The spirited stairway.
No bones about it, then: The Man Who Was Thursday has been a qualified hit. Tickets are at wait-list only at this point, and although New Leaf dearly wishes they could extend, a number of factors make that an impossibility. If you saw it, thank you. If you wanted to see it but couldn't for one reason or another; still, thank you.
This, then, is the hard part. For me, this is the hard part.
Writing a play takes a lot out of me, to be sure. Even some of the minute-long things for TML produce cold sweats and angst, pull blood out of my pores like a man undergoing vacuum decompression. There are long nights hunched over the keyboard, there are blank screens. There are the hundred thousand demons of distraction and despair gnawing on the neurons, there are phantom razors gliding across facsimile wrists.
But I still enjoy that. I wrestle with the art constantly but I never hate it. None of it manages to petrify every cell of my body the way that the prospect of The Next Step does.
The Next Step: that thing you're supposed to take when the thing you are doing becomes that thing you've done.
I am spending as much time as I can afford right now--between job searching, tour coordination, prime-time proposal meetings, teaching classes, re-reading my next adaptation project source material, doing research/brainstorming for the spring Neo-Futurist production, etc.--trying to find literary agents in the Chicago area who might be interested in attending this little runaway hit I wrote, as at this point I do have the power to get such a person in to see the otherwise impossible-to-see production before it closes. If you are or you know a literary agent who is interested, please let me know ASAP.
I'm proud of the work I do but I have no talent for self-promotion. Instead I self-sabotage, overcompensating modesty so as not to come across as arrogant. I maintain a complicated internal delusion about my relatively minor role in the creation of my own art and therefore tend to downplay my contribution to it. Fear of success, of course, on the basic level; but also a fear of losing myself in whatever success may bring. But it's a strange thing to fear losing oneself when one is still not entirely sure what one's self is.
This is an awful lot of introspective babble for one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life.
There's a hit show playing in Lincoln Park until November 21st with my name listed as author, and at this point your best shot to see it is to be somebody who can help me strike this hot, hot iron.
Sigh. Already I can hear my mind forming ways to temper this declaration.
My problem isn't so much that I need my ego to get out of the way as it is that I need it to bother showing up once in awhile.
This, then, is the hard part. For me, this is the hard part.
Writing a play takes a lot out of me, to be sure. Even some of the minute-long things for TML produce cold sweats and angst, pull blood out of my pores like a man undergoing vacuum decompression. There are long nights hunched over the keyboard, there are blank screens. There are the hundred thousand demons of distraction and despair gnawing on the neurons, there are phantom razors gliding across facsimile wrists.
But I still enjoy that. I wrestle with the art constantly but I never hate it. None of it manages to petrify every cell of my body the way that the prospect of The Next Step does.
The Next Step: that thing you're supposed to take when the thing you are doing becomes that thing you've done.
I am spending as much time as I can afford right now--between job searching, tour coordination, prime-time proposal meetings, teaching classes, re-reading my next adaptation project source material, doing research/brainstorming for the spring Neo-Futurist production, etc.--trying to find literary agents in the Chicago area who might be interested in attending this little runaway hit I wrote, as at this point I do have the power to get such a person in to see the otherwise impossible-to-see production before it closes. If you are or you know a literary agent who is interested, please let me know ASAP.
I'm proud of the work I do but I have no talent for self-promotion. Instead I self-sabotage, overcompensating modesty so as not to come across as arrogant. I maintain a complicated internal delusion about my relatively minor role in the creation of my own art and therefore tend to downplay my contribution to it. Fear of success, of course, on the basic level; but also a fear of losing myself in whatever success may bring. But it's a strange thing to fear losing oneself when one is still not entirely sure what one's self is.
This is an awful lot of introspective babble for one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life.
There's a hit show playing in Lincoln Park until November 21st with my name listed as author, and at this point your best shot to see it is to be somebody who can help me strike this hot, hot iron.
Sigh. Already I can hear my mind forming ways to temper this declaration.
My problem isn't so much that I need my ego to get out of the way as it is that I need it to bother showing up once in awhile.