Thinking about NaPlWriMo 2009...

And... done. Thanks for the reminder! :)

HeyIsaiah!

The "author news" feature is working now ! Use that to post your "spam": instead of composing a forums post, you should see an option for compose - author news.

:) It will automatically show up on the front page under "author news". Nifty, no ?

That I am! See you there! :)

For other New Yorkers who are interested, there's info at our website: www.fluxtheatre.org . Expect some more spam, er, helpful announcements as we grow closer to opening.

Oh, thank you! I'm very proud of MML and I hope somebody will do it again.

Of course I'm coming to Flux's show. Are you in it?

Hey Josh, apropos of nothing, congrats on all the great press MilkMilkLemonade has gotten! I wanted to audition for it but my Fringe show kept me too busy. Hope you can make it to Flux's show in November!

Hey all. Great to be here again. Maybe I'll make it all the way through this time?

I've got a few ideas floating around my head for this year. They all revolve around a phenomenon known as "Seeking Behavior."

So your brain has a this bit called a reward center. It's the part that gives you a burst of dopamine (which your brain interprets as "a happy feel-good feeling") when you accomplish something, like eating a tasty burger, reading a long-awaited email, or having sex. But there's a totally different system elsewhere in your brain that rewards you simply for SEEKING things -- reading a menu and deciding which food to get, checking your inbox, or dating.

The most interesting part is that your seeking reward is greater than your reward center reward -- that is, you are happier looking for something than accomplishing it. So we are hard wired to strive, and then, when we've acheived whatever it is, look to the next goal, rather than simply enjoy what we already have. Great for a species (apathetic, complacent animals starve to death and don't mate, let alone send interesting emails); kind of miserable for an individual. And as any writer knows, misery = drama.

So there's that. A few other threads to tie into this:

- The segment a few weeks back on NPR's "This American Life" (the program is a great story starter, btw, and you can get it as a free podcast) about a construction worker who decided to collect every book ever published on Lewis & Clark. Including the 1807 1st edition publication of their journals, which go for $12K! He had no interest in reading this collection -- he just wanted to own them.

- Lewis & Clark themselves were seeking, in a way, or at the very least exploring. In particular, one of their goals was to find the elusive Northwest Passage (which we now know doesn't exist).

- President Jefferson (who sent L&C) was himself a book collector, and his philosophical collection was widely considered the best in North America, and was what started the Library of Congress.

- The fact that many websites are designed to suck you in as you click from one page to the next. Wikipedia, imdb, and especially tv-tropes.org (you've been warned!) are great examples of this, but any multipage site with lots of internal hyperlinks is like a built-in seeking-center reward machine.

- The idea of an affair as being a search for something that is "missing" in a marriage. Maybe?

- Lastly, the recent news story of the "Balloon Boy" who went missing for days, panicking and mobilizing an entire town to look for him before eventually turning up in the attic. Also, the fact that this may very well have been a hoax by a reality-television-obsessed family makes it all the more delicious.

So I'm thinking maybe someone in the family -- the father? -- gets stuck in some sort of seeking/collecting behavior, probably online (buying things on ebay? editing wikipedia? a succession of such things?), as his family falls apart around him. I'd love to hear peoples' thoughts on this.

Especially: what things in your own life do you strive for, and then ignore, devalue, discard, or replace once you've acquired? How have you broken (or at least mitigated) the cycle? Is it even possible?

I love it! Dark comedy is my favorite, I just can't seem to do it myself. I can't wait to see how it turns out!

Toni

That sounds awesome. I saw the title of the post and I totally thought it was spam until I looked and saw it was you. Ha. Josh, you will win this thing ! It's your winning year!

My tentative title is Hooray for Hot Dogs! It's a dark, dark comedy about a blue collar wife and mother who finds an upsetting pornographic DVD in her home and doesn't know which man in her life it belongs to. Her boyfriend? Her ex husband? Her teenage son? Partner this with several neighborhood women being attacked while walking at night and you have a woman on the brink.

We'll see if I can finally win this thing.

So excited to be back!

I am excited to get started! Looks like another talented group this year.

Yes, I am! I am very excited about it to. I am putting in a lot of effort with keeping up with the posts, mostly so I get into the habit of it, and also so I can keep my level of energy up. These early posts are getting me really excited for the whole process. So get used to it--I'll be around a lot. :)

I ALWAYS feel that way. Every time I have an idea, I fear I won't come up with another one. And then there's an idea! It's funny how it works. I was just thinking about that--muses and all.

I hope you don't discount things to write about because you don't feel like they are worth writing about. I mean, everyone has a story, everyone has something to say--any idea that piques your interest is worthy, you know?

You have such cool ideas. The hardest part for me is always thinking of an initial idea to write about. Not that the actual writing process is easy by any means... I'm just particularly bad at generating ideas that are worth writing about. :) 

Thank you! I also just read via facebook that you're this year's forums mod... yay! That sounds like it will be a lot of fun. (This is me procrastinating on the current full-length by the way... time to get moving on it!) 

that sounds like a really great, really intense program! Brack a leg, girlie!

Yes, BU is Boston University. I'm sorry, I always forget that there are tons of other universities that could also be called "BU." I'm from Boston, so around here it's always BC and BU rather than Boston College and Boston University. :)

The program is great so far. I'm taking two workshops, one focused on full-lengths and the other on shorter things like ten-minutes and one-acts. I'm also keeping my full-time job as a copyeditor (did I mention that in my first post?) working flexible hours from home. In the spring I take two more workshops, and I have a staged reading thesis presentation in May. Then over the summer I need to take three electives (I could take them now, but I have no time, and I could take them next year, but summer classes are 1/2 price and my scholarship is only half-tuition) and I have one elective I took last year at UMass that will transfer in. Then I'm done! It is going to go by so fast.

I am also bad at self-imposed deadlines. Once school is over I'll have to find tons of festivals and things to submit to so that I have "deadlines" in that sense. And yes, I love the community here so I wanted to be part of it this year even if I can't get my own brand-new full-length off the ground.

Also, if anyone's in the Boston area and wants to check out some new plays, Little Black Dress is going up this month at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, and I'll be working the box office most weekends as part of my stipend-earning. :)  There's also a one-person show called The Salt Girl going up in November, and I'll be box office-ing it up then too.

I can't wait to see what you come up with. We got 30 days after today!

That's Boston U right? Your workload sounds DIVINE! I really miss being an undergrad and having all this writing to do and deadlines...I'm getting better at self imposed deadlines, but you know how it goes. Break a leg with all that, it's a lot but you can do it!

Thank you for saying you will support us in the enveavor. I really hope you can squeeze some time out to do a full length, but I think that if you wanted to do a couple of one acts, or a bunch of ten minute plays, I think as long as the page length is done, that might be all right. I will have to find out.

I'm sorry to hear about your year last year, but it's good that you are looking forward to being here. We're looking forward to having you as well!

Did you post any of your plays on here last year? I will have to look because they sound as interesting now as they did then!

You could always do some research on the celebutantes in question, and other celebutantes as well. Unless you might want to stab your eyes out. :)

The play definitely sounds like fun and I am looking forward to hearing about your progress and reading it when you win this year (because you will, woot woot!).

Last year I wrote the first act of "Brigid Kildare's Steelworks." 50 pp -- didn't win but was a great experience. I'm touching up my first play in the series, "The Feast of Jovi Bono" (much different from the version any of you might have read last year) for a staged reading at my local theatre. Woo-hoo! Brigid is still in Act I and for NaPlWriMo, I am writing about St. Clare of Assisi, her sister Agnes, and their bff, St. Francis.

Clare and Aggie started out as wealthy party girls and in my modernization, Clare and Aggs will start out much the same, like two well-known celebutante sisters I could name. Other than Francis being their friend who's eschewed the privileged life and whose antics are the talk of the cocktail party circuit, I'm not sure how it will proceed. I may do some plot thinking this month, but within the rules of NaPlWriMo.

I'm excited!

...but it's going to be hard to finish this year. I just started the MFA playwriting program at BU (which is awesome so far, by the way), and I need to get a full-length drafted as soon as possible to start workshopping it. And I need to have two ten-minutes revised and done by Oct 31. I'm not sure if I can get an additional full-length done in November if I'm writing more short plays and working on the other full-length for class. We'll see though. If it were October I'd definitely get it done.

But I'm excited to at least try and to be here and offer support for people who will no doubt be more successful in their attempts. I loved the forums last year. And I've gone through complete emotional hell since last year's NaPlWriMo that it's nice to be back and have something to look forward to again. if I can't get a full-length out it will at least be really great to have moral support while I work on all my other writing projects for class. :)

I've been researching and fiddling with the ideas, but no actual playwriting has occurred, so it should be eligible.

Flex those fingertips, stretch those synapses, ruffle those thesaurus pages....we're getting ready!