All Eyes on Me

Today's piece goes to that source of inspiration that served me so well the first time around, drawing from the backstory of The Stand. This is an attempt at doing a better job at a scene that would have appeared in Sally and Deadeye, my original thesis piece that for whatever reason wasn't working the first time I tried to write it. (As you'll recall, I ended up abandoning it in favor of writing Mrs. Loring.) But I think it could still possibly be salvaged, especially since I'm no longer morbidly depressed. So, without looking at my original draft, I redid this scene from whole cloth. This is rough and rushed, but it's a stab.

This is extremely spoilerly for The Stand, just as a warning. It follows sometime after No Clean Break, a ten-minute I wrote in my first semester of grad school, which has had several readings now and is considered to be one of my more successful pieces.

Also, surprising no one, it features of one my more common Author Tropes.

( Day #3 - "For Her" )

I just got alerted that the information for the ten-minute play festival that includes my piece Public Enemy just went live. Thespian Production will be producing it as part of their Theatre Madness event this coming March, and the info just got posted on the website. I had a bit of a bad moment when I first looked and saw every piece but mine had a director listed. I shot a not-quite-panicked email to the organizer to make sure that finding one was not my responsibility-- because if it was, nobody had told me --but fortunately it was just an oversight, and the director's name was shortly added. Weird as hell oversight, though, I have to say, since literally every other featured piece had theirs included except mine. Whatever, it's fixed now, just glad I don't have to worry about it.

I do like this piece quite a bit, so I'm glad it's getting produced. Especially since it's not my responsibility to get together. I'm including it as part of my new full-length play that I'm writing for my thesis. It tells the story of a couple of famous outlaws from The Stand, which is a cool story I think but very large. Right now I'm trying to figure out how much of it I can tell in a single play, and how to do so efficiently. One of my biggest concerns is that since it spans so much time and space, it included a ton of characters, which might make it unwieldy for production. Also have to make all those life events connect in a complete arc in a way that doesn't feel excessively episodic. It'll be a challenge. I owe the first quarter of the piece by the 5th, so I think I'll just toss out everything I can possibly think of and edit it later.