Well, maybe not...
The promise of spring on the farm has yet to materialize - this little one is actually a very late arrival from the winter season. The air is still cold and wet, as is the ground. The cattle are in mud up halfway up their legs if they dare to step outside (which they do). We didn't tap the maple trees this year, so aside from some buds on the willows down by the pond you'd be forgiven for thinking we're still in the middle of last winter. But despite the weather the calendar marches on, and I know that spring will be here eventually. If past years are anything to go by I think our spring will be very short, and the heat of the summer will soon be upon us.
Despite it still being too cold for me to get much done in the shop Grinder Productions prep work for the summer season is coming along well. Casting is underway, and while I'm not there yet I'm a lot further ahead than I was this time last year. As always, I'm on the lookout for new talent, even if it's someone that I can't use this summer, so I'm always happy to hear from a potential new actor. Much of the production work needs to wait on the weather, but almost everything that I can do ahead of time I've now done, save for some sound work on Maid of Stone, where I've brought in an old friend with some outside expertise to help me. I hope that by the end of this month I'm at least beginning to get set construction under way, and with any luck I'll have something to show you in next month's post.
Writing remains a challenge, though there are some slight signs of improvement on that front as well. I set myself an accidental New Year's Resolution (accidental because I started it in January, not because it was January) to submit to at least 10 play submission opportunities every month: contests, open calls, prompts, etc. So far, so good. I'm under no illusions about these - most submission opportunities that I qualify for get so many submissions that the chances of my scripts being chosen are less than 1%, if the form reject letters I get back are anything to go by. The real goal with submitting to 10 things every month is to get into (and keep up) the habit of submitting my plays, and to keep the content pipeline flowing, creating new and better plays for submission.
And creating new and better plays is a priority. During the pandemic I was churning out new material all the time, one of the few means I had of channelling my grief, and those plays were, on the whole, okay. But since then my list of plays has been very short - I wrote more in 2020 than I did in the next three years combined, and much of what I did write wasn't very good, with perhaps one exception. By the end of last summer I knew that I was no longer that writer that I wanted to be. I needed to get my spark back.
Over the past few months things have slowly started to improve. I'm not quite so busy at work. I wrote a new 10 minute play, in response to a writing prompt, instead of a personal whim. I joined a script exchange site, where playwrights read and comment on each other's works. I'm also doing a close reading of a 1960's high school English textbook, in an effort to finally learn the rules of parsing and grammar, two things which I've never fully understood, in an effort to both improve my writing and put to rest one more source of childhood trauma. I am not yet back to writing something every day, but I am writing something at least once every week, and the frequency of sessions is increasing. For me, that's progress.
I'm also working hard on setting boundaries. Time to stop writing for today, and be grateful for it.
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