That said, I wrote the script in an hour with hardly any planning beforehand (I got the idea in the shower, got out, dried off, and promptly sat down and wrote it all out right then) and never actually revised it (contrast that with my last play, Tree of Blood, which I rewrote 15 or 16 times). And I only went to one rehearsal. (Rehearsals are usually where I see what needs to be rewritten, thus their importance.) As a result, there were some things I didn’t get to change about the play that I now wish I could have (tightening it up a bit, giving the characters a named homeland and culture instead of the ambiguous one they had, reword a few lines here and there), but that’s just life.

Oh, and I’m happy to announce that this is the first time I didn’t place in the top three! (My last three plays all got third place.) This sounds kind of weird, I realize, and you might think I’m asking for sympathy or pity or something, but I’m not. I’ve been hoping that my winning streak would end because I was starting to take it for granted, and that assumption is a quick recipe for laziness in writing and complacency. I needed to know that a third-place finish was not guaranteed, so that I keep striving for excellence in my craft and all that.

Speaking of which, I’ll keep writing plays, but I plan to switch gears here and focus much more heavily on fiction (short stories and novels).

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(Tree of Blood is my latest play, which was produced about a month ago.)

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Monday also happens to be the submission deadline for the next set of New Play Project plays, Fire and Rain. Originally I’d hoped to submit four plays, but now it’s looking like it’ll be two, with a small chance that I’ll finish a third one in time. The first is called Sixteen Stones and is about the brother of Jared, taking place around Ether 2–3. I’ve got ten pages written so far and just have to write the middle scene and it’ll be done (done as in first draft done, which is about all I can hope for considering my time constraints). The second is tentatively titled Missing and is about a wheelchair-bound mother whose three-year-old daughter goes missing in the woods. And the third is a comedy about four missionaries, called Scrambled Eggs. (I’ve got two or three pages of it written so far.)

Other than that, I’ve got a rather big project coming up in the near future, and I think within a week or two I’ll be able to announce it. This is the one that’s been consuming a lot of my time for the past month and a half. It’s the one I’m most excited about, too.

Oh, I’ll also be starting up a new blog in the next month or two — whenever I find time to design it — and as a result this blog will change slightly, repurposing itself to fit into the new scheme of things. More on that once the new blog’s up.

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And I’m not assistant directing anymore, by the way. I’m directing. Yup, I don’t have all that much experience under my belt (assistant directing a single forty-five minute play and writing four of my own plays, plus watching lots of plays and movies over the course of my life), but I’m now the director of James Goldberg’s play Repeating History. It’s a good training-wheel play, since it’s only three pages long. But it’s got its own challenges, too — the bulk of the play is effectively a Powerpoint presentation, for example. There’s only one character (well, there’s sort of a second character, but she only has two lines and she’s not onstage). And the play has a lot of historical allusions that most people probably aren’t going to get, because we’ve all forgotten almost everything we learned in U.S. History.

In other news, I’ve got a few new projects lining up. First, I really want to get back into writing novels, so I’ve decided to aim at 1,000 words a day (which, as I learned from my NaNoWriMo experience, should be a piece of cake) and I’ve started outlining the one I’ll focus on for the next few months.

Second, almost every time I watch a movie I want to start writing screenplays, so I’ve decided to finally start doing it. I’ll probably start out with short films because, well, they’re shorter. And they’re similar to short plays, which I’ve got a decent amount of experience with.

Third, I’m writing some TV scripts for a demo for this new television channel that’ll be starting up soon. I don’t know how much I can talk about it yet — probably more than this, but I’ll play it safe for now — but it’ll be fun. And regardless of the fate of the channel, it’ll be a really good learning experience. Besides, who ever thought I’d be writing for TV? Not me.

And last but not least, I need to start blogging on here more often. Monthly isn’t going to cut it. I’m also itching to redesign the site, but that’ll have to wait for a bit. (I’m currently redesigning the New Play Project site. And have been for a while; hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend.)

Unbindery’s on hold for now.

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Oh, and I’m going to be assistant directing again. I’d thought about passing on that, since it is a bit of a time commitment, but I need my theatre fix. And it’s a lot of fun to be more involved with the show — playwrights do participate, but not nearly as much as directors.

I’m going to try really hard to start writing plays for the next show (Fire and Rain, religious plays) in advance, so that I can submit six or seven. Why? Mainly the OCD. No, really, I have tons of ideas for plays — a flood of them — and the more I write, the better I’ll get. And deadlines make me write. It’s not the submitting that matters so much to me (though it feels good to send in a flurry of scripts), it’s the writing.

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