All Eyes on Me

October Review Challenge, #14 - "What’s a piece of yours you feel got slept on?"

Oh, Christ. All of them.

Okay, kidding. Though I wish people would pay more attention to the stuff I've made. People are really resistant to trying new media. GO OUT AND WATCH AND READ MY STUFF, OKAY? IT'S REALLY GOOD AND I WANT THE ATTENTION ON IT.

Anyway, for real. Among my pieces that I always felt were better than they generally got credit for, I would have to say my cowboy larp, The Stand. I finished it back in 2011, after playing in a western game that I thought had potential but didn't quite live up to what I wanted it to be. I've always liked westerns, even though I think the genre needs updating to tell meaningful stories in the modern day, and I put in an effort to do so in this game. I had been writing larp, alone and in groups, for some time by this point, so my sensibilities were fairly well honed. I came up with some fun mechanics— the way you could travel to various locations to investigate in the surrounding terrain, the little mini game where you could wrangle wild horses. And I wrote some really meaningful story.



The game is set in the late 1840s, during westward expansion and just before the Civil War. There was a lot of interesting stuff about how people use power in a situation where authority and law was what you made it, and how people interacted with war and injustice. I did my best to meaningfully include characters who were Native American, Mexican, and black instead of allowing it the history to be whitewashed, especially given the big political issues of the time period. I had a resolution that one third of each racial group present in the game would play a heroic role, one third would play a villainous one, and one third would be a shade of gray. At the time that seemed fair to me, a way to hold myself accountable, though these days I am very, very cautious about villainizing characters from marginalized groups. And I know I am more educated about racial representation now than I was a decade ago, so I'm sure I made mistakes. If I were ever to run it again, I'd make sure it was carefully edited for any possible failures on that count, but I do recall trying my best. Still, there were a lot of really rich characters in the game, with interesting conflicts, relationships, and mysteries to unravel.

I ran it three times. It was kind of a big game, so I worried about it being hard to fill after that. And while I got a fair bit of positive feedback immediately after, it seemed like it kind of immediately left everybody's mind. Nobody much talked about it afterward, and I don't think anybody ever heard of it by word of mouth. I guess the experience didn't stick, which makes me sad. I'm not exactly sure why. The best I can come up with is that the style of larp was very conventional for narrative "secrets and powers" games, to use Nat's term, and the western genre didn't exactly light a fire under anymore.

Still, I'm quite proud of the game. And I have good memories of it. Haz Harrower-Nakama and Ada Nakama were legally married during one run of it, playing characters who were romantically involved. I got such a kick out of that. And natbudin wrote a song called "Stand and Deliver" from the perspective of central character Malcolm Royce, who was called upon to make a stand against a gang of bandits that were threatening the town. It's a really good song, available now on Blue Sky, Nat's latest album on Bandcamp. Those things are pretty serious honors, so I guess I should count my blessings. It means a lot when people emotionally engage with one's work in any way. It's basically the thing I want most in the world from people.

Oh, my God, I just started playing the silliest game and I am having so much fun doing it. I was making a chart of various things I've written to examine some demographic info-- genres, lengths, genders of the protagonists, that sort of thing --when I started thinking about the various character connections between the assorted pieces. As I mentioned, I've started considering everything I've written that's a basically-realistic-approximately-historical period piece (Mrs. Hawking, The Stand, Tailor, Mrs. Loring, Puzzle House Blues, Brockhurst, et cetera) to be all in the same universe. I found I could play a very amusing version of six degrees of separation between characters based on who would have known or encountered who, and I have been happily wasting time writing out the connection chains.

I've discovered I can link all the protagonists from my completed major works-- Victoria Hawking and Mary Stone, Tom Barrows and Alice Loring, Josie Jenkins, Elizabeth Loring --plus the characters I've explored to great extent-- Flora Johansson, Carson Hill --all within the proscribed six degrees. I was surprised at first to see linkages flowing through certain characters much more than others, until I thought about it-- they tended to be those that have appeared in more than one work, or at least more than one area of the greater universe. I roughly break it up into the "Hawking" section, London in the 1880s, the "Fairfield" section, the east coast of America in the first half of the 20th Century, and the "Stand" section, the California territories in the middle of the 19th Century. The most frequently occurring characters were Lillian Holland/Lou Amsterdam, Elizabeth Loring, Marcus Loring, (all "Fairfield") Jamie Harper, ("Stand") and Reggie Hawking ("Hawking"). Those last three all appear in my 1910s-era larp Brockhurst, the first piece I ever wrote that was explicitly crossing all three section. Elizabeth was mentioned in Tailor before she starred in Mrs. Loring, and Lou who first appeared in Mrs. Loring before she recurred in Puzzle House Blues.

The greater universe should probably have a name. I'm tempted to just call it the Breaking Light Universe, but not everything I write takes place in it-- see Alice, Oz, Chadwick, Adonis, the Vantage 'verse, and others. Call it "Breaking History," maybe? I don't know. I like things to have names. I'll think about it some more?

This is a very silly preoccupation, and likely nobody cares but me, but damn, I'm having fun with it. :-)

Another piece drawn from the back story of The Stand. Buck and Kenneth Dillon were a team of brother who were some of the most successful US Marshals in the territory, until Kenneth was rescued by a Yurok woman by the name of Negahse'wey and found he wanted to follow her way of life instead of the one he'd been raised to. But when he returned to his brother Buck, he did not find a warm reception to his new identity. I'm surprised I never worked on this scenario before, because it has a lot of dramatic potential.

( Day #16 - "Not My Brother" )

Yesterday I submitted the second packet of homework for my thesis, which included the second quarter of the play I'm writing about some of the outlaws in The Stand. I haven't been posting those pieces here because at this stage it's mostly what some writers call a "vomit draft," where you just throw every idea you have out on the page with the intent to clean it up later. I don't think I'll show you that until I get a chance to go over it with a chainsaw, as I expect it to be substantially different.

But it got me thinking about my Stand-related theater. Another full-length play I could write could be about PC Carson Hill, the protagonist of The Triumph of Law which will get a reading on public access TV this April. I had a few scratching of a new scene for it, and though it is still only a fragment, very much out of context, it follows up on the issue brought up in The Triumph of Law. It also features Emma Holloway, another PC from the game, making her debut in my Stand-related theater. This spoils a major secret in the game, so read only if you don't care or can't be spoiled.

( "Ain't Pity" )

My residency period for my fourth and final semester of graduate school began this week. Things seem to be going okay so far. I had my ten-minute Stand-inspired play Wildflowers workshopped yesterday, and the response was positive and the criticism useful. I always wait to see if my teacher has any amount to say about it, because I think it's an indicator that they're becoming engaged, and fortunately that seemed to be the case. The fourth semester is the thesis semester for my program, which means I have to revise an old full-length piece, write a new full-length piece, write a new ten-minute play, and design a seminar for my fellow students on some aspect of craft. My teacher said she'd be happy to work on the larger story Wildflowers is part of as my thesis, which would be cool. It makes me feel good to hear she likes it.

Also regarding that larger story, I was fortunate enough to get another ten-minute play accepted for performance. This one is Public Enemy, which happens to be another piece of the story that Wildflowers helps to tell. It is spoilery for The Stand, and was written as part of 31 Plays in 31 Days. This one will also be happening in New York, produced by a group called Thespian Production as part of the 2013 Winter "Theatre Madness" at Joria Main Stage Theater at 260 West 36th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY. The production dates will be from March 7-9th. This is cool because it's the first piece of this story to see performance, which will be great if I'm going to develop it this semester for my thesis. Also, perhaps best of all, I need do nothing at all to put the production together. As much as I like putting shows together, personally getting things together to go up in New York is a little tough, and lately I don't have a lot of extra time and energy. I'm hoping for more of this in the future, so I can have lots of production without driving myself insane. :-)

So this brings the tally up to four performances of three plays-- The Late Mrs. Chadwick, Work-Life Balance, and Public Enemy --and two readings-- of Mrs. Hawking and The Triumph of Law. Here's hoping things continue in this vein!

Over the last couple weeks I wrote another ten-minute play based on The Stand. This one is probably spoilery too, so probably only those who don't want to play in future runs should read. The characters featured are Sister Flora Johansson and Violet Wood, both PCs. I like the idea of this scene a lot, though the piece itself probably needs polishing.

( The Stand play series - "Wildflowers" )

So I got through the month of August having written a play for each of the thirty-one days, and I'm quite proud of myself. It went  differently than I expected it to, and though it was hard and an additional source of stress at a time when that might have been the last thing I needed, but I think it was extremely beneficial for me and I'm extremely glad I undertook it.

First of all, it got me writing. It forced me to practice my craft whether I was feeling it or not. They say every word you write helps you become better, so of course the more you do it, the more you improve. I've learned a lot about how plays should be put together over the last year and the only way to get better at doing that is to practice. 

Secondly, it gave me a ton more material for my portfolio. Up to this point I've had relatively few finished, useable pieces to my name as a playwright, which makes it hard to submit into consideration for production. Now I have a bunch of things I can fix up into submissions. Starting and getting the words on paper is often the hardest part, bow now I have things to go on. I can edit what I came up with last month, whip it into shape, without the pressure of coming up with the bones of the original idea. 

When I got ready to start, I expected to have to just write some nonsense each day just to meet the quota. When I've tried to just force myself to write something in the past, I've had a very hard time summoning any meaningful inspiration on command. But to my surprise, I think that happened maybe three times in the thirty-one days. (They were, for reference, #13 "Explain," #25 "Daughter's Daughter," and #29 "Playing the Game.") All the other times I was able to come up with an actual idea I could get mentally invested in. I'm shocked and delighted that I was able to do that. 

Some of them, such as the many based on The Stand, were drawn from the stories of characters I already knew and cared about. I got no fewer than seven short plays from that larp of mine (the plot of which I'm particularly proud) not counting the one I wrote for school first semester. All of them, I feel, could be polished into real ten-minute plays. Maybe they could even be pieced together into a full-length, especially given how many pieces I got out of the backstory of one particular character. I'd like to see if I can come up with even more, given how many cool characters I have in that game.

Other pieces came from ideas I'd had floating around in my head but heretofore had never done anything with. I'd had the vague notion that I could make a play about a supermodel who is catastrophically disfigured in an assault and must rebuild her life and identity now that she is no longer beautiful. Pieces #1 "Pretty is Power" and #23 "Lie Down and Die" are the first bits of work I've done toward actually realizing that story. I now have a start for a new play that I wouldn't have otherwise had. 

In two instances I came up with a brand-new concept I think I could do something with. I came up with the character of fashion designer Freddy Moreau who featured in pieces #17 "Slimming" and #28 "Better Design" in the course of this challenge, and I have become quite interested in the idea of him learning the absurdities of the notions of body image in the retail fashion industry. I never would have come up with him if I hadn't undertaken this. Also, I'm pretty excited about doing more with my somewhat meta, humorous take on what it is to live the life of a superhero as done in #5 "Wondra" and #14 "Work-Life Balance." 

In other cases it provided impetus to work on scripts that I needed for other things. I wrote six, possibly even seven, scenes that I could adapt for use in my ballet-themed graphic novel. I also wrote one scene for Mrs. Hawking, which will feature in the next installment of the play I will be handing in for credit. Getting even the tiniest bit ahead is really helpful, given how much work I have to get through this semester.

Finally, you may recall that in Break a Leg, an important part of the gameplay will be "cobbling together a play" to put on in two hours because the death of the leading lady has made their previous show unplayable. Fortunately, before her nervous breakdown, the playwright associated with the troupe left scattered pieces of scripts around the backstage area that can be performed instead. So the players have the option to perform scenes during the game, hopefully as humorously and outrageously as possible. That means I have to write those scenes! But I think in the course of this project, I may have generated a couple that may be viable for inclusion in the game. I won't tell you which ones so as not to ruin the surprise, but that's a little work off me already. :-)

So I think there's a lot more good than not in the things I wrote last month, even if only in the form of good bones that still require editing. I really like a number of the things I wrote, and definitely plan on devoting the time to revising them. I have been encouraged to have pieces read aloud to hear how they sound, so I would really like to have an evening of readings of my favorites from this. Cook a nice meal and have all of you over to read some of my favorite pieces. If anyone has any opinions or suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them. 

Now I just need to figure out what to do for edits. Which to do first, where to go from here. But I'm taking a day or two to just enjoy having completed the challenge to write thirty-one plays in thirty-one days. 

And we're back to plays based on The Stand! Apologies again that this one also contains a spoiler from the game. This one is about the backstory of Carson Hill, the PC played thus far by laurion, bronzite, and usernamenumber. There's not much I can say about it at the moment, except that I think the ending needs work, but I think this is a very dramatic scene. Again I kind of took it for granted that you knew what they were talking about, so I hope it still reads.

( Day #11 - "The Triumph of Law" )