New over old

Lowell is refreshing and renewing some neglected factory streets just south of the downtown core. They have ripped up old road surface and the trolley lines that were under them, so they can lay down a broad sidewalk with shade trees.

I was glad to spot even older structures deeper down, like the brick arch you can see in the attached photo. The old Lowell will never completely go away.

What country is this?

Here's a map of my favorite country:

Actually, it's a "cartogram" of the results of the recent Canadian election. Every electoral district is proportionately represented, so it really shows how the Canadian population is packed into southern Ontario, southern Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, Vancouver. It also shows that the Liberal party (red), although much diminished, is still a significant presence in the land--that fact is obscured using a traditional map to show the results of the election.

The article this cartogram comes from, "Two Maps One Election", is here.

Goalscape to the rescue!

I am co-producing a monthly television show for a couple of local public-access stations in Massachusetts. The show, "Live from Studio A", will feature staged readings of short plays by local playwrights, so as you can imagine, it is a herding-cats sort of project.

So of course I reached for Goalscape. I have one Goalscape for tracking general start-up tasks (design logo; set rehearsal schedule...). Here is my other Goalscape, covering the specifics of the first six episodes:

I'll be living by this for the next little while...will let you know how it goes. The episodes will eventually be available as streaming media, and I will link to them when that comes to pass (in the fall of 2011).

Done, but not finished

My script grew over 100 pages during the month of April, so I have "won" Script Frenzy. I even have the badge to prove it:

The Script Frenzy site has a nice chart that tracked how many pages I added each day during April, and it shows that, due to a very busy month, I was lucky to make my century:

The script is not done--I still have some cool scenes to write. Then I get to set it aside for a little while to cool before I go back to do the second draft. But it's been a really good month for writing.

Playing God

This Easter season I have been thinking about the biggest writing project I have ever done -- 15,000 script pages, in English and Spanish, and still counting. It is the dramatized performance of the entire Old and New Testaments: the first attempt won Audio Book of the Year in 2007, and featured hundreds of Hollywood stars and religious leaders.


Along with converting the text into audio scripts (the chapters and chapters about boundary issues and dimensions of the Temple are particularly stunning, I am sure you would agree), I had to create character packs for the actors. The actor, or voice talent, in an audio production generally gets a character pack that includes just the lines he or she has to record, not the whole script. It also includes a bit of a description of the character to help the actor and the director along.


God's character pack for The Bible Experience is about 500 pages long, which is pretty divine in itself. This is what I wrote as hints to the voice talent who would play God:

God is so powerful, so all-knowing, so essential to our being, that it is important to underplay him a fair bit. It is what God does himself, of course: he underplays about 99% of himself whenever he walks the earth and talks with humans.


CS Lewis has a great image of angels taking human form. It is so hard to contain themselves into merely three dimensions that they sort of shimmer, and their hair stands out in all directions. God does a better job: we do not sense any tension, stress, or pressure in God.


God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. God knows all and sees all, and supports us in our doings. In the book of Job, God even supports the devil in his attempt to tempt a good man.


However, for the sake of relating with us and making us part of his ongoing creation of the universe, God takes on certain conversational forms. He expresses wrath. He allows himself to be outbargained, to be wrangled with, to be yelled at. He asks rhetorical questions of Jonah, and shows his backside to Moses because Moses cannot tolerate seeing God’s face.


God is not petty, mean, forgetful, capricious, lazy, annoyed, frustrated, or at a loss. Those emotions are not available to you in your performance. God delights in his creation, and delights in his people; he agonizes in their agonies, and resolves to destroy them for their naughtiness in order to let himself be argued out of it.


The trickiest part, perhaps, is that God, although immeasurably far beyond us in all ways, does not treat us as we, say, treat ants. He engages with us to draw us to him, while giving us the will to choose to come closer or turn our backs.

Script Frenzy - finally under way

I had a slow start on my screenplay for Script Frenzy. Should have started April 1, but I had other deadline-driven writing to complete. Then we spent the weekend helping catalog my mother's artworks from the past 40 years (material for some future play).

But now we're rolling. Here's a view of my screenplay Goalscape. This shows just Act 1, and you can see that I have tinted the first two scenes to indicate that they are WRITTEN!

..

The characters are speaking to me faster than I can transcribe what they say, and that is an excellent sign so early in a script. For instance, it turns out that the cartoony boss of one of the lead characters actually has a sense of humor. I didn't know that!

Stay tuned: Act 1 should be finished before the end of the week.

Goalscaping a script

Less than a week now before I start writing my screenplay during Script Frenzy, and I feel much more prepared than I was the last time I took part in the month of writing. One of the reasons is that I am doing most of my planning using Goalscape.

With Goalscape, you lay out your tasks, project elements, or whatever, in a circle. Traditionally, the size of each task 'wedge' indicates its importance; however, there is a cute coincidence with a screenwriting Goalscape. A script for a movie is roughly 100 pages long, so a page of my script takes 1% of the way around the Goalscape circle. This shows me right away that, at this stage in my plans, I have far too much in act 2:

A new feature in the latest release of Goalscape lets you filter the chart by tags, due dates, people responsible for the task's accomplishment, or whatever. For the script, I have created a tag for each member of the cast. Katie is a major character, and if I filter the Goalscape to highlight just her scenes, it looks like she gets lost for a while a couple of times.

It is very exciting to see the balance of the script this way, and not have to sort of fumble around while writing and wonder whether I have left Katie offstage for too long.

If you look back in the blog for other Goalscape entries, you will see I used it when learning lines for a production of Titus Andronicus. As I did then, you can register graphically how much of each task is completed, and make sure you can make your deadlines.

I will post a progress report in ten days or so, unless the wheels really fall off the wagon. Really looking forward to April!

Script Frenzy - writing with your hair on fire

Script Frenzy challenges you to write a script (screen play, stage play, radio play...) of 100 pages during the 30 days of April. It is no coincidence that it starts on April Fool's Day: several thousand creative people spend a month playing a joke on themselves.

It's actually a great experience to finish a script, even if it is a somewhat fuzzy and shaky one. A huge number of would-be writers never ever get to the last page of anything, so doing that from time to time is a great confidence builder...like having the next belt color in your preferred martial art.

Not so many days to go before Screnzy 2011 starts. Unless the outside world brings surprises that keep me too busy to write, I hope to create a romantic comedy ("romcom") currently called Seven Ways. Coming soon to a theater-of-the-mind near you...

If I have learned anything from last time, it is to do a lot of preparing. I am writing lots of notes, organizing the order of scenes, trying to figure out how the story lines weave together...trying to understand what, if anything, I have in the way of a conclusion.

Fortunately, my characters are already starting to come to life. They whisper pithy little dialog snippets in my ear when I am supposed to be attending to other things, and then I have to hurry to scribble down the gist of what they said. Four voices have appeared so far: the two main characters, an opponent to one of them, and a member of the 'crew' of the other one. I am going from dreading the prospect of 100 blank pages to fill, to wondering how I will squeeze their interesting stories into a single script..

I started capturing my notes in Mindomo, a good mind mapping program. But the map has gotten a bit out of hand:

(I know it's too small to read. I just want to give you a hint of how this goes, not give away all the surprises in the script. Not yet, anyhow...)

So I have opened up a Goalscape as well. I keep the undigested notes in the mindmap, and will use the Goalscape to organize what happens in each scene in the script. This is the first pass on the Goalscape; I will post it again just before Script Frenzy starts. Once the script is done, I will post part of the script and the Goalscape behind it so we can compare and contrast what I planned and what really happened..

Even at this point in planning, when I don't even know the names of half the key characters, I am starting to feel a lot more confident. These planning tools reduce my chances of getting totally lost and discouraged. Once the framework is in place, I can let the characters loose and, with luck, mainly just record what they say and do to each other.

Can't hardly wait!

All dressed up with nothin' to say

In the FemNoire festival of women's plays, performed in Lowell this past weekend, I had fun directing Debbie Roy's "And So it Goes". Two people mind their own business on a park bench while their alter egos rise up and get pretty wild. It's a short play that I can see going into the festival repertory all across the country.

My two bench-sitting actors (Rob Nason and Maria Bela Soares, below) each had one (ONE) line. But they had the great challenge of playing to the audience with slight sideways glances of the eyes, sighs, and judicious use of props (oh, that banana).

The (sold-out) audiences loved them. Sometimes saying a lot less allows for saying a lot more. Just sayin'.

Perspective

I was at a company meeting today and heard about the amazing things planned for this year, and the truly amazing amounts of money that are on the table. It put the challenges and occasional victories of my work there in perspective. I mean, if the corporate enterprise is like a vast ship muscling through the high seas, my pals and I in documentation are hunched on a lower deck, crocheting the life jackets. Management knows the ship needs the life jackets in case of an emergency, but they really really hope never to have to use them. Sigh.

No such thing as bad publicity

I remind myself that any publicity is better than none whenever I have to write a press release. I sweat over these 500-word compositions as much as I do over a full-length script. Here is one I did for the next show at The Loading Dock Gallery, the best art gallery in Lowell, MA:

http://www.richardhowe.com/2011/03/01/loading-dock-gallery-exhibit-opening-tomorrow/

Richard Howe kindly reproduced it in (almost) its entirety on his site.


The gallery site is www.theloadingdockgallery.com.

Local Theater

In our town there is a great semi-pro theater company, Image Theater. I have the good fortune to be able to work with them from time to time, and I enjoy it not least for the logistics. It is generally a short stroll from home to wherever we are rehearsing (the theater does not yet have a permanent home) rather than a long commute.

Last night we started rehearsals on a play in the Fem Noire festival:

I am directing a sweet cast in a cute play that, if the producer doesn't change his mind again, will be the upbeat ending for the first half of the evening. We rehearse in the basement of a local market (the co-owner is in the cast), and it was one of those rehearsals conducted amid peals of laughter and, as far as I could tell, no anxiety at all. Not all plays start (or end) this way, but this experience so far reminds me of all the good parts of putting on plays.

Nobody makes a living doing shows like this: the performance space can only seat 70, and the ticket prices are modest. But--for author, actors, and director--it contributes to making a life.

Dotty ready to launch

This is a little movie of Dotty, the app to help families redistribute household goods, as in the situation where the parents are moving into a smaller house. Two components are still (and stubbornly) not ready, but I am pretty pleased with the general work flow.

You can find a larger version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA2zRNCmagw

Gallery daze

I belong to Lowell's Loading Dock Gallery, the only playwright among more than 40 visual artists. The artists are inspiring and challenging, as much for their supportive and encouraging attitude as for what they produce. As I write this, the group is going over needful left-brain stuff like budgets and blog maintenance...artists are notoriously bad at tasks like marketing and suchlike, but so far nobody has crumpled up the agenda and flung it at anyone. If course, for a playwright, having more angst to observe might be useful...

Just one last feature to add...

So I'm working on this application called Dotty, and it is almost ready to go. There's just this one last tiny feature I have to throw in, a feature that isn't even needed at the start of the application's use. Should be no trouble at all.

So this afternoon I sketched out the feature's flow, and made notes about the various functions I'll have to write to support it. Came out like this:



Someone please remind me next time about the perils of 'feature creep'...preferably with a whack to the head.

Blog on hand

Google has released its Android Blogger gadget and I threw it onto my cute new Android phone right away. Watch for new posts arriving from traffic jams, movie queues, and the back row of groups enduring a PowerPoint assault,

A Canadian validation

So I wanted to switch the name on the billing account for our cottage electricity in Nova Scotia. Had a surprisingly-pleasant customer-service experience with Nicole at NS Power. We chatted about her new office on Water Street in Halifax, where the noisy old power station used to be (back in the 1970's they would open the big windows on the power station at around 3 am on summer nights to reduce the heat on the machines, also letting out the bang-bang-bang sound effects that would galvanize us out of bed, one block over on Barrington Street).

Nicole just sent an email confirming the various changes we made, and adding this note: 'I have waived the $24.00 standard connection charge as a courtesy, basically because you were such a pleasant person to deal with!'

Oh, Canada...