Monday, October 01, 2007

Time flies when you're...wait, what have I been doing?

So it's been a bit more than a week since I lost posted. Since then, Dinner and Drinks hit the stage and was a phenomenal, near-sellout hit, closing to standing ovations on three of the four nights, and exceeding my wildest expectations. I am ridiculously happy.

Also, I finally got my laptop which was ordered from Dell about four months ago. This also makes me happy, and it is with this laptop that I am currently blogging. Hopefully the laptop -- which was purchased for the express purpose of being able to write just about anywhere -- will actually help me to, you know, write a bit more often. On plays and novels and short stories and things like that. But, you know, on a blog too, from time to time.

Back to the play.

I have to admit that the somewhat surprising success of the show has left me feeling like...well, like there actually might be some avenue to success through this writing thing. It made me feel like all these years spent tapping words on out word processors were maybe not wasted, that maybe I *have* been working towards something all this time, even if maybe I wasn't always quite sure what it was, and even if at this moment I'm maybe not entirely sure what it is.

I have, of course, been considering the inevitable "follow-up." You don't have a success like this without thinking, "What next?"

And I really don't even know where to begin. As goofy as it sounds, a "Dinner and Drinks 2" has actually been rattling around in my head, just because the concept -- two people have an inappropriate conversation in a public place -- lends itself nicely to so many different scenarios. I was also reminded today of an old writing project I started but never really followed through on, which involved crafting fictional backstories to some of the classified advertisements that I would stumble across in a given week while working the classified department at the newspaper. This, I realized today, was another idea that would work well on the stage.

And then there's my multimedia theatre project, involving an onstage narrator, offstage voice actors, and a slide show of bad drawings, called "Spiffy The Chicken" which is about a chicken named spiffy and his adventures in the city, where he meets drug dealers and prostitutes and the like. And which would probably a disasterous choice for a followup.

But the biggest issue isn't so much finding the idea. There's ideas everywhere, they bounce around in my head constantly. The problem is writing them.

I look at parts of the script for "Dinner & Drinks" -- especially the particularly funny bits -- and I find myself thinking, "Where did that come from?" I know I can be a funny person, but it's mostly reactionary humour, someone says something, and I'll say something funny in response to it. Having to just be funny all by myself...well, I didn't think I was very good at it, but the crowd at the show certainly seemed to think otherwise.

But that's what makes the prospect of a follow-up even freakier. Now I've done something that was successful, that people enjoyed, that people laughed and applaued. What if the next one isn't as good? What if I get a metric buttload of people out to another show, based on the strength of this one, and they all hate it. What then?

This is, of course, the inevitable fear of any creative type, particularly a creative type on the edge of even a small degree of success. And I'm sure in time I'll fight past this particular fear and start working on *something* for the stage again, regardless of whether it's good or bad. Eventually, the desire to create is a desire that demands to be dealt with.

And when that time arrives...that's what this spiffy new laptop is for.

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