I aten't dead
Hello, friends!
I realized it's been ages since I posted, so I thought I'd check in.
I'm editing as well as writing now. It's wonderful to get paid for being nitpicky, though I'm still insecure enough to double-check myself against the Chicago Manual of Style every few minutes. Fortunately, my instincts are nearly always right and the cases where they're not are generally things that only come up rarely, so I'm getting more comfortable with the process.
I continue to do murder mystery dinners, both acting and writing. We're getting a lot more bookings than we were for a while there, thank goodness. We now have two regular venues for shows open to the general public: one in town and one on a riverboat in Peoria. We did our first gig at the former back in the summer. We've done them on the riverboat for several years, but we've gone from three dates a year to five last year to seven this year. Our cruises tend to sell out, which is wonderful. (It's also a lot of work; there are two dining rooms on different decks, so we have to do many scenes twice - have an argument downstairs, chase each other upstairs, and repeat all the key information. But that's okay.)
I've written a couple more scripts since I last posted. "Who is the Klondike Kid?" is the prequel to "The Klondike Kid Comes to Forty Mile," the one I wrote for the reindeer ranch. We get a lot of requests for the original, so I wrote another in the hopes that we could mix things up to prevent actor boredom. It premiered earlier this month, and went very, very well. Actual standing ovation well, which I've never seen before.
I also did one called "Dead Air," which is a blatant spoof of WKRP (though with a few characters dropped and added.) That premiered on the riverboat in the fall, and we did it in town this past Sunday. I gave myself a challenge in that one by deciding I'd like to play an extremely airheaded character. (Our organizer assigns roles from whoever's available, but she usually gives the author dibs.) I was a bit nervous about sustaining the breathless squeak all evening, but it turns out to be fun. Kind of restful, too - I don't have to keep track of much of anything, since my character is so dumb. (I do keep track of how the other subplots are running as best I can, of course - it's reflex by now - but I don't have to be as attentive as if I was the victim or investigator.)
And I have one script completed and delivered that I don't have feedback on yet. (I don't blame our organizer - she's in a very intense play right now and doesn't have the spare time or attention to give another script.) It's called "Mommie Deadest" and has a rather '80s nighttime soap opera vibe: rich people being horrid to one another. It's set at a memorial service for the matriarch of a family that owns a winery.
Gaming continues to be good. I'm still one of the STs for the vampire LARP. We made major changes this year, keeping the same setting but jumping forward in time a few years, removing all past PCs, and mucking with the political situation. The town now has Camarilla, Sabbat, and Anarch factions and a number of Independent types (Giovanni and Setite, mostly), which of course makes for delicate balancing acts. They've had mutual enemies in the form of demons and mortal infernalists, which kept them off each other for a while. We also did a major rules overhaul this year, which was a huge (and ongoing) project with, I think, good results.
In tabletop, we have several campaigns going, all fun. I'm actually running a tabletop game for the first time in several years, a reboot of my Buffy game (run in GURPS). It's been rather a struggle for me; I have ideas but I keep feeling like I've got ideas that belong five sessions down the road and none for the next one. I've asked the players to help me fill out the NPC roster, which is helping considerably.
After a brief schedule-conflict hiatus (the concerts overlapped Anime Central) last spring, I'm once again singing with Amasong. I've passed along the role of Alto 2 section leader, though - it's not a big job but I hit a point last fall where it was just One More Thing and I decided it was time for it to be someone else's Thing. We have a lovely array of music as always, from a wide variety of cultures and languages. (I should really recheck my running tally of languages I've sung in Amasong. It's over 50, that much I know.)
I see some local friends often, am spectacularly bad at keeping up with other folks, and visit family when I can. I watch too much TV. I spend inordinate amounts of time on Facebook and RPGnet, though usually while multitasking. Winter War (the local gaming con/geek family reunion) is coming up this weekend; it's always a highlight of my year. Anime Central is in April this year and I'm looking forward to staffing as usual.
I think that's about it. It looks like a lot and yet not much. I've been wandering along the edge of the great pit of depression for some time - managing not to fall entirely in, but stumbling too close for comfort some days. I just don't talk about it often and perhaps I should. (Don't worry about me. I keep an eye on myself and have other people keeping an eye too. If things get too bad, I should be able to get some kind of help.)
I realized it's been ages since I posted, so I thought I'd check in.
I'm editing as well as writing now. It's wonderful to get paid for being nitpicky, though I'm still insecure enough to double-check myself against the Chicago Manual of Style every few minutes. Fortunately, my instincts are nearly always right and the cases where they're not are generally things that only come up rarely, so I'm getting more comfortable with the process.
I continue to do murder mystery dinners, both acting and writing. We're getting a lot more bookings than we were for a while there, thank goodness. We now have two regular venues for shows open to the general public: one in town and one on a riverboat in Peoria. We did our first gig at the former back in the summer. We've done them on the riverboat for several years, but we've gone from three dates a year to five last year to seven this year. Our cruises tend to sell out, which is wonderful. (It's also a lot of work; there are two dining rooms on different decks, so we have to do many scenes twice - have an argument downstairs, chase each other upstairs, and repeat all the key information. But that's okay.)
I've written a couple more scripts since I last posted. "Who is the Klondike Kid?" is the prequel to "The Klondike Kid Comes to Forty Mile," the one I wrote for the reindeer ranch. We get a lot of requests for the original, so I wrote another in the hopes that we could mix things up to prevent actor boredom. It premiered earlier this month, and went very, very well. Actual standing ovation well, which I've never seen before.
I also did one called "Dead Air," which is a blatant spoof of WKRP (though with a few characters dropped and added.) That premiered on the riverboat in the fall, and we did it in town this past Sunday. I gave myself a challenge in that one by deciding I'd like to play an extremely airheaded character. (Our organizer assigns roles from whoever's available, but she usually gives the author dibs.) I was a bit nervous about sustaining the breathless squeak all evening, but it turns out to be fun. Kind of restful, too - I don't have to keep track of much of anything, since my character is so dumb. (I do keep track of how the other subplots are running as best I can, of course - it's reflex by now - but I don't have to be as attentive as if I was the victim or investigator.)
And I have one script completed and delivered that I don't have feedback on yet. (I don't blame our organizer - she's in a very intense play right now and doesn't have the spare time or attention to give another script.) It's called "Mommie Deadest" and has a rather '80s nighttime soap opera vibe: rich people being horrid to one another. It's set at a memorial service for the matriarch of a family that owns a winery.
Gaming continues to be good. I'm still one of the STs for the vampire LARP. We made major changes this year, keeping the same setting but jumping forward in time a few years, removing all past PCs, and mucking with the political situation. The town now has Camarilla, Sabbat, and Anarch factions and a number of Independent types (Giovanni and Setite, mostly), which of course makes for delicate balancing acts. They've had mutual enemies in the form of demons and mortal infernalists, which kept them off each other for a while. We also did a major rules overhaul this year, which was a huge (and ongoing) project with, I think, good results.
In tabletop, we have several campaigns going, all fun. I'm actually running a tabletop game for the first time in several years, a reboot of my Buffy game (run in GURPS). It's been rather a struggle for me; I have ideas but I keep feeling like I've got ideas that belong five sessions down the road and none for the next one. I've asked the players to help me fill out the NPC roster, which is helping considerably.
After a brief schedule-conflict hiatus (the concerts overlapped Anime Central) last spring, I'm once again singing with Amasong. I've passed along the role of Alto 2 section leader, though - it's not a big job but I hit a point last fall where it was just One More Thing and I decided it was time for it to be someone else's Thing. We have a lovely array of music as always, from a wide variety of cultures and languages. (I should really recheck my running tally of languages I've sung in Amasong. It's over 50, that much I know.)
I see some local friends often, am spectacularly bad at keeping up with other folks, and visit family when I can. I watch too much TV. I spend inordinate amounts of time on Facebook and RPGnet, though usually while multitasking. Winter War (the local gaming con/geek family reunion) is coming up this weekend; it's always a highlight of my year. Anime Central is in April this year and I'm looking forward to staffing as usual.
I think that's about it. It looks like a lot and yet not much. I've been wandering along the edge of the great pit of depression for some time - managing not to fall entirely in, but stumbling too close for comfort some days. I just don't talk about it often and perhaps I should. (Don't worry about me. I keep an eye on myself and have other people keeping an eye too. If things get too bad, I should be able to get some kind of help.)