The Dotted Logline

Playwriting was one of the best workshops I took while working on my MFA at Emerson. It was also the most aggravating. I was focused primarily on screenwriting, which was all tight structure and tighter dialogue and plotting everything out down to the tiniest little detail in advance. Playwriting was all about letting things flow and meander where they wanted in the hopes that they would eventually come together into something beautiful, perhaps even coherent. It was a very organic process. Scary as hell, too.

But my playwriting professor, Betsy Carpenter, must have been doing something right. Her class swept the playwriting fellowship awards at least three years in a row, with the winners (myself included) receiving full productions from the very same theater department that vastly outnumbered us in number of entries. And this was despite a deadline that was increasingly pushed back to cripple the workshop and us sacrificing most of class one week for a “field trip” to the pub next door to watch a few innings of the Red Sox/Yankees game (a trip that was both completely dry and top secret, of course.)

Betsy ended up being my graduate thesis adviser. As my thesis was a screenplay and I was working on it long distance to avoid paying another year’s rent in Boston, I was a little concerned about how things would work out. Betsy was great, in an incredibly odd way, but she was rather unpredictable too, much like playwriting itself. It was a a bit of a scary prospect.

Scarier when I didn’t hear back from from her about my preliminary draft for a few months.

When I did finally hear from her, Betsy told me that the screenplay would certainly pass the thesis defense in its current state, but she thought that I could do better. It was tepid, as she put it.

She had two words of advice. “Watch Brazil.”

So I did. And she was right. Brazil showed me exactly what was wrong with my script and exactly what I needed to do to fix it. In the end, there was very little “defense” needed for my thesis defense.

I was in Boston for two weeks to wrap up all of my thesis business. During that time, Betsy invited me to not only sit in on, but participate in two classes and three readings for her current playwriting workshop. She told me several times how great it was to have me back. It was great to be back.

I just received word from my friend Alex, a classmate and friend from the playwriting workshop, that Betsy Carpenter passed away this morning. She had been undergoing cancer treatment for several years. I don’t think I’d known that.

I hadn’t spoken to her since I finished my thesis. I kept meaning to e-mail her but I was waiting until I had some news to tell her about my play. I wish I had dropped her a note to say hello, to let her know that I did make it out to LA after all, to tell her that I have never gotten better advice crammed into two small words.

I’m debating on whether I should start querying literary agents again now or hold off for a bit. Unfortunately, I waited until after My Super Ex-Girlfriend came out and bombed. Since my screenplay Struck is in a similar genre, I’ll most likely be completely ignored at the moment. Not that querying agents isn’t almost always a total waste of time and money in the first place. But maybe I’ll have better non-luck if I wait a few months for it to blow over.

I was looking at going to Lobster Alice, a play starring Nicholas Brendon (Xander from BtVS) and Noah Wyle at The Blank theater down the street. It turns out the theater accepts play submissions, and I decided to submit Goodbye Dolly. I’ve been waiting almost two years to hear from the publisher and I’m sick of just sitting on one of the best/most successful things I’ve written to date. Besides, the play I’m currently working on is most likely going to be catered towards the improv group I’m in, so I won’t really be looking to shop that one around at first.

Writing Project Status

Brickgirl & Oscar: Plugging along well. Four strips posted, ten completed, and I don’t even know how many more scripted. Readership is still fairly low, but then again, I haven’t done a lot of promotion. I have gotten a very positive response from readers thus far. I considered increasing to two new strips a week, but going to hold off on that for now, as I don’t want to neglect all my other projects…

Chimera (TV pilot spec): First draft done, working on revisions.

Goodbye Dolly (Feature spec adaptation): First draft done. It’s craptastic, but it’s done.

Untitled Stage Play Project: Minimal progress since I started about 18 months ago, but stuff is still a brewin’ in the ole noggin.

Other writing news: Spoke with Baker’s Plays about Goodbye Dolly (the stage play version) which they’ve had for 19 months now. Seems that last year, they replaced the entire editorial staff, and the consideration for publication process had to be restarted for everything. My play has been cleared by at least one reader, though, and I should hear something back by late summer.

Had a bit of an incident with a literary manager about a month ago, but unfortunatly, it was not really legit.

Job Status

Starting next Wednesday, I’ll be working as a content writer for a search engine optimization firm. It’s not creative, persay, but it is writing. More important, it isn’t taking photos of faucets in a dingy warehouse with no windows in downtown LA where the temperature has been hitting 90 degrees in the afternoons even with two AC units running.

Other Creative Stuff

I will be performing with an as of yet unnamed, possibly all-female improv group in coming months. I’ve always loved improv, but never considered myself to be exceptional at it. Better learn fast… we’re looking at six rehearsals before the first performance.

Hey, I’m still alive! I know it’s been a while since I posted here, but life in CA has far busier than I anticipated. And let’s face it… hardly anyone reads this thing anyway.

I rather like living in LA, as long as I focus on the fact that I’m surrounded by many creative and talented people and ignore the fact that many of them are floundering in desperation at all of the closed doors, the inability to do what they really want with their lives, the fact that they can’t afford food, etc. Luckily I’m not quite suffering from the third one myself. Currently, I’m working in photography/web design for a plumbing hardware distributor (printing orders for faucets and printing labels to mail said faucets most of the time.) It’s a job. It’ll do for now.

Writing wise… Overloaded on projects as always. Working on a screenplay adaptation of my first stage play Goodbye Dolly (finished a rather pathetic first draft of that, but have some excellent plans for the rewrite), stage play #2 that sat around dormant for a year and is now seeing some action, and what WAS formerly screenplay #2 that in the past few days became TV series pilot #1. Will probably be renamed from Project Changeling (which sounds too much like Project Runway) to Chimera (which no one can say correctly.) There are a smattering of other projects on the backburner, but I’m pretending they don’t exist at the moment, lest I give myself an aneurysm.

Hollywood is interesting. I like my neighborhood… easy to find parking compared to the surrounding areas and the Scientologists have security people standing around at all hours (I THINK that makes me feel safer, though I’m not 100% sure.) Movie tickets are hella expensive; unless it’s a big event, best to go to one of the surrounding cities and pay $8 instead of $15. I’ve been to the Arclight, Gramanns, and El Capitan in Hollywood. The latter was to see Chronicles of Narnia, and as they had all sorts of costumes, props, models, production art, etc on display, that was the ticket I most felt was worth the price.

Other randomness… In & Out Burgers are very good, though the fries caught fire in my microwave. Target is a great place to buy a new microwave. Upright Citizens Brigade has some great shows, and many of them are free. Traffic isn’t as bad as I expected. The price of food is worse than I expected. Drinks are even more expensive than food, so best to do your drinking before you go out. Having a boring job unrelated to what I want to do with my life means I’m still doing better than a lot of people out here. I’ve lost my fear of earthquakes and gained a fear of being trapped in my car for hours, unable to find a parking space.

So I submitted my play Goodbye Dolly to Baker’s Plays about the middle of October. Up to a six to eight month wait, so I was hopping to hear something in the next month or so.

Well, I heard from them. Apparently it will take ANOTHER six to eight months for them to complete their “extensive reading process.”

…

I suspect what happened is this:

The Baker’s website said that they would send a postcard notifying the writer when they receive the play. So apparently they just GOT to my play in the mass of submissions. Hopefully they skimmed it/read the first ten pages/whatever to see if it was worth considering, and shot me a postcard to notify me they were going to consider it. Because I’m hoping they actually have some interest and aren’t just sticking it in another pile to get a glance and a quick no many months down the road.

So no big sales or publications before I turn 25, I guess.

While in Boston, I’ve attended a number of Playwriting Workshop classes and readings. It’s been a lot of fun.  Some of my old friends are in the class, there have been some really interesting plays, and my old professor Betsy keeps telling me how wonderful it is that I’m back (nothing like feeling useful since I had minimal work to do on my thesis.)

Anyway, because I’m a sheep or very competitive (or a competitive sheep,) being around a bunch of playwrights again has inspired me to start working on a new play. It’s very rough at this point, but unlike Dolly, I’m not sticking with a straightforward linear story and instead am playing around more with elements of the stage. Should be a lot of fun (assuming I figure out the stuff I’m stuck on at the moment.)

It’s so hard to find anything truly unique and original in writing these days. Therefore, I must congratulate my friend Alexander Danner for writing a play that includes (what I assume is) the world’s first pornographic quadratic equation.

The final revision of my stage play, Goodbye Dolly, is now complete and will be submitted to Baker’s Plays for publication on my next trip to the post office. It’s a little unnerving, because it is both the largest and the most deserving project I have submitted for publication to date. And I have to wait six to eight months to hear back.

I’ve finally gotten word from my thesis director that my screenplay, while well-written and already good enough to qualify me for graduation, is currently not a marketable sample of my work. I knew that to a certain extent, and was expecting to do a number of rewrites, but it still depresses me that I sat on it for over two months while I was waiting for feedback and wasn’t able to see what the problem was myself. It is currently too “tepid”, which is apparently going to be the word/comment that I get hung up on. Unless it’s “oatmeal”, which is my own choice for describing its current status.