incredibly lucky that they were willing to help us out that way.

Steph squired us all over the city, finding us tasty restaurants and keeping us on a good schedule. We'd never have been able to navigate so efficiently without her. She even took me to see Mood, the giant designer fabric store, when I realized we were in the Fashion District. That was really exciting, and that place is fabulous. You have to take an old-fashioned elevator to get there, and it has every notion and fabric you could possibly imagine. I'm so glad I got a chance to see it.

The show itself went very well. The theater itself was a small hole-in-the-wall sort of place, but near to Times Square and just up the street from the Spider-Man musical. We had full or nearly full audiences both times, and Bernie and Kindness were wonderful enough to make the trip all the way from Massachusetts to come see it. I'm so grateful that they went to the trouble. Jared and Charlotte did a great job, committing to the roles, carrying the humor, and even looking pretty damn cool in their costumes. I wish I'd remembered to take pictures. We stood up well against the other pieces, some of which were good, some less so. We certainly didn't do too badly for our New York debut.

I'm so glad we did it. Here's to hoping this is the first of many such productions, with great collaborators like these.

I was a productive little worker Bee over the last few days. I set several goals for myself to accomplish this weekend and I believe I managed every one of them. What I have done includes:

- Finishing my first assignment for screenwriting
- Writing an additional scene for Tailor
- Incorporating ten thousand steps of walking into my routine
- Making headway into my sewing text
- Starting the first Hipster Feminist plot line
- Cleaning my room

I have also consumed several gallons of apple cider in an effort to stave off my chronic dehydration, but that's probably not an accomplishment so much.

Still that leaves a number of things. First and foremost, I need to do my first assignment for science fiction and fantasy. Unfortunately I put this off a lot in favor of the screenwriting assignment, so I don't have a ton of time left for this. I'll chunk this out better for the second round of assignments.

I also really have to edit that additional scene for Tailor. In my desire to just get it done, I broke with my usual pattern of tweaking as I go and instead just banged out the scene from start to finish. Jared and Kindness were the first to read it, and they both gave the extremely spot-on criticism that there isn't enough conflict in the scene. There needs to be more of a struggle for the information to come out, as it is information Kenneth would want to conceal. Plus, conflict raises tension, always necessary for drama. Kenneth is the character Jared is playing, and in the course of developing his performance he tends to internalize a very well-defined idea of who his character is, and Kenneth just spilling his guts wasn't in the conception he'd gotten of the man. Kindness is a man of excellent artistic taste, who I thank for being Palamon-like enough to give it to me straight, both on the positives and the negatives of what he sees in my pieces. I was lucky they were my first responders to the scene, because now I know what I have to do to fix it.

Now that I've taken the plunge and begun the first-ever tweet chain plot for Hipster Feminist, I need to be on top of where the action's going. I am now two tweets in, so there's no going back. ;-) I haven't done as much working out of the storyline or the tweets illustrating thereof as I would have liked, so I have to get on it. They tend to come out funnier when I come up with them in advance and I can tweak them into optimum shape.

I have settled on a new project I am very excited about. In order to scratch the theater-making itch without having to deal with organizing all the details of a production and a long rehearsal period, I have decided to make an audio drama. The script is coming along nicely, a sort of old-fashioned mystery I call The Tailor of Riddling Way. I still have to learn about the conventions of the genre, and figure out the technical logistics, but the script is coming along well. Here is another piece that I composed over the course of today. I've cast a handful of the number of roles I am going to need voices for, and this piece features Rowan Loring, the character I want for the talented morethings5. One of the best parts of dramatic writing is casting the people whose acting I like, and I am already excited just imagining it now.

( Alice never knew much about her father Rowan, who died in the war when she was just a baby... )

So last night I did some serious work on my blank verse writing assignment. I don't know how good it is, but it's something, it's an honest effort with some substance to it. But I kind of like the topic at least, because I am writing about the conflict between Palamon, the fan favorite character from To Think of Nothing, and the younger brother of his who craves his approval.

There is a quick mention of a person in To Think of Nothing named Zephyrus as someone who attended an earlier show written by Cassander. Zephyrus is, in fact, Palamon's younger brother, who, to create contrast with his sibling, I decided is an actor who wants and never feels he gets the approval of the renowned theater critic he's related to. With that in mind, stuck for something to write about, I decided to write about the brothers working their crafts against one another.

I love the character of Palamon, It's weird to say about your own character, who hopefully ends up as whatever you designed him to be, but I find him so fun and charming and funny with an honesty that cuts through the bullshit to the bone, and I love it. This is shaped not only by my own intentions but by the fabulous performance of morethings5. Nobody could have played him more perfectly than Kindness, whose rendition made the character loveable, amusing, and yet still with that sharp incisiveness that gives him weight in addition to his comedy.


There you have it, the only one with the guts to sit in Cassander's chair. I just want to write reams and reams about him, so I've been craving a chance to use him in something again. And I'm amused by the fact that I'm writing him to speak in blank verse. I will post the results when I'm finished, which knowing me will likely not be before Friday, the last possible day I have to work on it.

I also need to get started on my regular playwrighting assignment. I was struck today with the notion to use two characters from The Stand, of all places. A PC and an NPC, the one who kind of captured my imagination and made me think there could be all kind of cool stories written about him. I can't work on that until I finish the stuff with the more pressing deadline, but that could be interesting to work on as well. Heh, though I think it would be spoilery for those who have not played the game.

The Burn Notice game went well last night. I felt especially good going into this one, partially because I was so excited to get back to this game, and partially because I was feeling very well-prepared. Jared and I had hammered out a particularly well-thought-out storyline this time around. While normally I do try to be very thorough, I usually have some gaps in what I've settled on that need to be filled in on the fly, but for this plot things were about as fleshed out as they possibly could be. I have Jared's help to thank for that.

Probably the thing I love best about this game is how the players play off of each other. The original three, Bernie, Matt, and Kindness, have established these awesome relationships between their characters that they roleplay so well together. And even better, before long Michael was clicking into it too, and I had an entire table to fun, funny, dynamic players who did interesting things, had fabulous interactions, and interspersed so much humor between the more serious plot moments of the game. Seeing as getting that going was my whole purpose in starting up the game, I am ridiculously pleased.

I still sometimes think I'm the world's lamest GM, given that I forget stuff like action dice and sometimes have to say, "Okay, GM break time," then go hide in the bathroom and rock back and forth muttering "What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?" But of course, there is no scenario you can entirely plan out, because players always always do things you don't necessarily expect. Still, I think I did a good job of expanding the concepts I already had to give responses to the actions they took. The one thing I'm a little disappointed with myself over is how I handled the investigation of the red herring in the plot. They were supposed to look into it and figure out that it wasn't actually the solution to the mystery, but unfortunately I couldn't find a way to tie in any actually useful clue into that investigation. I guess that's not unrealistic, but I didn't want the players to feel as if they'd wasted all that time. Not sure they did, but I think I could have handled it a little more skillfully.

What I want to do from here is activate more of the personal and meta-plots for the characters. I planted a couple of seeds for future things here and there, but they need to start factoring in. That will require a lot more planning on my part, but it will make the story and world so much richer.

Now for my actual reviews of my experience of Larpercalia as a participant rather than as con chair! Spoilers are minimal.

Friday night was Prince Comes of Age, a game the production of which I had heard a great deal. It is, as you may know, set in the larger campaign setting made up by morethings5, and in fact included larp versions of five PCs of a game he ran a few years ago. I had a blast in this one as a secretly scheming character who was playing several sides against one each other. One of my favorite things to do in a larp is weave an elaborate lie to achieve my ends that everyone buys into, and that is exactly what happened here. Great interactions included my drug-dealing ne'er-do-well date played by Michael Hyde, and speaking very very earnestly to hazliya  in ways that served me and actually did kind of help her despite the fact that I told many, many lies. :-) I highly recommend this game, written by Kindness, Bernie, and Matt to excellent collaborative effect. There is a lot going on and the writing is very well done, though I think the character sheets could stand some pruning-- there is a little over-enthusiastic background scene-setting that is a bit too verbose. And for those of you who were afraid everyone else would be supporting cast to the characters of that campaign's PCs, worry not, the storylines are well-balanced. 

Here is me and my date, Ferlis, who spent most of the evening either high or facilitating the getting of others high.


Saturday morning was the second run of my newest solo game, The Stand. The game went well enough and pretty much everyone told me they had fun, but frankly I thought the Intercon run went better. The first time around nearly all the secrets came out except for maybe two, while in this there was a lot more plot that simply failed to materialize. I was especially disappointed that so little of the emotion-heavy plot that would have been bronzite 's did not come to be, as it's some of my favorite in the game. One thing that may be to blame was that people seemed really low-energy, too tired from the late night before. Also, as solid as the game may be, I don't think anyone was really excited about the concept. They signed up for it because it sounded neat enough and probably on the strength of my name, as I've built up a pretty decent reputation by now. That's flattering, to be sure, but I don't think anyone really sunk their teeth into the concept. I confess I'm slightly disappointed, as the game is extremely full and well-constructed and I think really demonstrates how much I've grown as a larp writer, which I'm not sure really showed through in this run. Ah, well.

Saturday afternoon I played Ruins of Grandeur by Bernie, Matt, Kindness, and Michael, which I really wanted to like. Unfortunately my particular piece of it was fatally flawed in the design and could not function in the game. I'm really sorry I had such a low time, but all my tricks to get engaged failed me. I think by and large people enjoyed it, but my casting was so broken that I had very few hooks into the plot and literally zero power with which to make anything happen. I'm usually the kind of player who can make something up if her character is a little thin and find a way to have my own good time, but when I tried that absolutely no one really met me on anything I did. I wish I could speak to the overall story, but I saw so little of it that I'm afraid I can't give an opinion. I think most people really liked this game and had a good time, but my character must be completely overhauled before they ever run it again.

Saturday night I ran the most recent game I wrote with Alleged, the experimental larp Resonance, and this time it went amazing. At Intercon natbudin and I were slightly disappointed with how things went-- we had a fairly gamist set of players who didn't seem to really get that the story is supposed to be allowed to unfold to make for an emotional experience, rather than a problem to be solved. This time we didn't have that problem at all. Our group here went with it smooth as you could be; I especially enjoyed their conversations sharing information and trying to speculate on what it meant. Among many others, in_water_writ was amazing with a character completely against her type, and rigel fascinatingly stepped into a leadership role. I spent much of the game watching Jared, curious for his reaction, and was pleased to see him leap into the concept wholeheartedly and beautifully act his parts. At the dead dog, bleemoo gave us the great compliment of saying it may be the best game he's ever played. I am incredibly pleased with it this time around, and consider it proof that our concept is capable of working out the way we wanted it to.

Sunday afternoon I zonked around consuite and tried not to pass out. So, despite some ups and downs, I consider this to be a typically awesome Festival weekend, made even better by the knowledge that I put it all together. Hope you all had a great time, and will be joining us there next year!