Hello again

Hi, all. I've been away from this blog for a bit. There were too many other things going on, and at the end of the day I generally felt too tired to write about them.

However, I now have a backlog of things I want to write about, so I intend to start posting regularly again.

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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!

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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.