It has been awhile since I last posted here! My apologies for my posts have been few & far between. I have been busy though. First off, we have a lot going on with our Wood Sugars site between podcasts & columns. So a lot of my writing energies have towards the podcast & my weekly column The EGP: The Economic Gho$t Po$t which is a blend of fiction (ghost stories) with economic analysis. Both the paranormal & economics have fixated me for sometime & I thought it would be fun to combine them into a strange concoction. I am by no means no economic expert, even though I have been reading up on economics quite frequently, the post is more so a means to a conversation regarding it, I might say something stupid but am open to be called out on it., so please read it & comment...maybe we can all learn from it.I've also been drawn towards playwrighting as of late. For along while I either wrote fiction or screenplays. In February I pounded out a script called Bosto. It's a strange one, takes place on the 3rd floor of a building. Three fisherman live there (two are out of work, one gets work) & below them one floor is a shelter for battered women. And on the bottom floor is a fine seafood restaurant. When screams sound from the floor below them, the fishermen are drawn into a night of intrigue. The play will be work-shopped with XIII Pocket this coming august at the DCA (Department of Cultural affairs) space in downtown Chicago along with two other plays by members of the artistic ensemble. I am psyched to get it on its with the other ensemble members, to see it, hear it, and continue to tweak it.
I have also tweaked the screenplay I've adapted from my book Whiskey Pike to also be a stage play. I must say I've had the most fun with the stage play form. Even though I feel the screenplay is in strong shape, I may focus on mounting the stage play first. Why? Both will be fairly expensive to produce. As it stands they read as period pieces, which are naturally expensive to produce. I do have some strong ideas to gear the film away from being period & make use of modern, guerilla shooting. This would make it more feasible to shoot on a low-low budget. But I feel compelled to stage it...to build an atmosphere to be experienced in the flesh. I feel with the vision I have brewing, I can get away with minimal setting, costuming & still douse it with the feel of an old forgotten world. There's still a lot of props & transitions, so I am continuing to work on fine-tuning it, simplifying it, trimming. But I am excited. It currently stands as a strong two act play, with a lot of potential for eerie environment & highly kinetic movement.
I think what is currently drawing a lot of my interest in writing plays is that it serves to bridge to of my passions: performance & literature. Plays serve as a strong blue-print towards performance, but also great reads. Look at the many who read Beckett, Shakespeare, O'neill, Shaw, among many others, and enjoy the read for it's literary value. I get a kick out writing with the challenge of developing human behavior within space. It's a blast to drive your own production but also interesting to let the script continue to exist & be interpreted by other productions throughout the years. As much as I love film, it tends to stamp one vision to a story & limit its play on one's imagination.I've had some new ideas for the developing of a novel I wrote called Televictim. The novel is still in rough form. I wrote it very quickly during the month of November. It's a bit sloppy overall. There's some stuff I am pretty proud of. There's also a lot that needs to be cut & there's a lot that needs to be further explored. I have spent a lot of time combing through it & working up a new outline. And the further I have gone into outlining it, the more I churn up some interesting staging concepts. I have currently put this project on hold until later in the summer as to focus more on writing for the Wood Sugars podcast Inside the Barrel & fine tuning both Bosto & Whiskey Pike but perhaps after letting it stew, I may dig back into the novel instead as a stage play.
