These Certain Musings

So the last couple weeks have been spent enacting the latest chapter of, "What Happens When Your Immune System Meets New Germs, Colorado Transplant Edition." I couldn't work at all for a week. I still have to monitor my screen time because of my eyes. Blargh.

This has not been a good year for me, healthwise. Or I suppose one could say it's been a great year, if the goal is to harden up the immune system. I guess we'll see how the second year in Colorado goes.

But there is good news!

I do believe I can meet the goal of launching Breath of Stone before 4th Street. There'll be far, far less pre-publication stuff than I wanted, but I'm more than willing to roll with that. The book itself is ready for readers, and that's what counts most!

Once Breath of Stone is in your hands, I'll be putting together the upcoming publication path. On a day to day basis, my schedule is unpredictable, but the overall time for writing is greater than at any time I lived in Indiana. That translates into more books! This is a good thing!

Thanks to a very generous patron, one of my two old and wounded cars will be repaired shortly after I return from 4th Street. That's more than a month ahead of what I'd be able to do otherwise, and the support and generosity is a most wonderful thing.

The next step will be to find a couple days for camping. 4th Street is its own celebration and retreat, but the need for solitude and silence is deep enough to make my teeth ache.

Have I mentioned here I'll be teaching karate, stage combat, and Shakespeare this autumn? I'll be working with a private arts enrichment youth organization, and I just couldn't be happier about that.

And, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, my son is awesome. How awesome? Well, I had to interrupt a conversation about his awesomeness when he came home early to bring me pepperoni and bacon pizza. That's how awesome.

Names:  I must change a major character's name.  I've known this for a long, long time.  Y'see, the current version of Chant comes from seeds of a story I initially wrote in the early 90's, and I named one of the primary characters Asper.  The diagnosis of Asperger's didn't exist at the time.  The name change is not easy.  Nothing sounds right.  I'm thinking I'll just use George as a placeholder.  Maybe it'll at least break my attachment to Asper.

Shakespeare and Omni: Directing Shakespeare's Hamlet is an experience very different from directing Midsummer Night's Dream, and not just because one is quite the tragedy is one is quite not.  In Hamlet, everything is about Hamlet.  If he isn't in the scene, he is discussed by the characters who are.  Hamlet has all the gravitational pull in the little Danish universe, and everyone who comes too close becomes trapped by his darkness.  It's almost claustrophobic in its focus, and can be made more so with very few script cuts.  If the director miscasts the leading role, or can't adequately support and guide the actor, the entire production implodes.  It isn't a single-viewpoint play, but it comes danged close.

Midsummer, on the other hand, is an ensemble piece.  The faeries, the lovers, and the mechanicals all depend upon each other to start, spark, influence, and conclude their individual storylines.   The storylines aren't interlaced so much as interlocked.  Directors sometimes emphasize that with casting choices (the actors who play Hippolyta and Theseus also play Titania and Oberon, forex).  Others do so with blocking.  I once saw a fanciful production that created Titania's bower from an oversized inverted umbrella that gently swayed above the stage, lulling Bottom to sleep while other scenes unfolded below.

In my own writing, I'm creating an ensemble piece by using omni.  Certainly I could do so using multiple third.  But, as I referenced before, it would be a very different tale told through that ensemble, and it would require thousands of additional words.  Thousands.

Midsummer also has a narrator in the character of Puck.  He's the one who invites the audience in, tosses out bits of commentary, oversees the interlocked stories, and is responsible for moving the plot along.  He is not the one with an emotional arc, with the greatest investment in the play's outcome, or unfolding character development.  He is at the end exactly who he was at the start.  But which character will cause the production to succeed or fail?  Which character will determine if the audience connects?  Puck.  The not-at-all-objective narrator who concludes his time on stage telling the audience just how special he is.  It's all about Puck.

That's the piece I'm needing to remember most as I march my way through revisions.  It is indeed a re-visioning, seeing everything anew, through the lens of my narrator.  Even though he isn't telling his story alone, he is telling what he wishes the reader to know for reasons that are his own.  It's all about his purpose, his interpretation, and his conclusions.  After all, the second sentence of the novel is, "Most people are wrong."

And in other news, I'm now wishing I'd been able to play Puck when the role was offered me fifteen years ago.  Alas, while a pregnant Cordelia could have made for an interesting choice in King Lear, the same could not be said for a pregnant Puck.  Ah, well.