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Two of my plays, The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal and Eponine, are now available through Heuer Publishing. It's always exciting to see a play reach this point; it feels as if the play has "grown up" and is now finally off in the world on its own. I look forward to seeing how they now do in the wider world.

And I know, I know, it's been quite awhile since my last post! (Fortunately I get the plead the excuse of a young son for awhile. ) But I haven't been entirely idle. I've been working the last month on sketching out a new mystery play (my first since 1998!) which I hope to start the actual writing of soon. I'm also trying to get back into doing some submissions, sending The Princess and the Moon to publishers and looking for an initial production for The Captain's Treasure.

This morning at 6 AM I left Saint Paul and drove to Bismarck, North Dakota for the premiere of The Princess and the Moon. I arrived in Bismarck in the afternoon and, walking around the town center, came across this as I passed the theater.

I don't know that it gets much better than that (unless of course they added my name up there as well. In lights). Several hours later I went to the theater to meet with the cast and crew and spent awhile signing programs and chatting with everyone before the performance.

It was a fun show. The kids clearly had a good time with it and it was exciting to finally see this play up on its feet, after almost four years since I first sat down to start to write it. There are some things in the script that I want to fix for the future, but I appreciate Shade Tree Players taking on a new play and all those who poured their energies into this production. In talking with the kids, some were old pros having spent years with Shade Tree, while others were stepping onto the stage in front of an audience for the very first time tonight. It was humbling to have written the script that gave them that opportunity. I wish them luck for the rest of their shows this weekend and I now enjoying having seen another play take flight.

So once again I've neglected the blog for awhile, owing mostly to the fact that Kelly and I are learning just how much time it takes to raise an infant. (You wouldn't think something that little would take up so much time, would you?) But I have over the past month been working on another rough draft, one I started just before the little guy was born back in April. I've been wanting for awhile to write a play based on a series of folk tales. Actually, I've had an idea to do a series of such plays, each based on the folklore of a different continent. And, of course, me being me, I decided to start with the continent of Antarctica. Now, you're probably thinking that's an odd choice since Antarctica doesn't actually have any indigenous folk tales. And you would be right. Which simply meant that I had to make them up. Which is much harder than it sounds. So the process has gone in fits and starts, as while I came up with a general through line awhile back, I tended to get stuck each time I came to a new story-within-the-story. But it's been fun to try and create something like this from whole cloth. The characters are all animals from the Antarctic region, and so I started by doing some research on that which gave me a base of potential characters to draw from. It also makes for a relatively simple set. I mean, creating a barren land of snow and ice doesn't exactly scream high budget, does it? At any rate, while this first pass at the idea (finally finished not ten minutes ago) is a bit rambling, but the end I started to get an idea of the general threads and how things fit together towards the end. It will need a lot of work (much as The Princess and the Moon did after its first draft), but I think it has the potential to be a lot of fun.

I haven't been keeping up with the blog much lately, owing primarily to the recent birth of my son. It has been a fairly eventful spring though in terms of writing, especially on the 10-minute play front. Circus of Fate was recently performed by The Renaissance Guild in San Antonio, Texas as part of their ActOne series, and has also been accepted by the MN Shorts Festival in Mankato, Minnesota this September. NUTS! was recently used by a class at Belleville Mennonite School in Pennsylvania and will be performed this summer as part of Summer Shorts 5: In the Garden in Williston, North Dakota. And a theater in the Philippines is planning on staging a Filipino translation of Look Mom, I Got a Job! this fall as part of a theater festival, that play's first production. My play Stalled Kiss is part of the Big Kiss Off, an event created by the Playwright Binge list, and I know it (along with many other Kiss plays) has already been used by one school so far. That project I am sure will bear fruit in its target date of Valentine's Day weekend, 2011 thanks to the efforts of Paul Barile who has spearheaded the project.

On the full-length front my mystery play A Slip in Time was recently performed by the International Academy of Suriname, my first South American production which means I have now had plays performed on six out of seven continents! (Now to find a way to be performed in Antarctica...) And lastly The Princess and the Moon is due to receive its premiere this summer with the Shade Tree Players in Bismarck, North Dakota (which I will be attending the opening night of), plus I just had an email the other day from a theater in Iowa that wants to produce the play this December. My published plays also have upcoming performances in Nebraska, New Mexico, Michigan, etc.

It feels good to have so much going on with my plays, and right now especially to finally be finding some success with the 10-minute ones. I've said this before, but in the end it comes down to just plugging away. Most of the above productions are the result of me sending plays out to various festivals and contests, and in the case of The Princess and the Moon, sending out on the order of 200 cold queries to theaters. The two upcoming productions gives me a success rate of 1% on those, which sounds low but for me just reinforces that it's a numbers game. As long as the play is a good one, send it out enough and you will eventually find that person who loves it and wants to put it on. And to hear that "Yes!" it what makes it all worthwhile.

I finally got around today to adding my new commedia play, The Captain's Treasure, to my website where the full script is now available as a PDF. Every now and then on the Binge list the question comes up as to how much (if any) of a script people put on their websites. I seem to be in the minority in that I post the scripts in their entirety (my unpublished ones, at least). This certainly increases the odds that someone can download the full script and perform it without my permission (and indeed I have had that happen). Most playwrights in the Binge seem to go the route of posting selections of their plays, then sharing the full script upon request (and still, as much as I can gather, for free). Everyone had to make their own decision here as to what they feel comfortable with, of course, but my own personal decision is that I like to make it as easy as possible for someone to read my scripts and to do so for free. (If someone decides they want to put on a production, then of course I do charge for royalties.) Interestingly enough I think I've had more productions from people coming across one of my plays on my website than I have had from submissions I've made myself. It's never a huge number, but it always amazes me as to how far plays can travel just being out there on the Internet. Here's hoping The Captain's Treasure will find some interest out there as well!

I've written before about how playwrighting can be a numbers game - each "Yes" usually requires experiencing dozens of "No"s. They're never fun (even when you knew it was a long shot you still hope), but it's just part of the game. Fellow PlaywrightBinge member Jack Dyville wrote recently of receiving 5 rejections in one day. Claudia Haas replied that she had once received 3 rejections in one day, at which point she turned off the computer (very wise). All this to say that when you do get a "Yes," it's something to savor. Which makes today very much worth savoring and I learned that Heuer Publishing has accepted not one, but two of my plays! (The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal and Eponine) It's always exciting to place a play with a publisher and know that through it the play will find a greater reach, but two in one day... well that's something to smile about.

This past month, in my goal of trying to write five rough drafts in 2010, I've been working on an idea with the working title of My Wife the Dictator about a couple that goes to visit their friend in a reclusive (and fictitious) Eastern European country ruled by a ruthless dictator, only to find that their friend's wife is the dictator. This was one of those pieces, however, that didn't end up going at all where I thought it would. I started it with the idea that it would be a comedy, but it didn't take long into the piece to realize it just wasn't very funny. At this point I'm not quite sure what exactly it is (and I could tell while writing it that it was suffering from a lack of identity). And now, having reached the end of it this evening, I'm not even sure if there's much there.

That happens sometimes. You start a piece with high hopes, but somehow the idea fails to gel. I spent awhile before starting the draft sketching out ideas for characters and all of the various motivations. It felt like there was plenty of material, but then while writing it just didn't feel very interesting. If nothing else it was an exercise and good practice, but I'm not sure that anything will ever come from it. It may end up just being one of those rough drafts that gathers dust, never to see the light of day again. Or I may come back to it with a fresh vision on where it could go. I've learned that sometimes you have to write a lot of bad stuff in order to sift through and find a few bits worth saving. Certainly in writing Illinois Jane and the Rainforest of Retribution I went through pages and pages of truly atrocious stuff before I finally figured the piece out and ended up with something I'm very proud of.

I set myself the ambitious goal of five rough drafts in order to keep myself writing, to try out different ideas, and of course just to see if I could. After all, every word we put down on paper in the end makes us better writers.

I wrote last fall about the PlaywrightBinge group I belong to (and if you're a playwright, you should too) and how twice a year it holds a submission Binge, the idea being that in the space of 30 days you send out 30 submissions. It's a way of helping encourage playwrights to think about the other side of writing: trying to find someone who will actually produce what you've written. I did a personal binge in December/January as I sent out queries for The Princess and the Moon, and for the last couple of months I've been sending out more submissions as I find opportunities, so I'm not sure I'll hit the official 30-submissions mark this time. The current Binge started March 1st, and I've kept up so far with 12 submissions in 12 days. But I'm now reaching the point where the opportunities (at least for the plays I have handy) are starting to run a bit thin. But with close to 200 queries and submissions since early December, I don't feel too bad about that. But it is good to focus on that side of the business form time to time, and since joining the PlaywrightBinge group I've put out many more submissions than I ever did before.

Last night I finally sent off the submission I really wanted to get out: to East Valley Children's Theatre's annual Aspiring Playwrights contest. This is the contest I took second place in last year with The Princess and the Moon and I'm hoping to have similar (or better) luck this year with my new commedia play The Captain's Treasure. I wrote it with the idea of teens performing it for teens (specifically something my friend Brian, who teaches middle school theater, might be able to use to do scene work in his class), so I'm hoping that East Valley will see it as I do as a way to introduce kids to this particular form of theater. The deadline for the contest is Monday, so I managed to just get the piece submitted in time! (Thankfully they accept submissions by email.) At least by sending it in at the very end, I won't have to wait as long to hear the results.

You write a play, toil over every word, send hours putting together submission packages, and finally one day it finds a home with a publisher who sends it out into the world. I was curious the other day at just what sort of a reach my plays have had, published and otherwise, and so I decided to pull together all the information I have about where my plays have so far been produced. Fortunately all of the publishers I work with give me this information in some way the basic information, plus I've kept all those details for productions I've licensed as well.

What I learned is that so far I have had plays performed in over 30 US states, in 5 Canadian provinces, and an additional 8 countries around the world across a total of 5 continents. The majority of the productions have been thanks to Illinois Jane and the Pyramid of Peril which has done well so far with Pioneer Drama Service. I have at least one more US state coming up (North Dakota with the premiere of The Princess and the Moon at the Shade Tree Players this summer), and possibly my first South American production as well, hitting continent #6.

It's exciting to see how far my plays have traveled so far and I hope that their reach will continue to grow, as my existing plays travel further and new ones join them in their travels.

After working on the commedia and the Adaptation over the past couple of months, I've come up with a new goal for myself for this year:

To write five rough drafts.

It's an ambitious goal, but I'm well on my way with two rough drafts down already in about a month and a half, which made me realize the virtue of setting a goal towards which you have already made significant progress. Part of this goal is that at least two of these rough drafts be brand new (such as the commedia) while the rest can either be new or be finishing up a draft that I've started but haven't yet finished (such as the Adaptation). Right now as I work on some revisions to the commedia I'm also sketching out some ideas for a new play, a comedy. I have a few other ideas that I've been meaning to work on, plus a couple of other pieces that have been gathering dust, and this seemed like a good way to motivate myself to get at least a full draft down on paper. The idea isn't that all of these plays will be finished and polished by the end of the year, but at least I should end the year with a lot of raw material down and ready for the next stage.