When you get to the final page

I have been writing the current play for far too long. The idea has been niggling at me for some years, and I made two or three false starts on it. But now I not only have a first draft of about 70 pages (not bad for something that at one point seemed likely never to make it to 10 pages): I even have a final scene.

That doesn't mean the play is ready for people to perform, or even ready for people to comprehend. I have a sense that the order of some scenes is wrong; that I have glossed over some stuff the audience needs to know; that at least one character's story line just fades out instead of coming to a good stopping point.

But now that I have the last scene, I know tons better what this play is actually about than I did when I started. And it's hardly about what I thought it was about, at all. I couldn't find the ending and couldn't find the ending, and the other day a character whom I had last seen about 20 pages earlier walked in and handed me the ending.

And now that I know better what the play is about, I can go back and spackle the awkward bits and expand the terse bits and get the thing to a point where some readers can sit around a room and read it to me. Here comes the fun stuff!

Getting to the end of a play gives you a gift that getting to the end of writing an article or an essay rarely provides: the characters have come alive and take the direction of the story out of your hands and show you how the play has to end even if it isn't how you thought it would end or wanted it to end. I think that's why I keep writing these things: there's a surprise at the end almost every single time.

wheePub

I have always wanted to publish things. When we were in the Arctic I created books with an unbreakable but ungovernable Gestetner duplicator, the kind for which you cut a stencil with what looks like a dentist's tool, affix the stencil on a drum, apply far too much ink, and feed the paper, sheet by sheet with one hand while you revolve the drum to print through the stencil with the other.

Later, I was the editor of not one, but two monthly newspapers. Layout involved printing out the columns of text to appear in the paper, and placeholder spaces for the images, and then crawling around (and on) the layout sheets spread out on the floor with a glue-stick or other affixer and trying to get the right columns in the right places, and all parallel with each other. Then I would trundle the layout sheets off to the printer, where the staff would try not to sigh to loudly while correcting my sillier misteaks mistakes.

Boy, is it easier now.

I just published the first of a half dozen or so collections of my plays as an eBook. I wanted to see what was involved in creating such a book, and was not averse to sharing some of my plays with the reading public. I read a couple of online guides about eBook publishing and then tried my hand at it. The result is available on Kindle, Kobo, the Barnes & Noble store, and lotsa other places.

For those playing along at home, I created the cover using Canva. I generally write scripts using Celtx, but the standard script format is designed for an 8.5 x 11 page. I therefore had to blow away all the formatting Celtx provided in its export-to-PDF option by dropping the text of each play into a text editor (EditPad Pro), copying out of the text editor into Libre Office (or Open Office or Word), and providing some basic formatting that would read clearly on any mobile device.

Then I uploaded the document to create the eBook in Smashwords, which not only has lovely book-creation tools but also delivers the result to most eBook markets except Kindle.

After that I took the epub version of the book that Smashwords had created and uploaded it to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing to create a Kindle version. The link for the image above goes to the Canadian Kindle store, but you can find the book easily in Amazon Kindle for many nations.

No one step is too onerous. I spent the most time (aside from writing the plays in the first place, d'oh) reformatting the scripts to make them readable on screens of many sizes.

I have three more collections ready to go, and a fourth on the horizon. I won't belabor you with the construction details every time I publish a book, you'll be happy to know. But I will tell you as each book becomes available.