Did I Promise to Post More Often?

 Hahahaha!

A linocut print of the city of Ptolith, in Aenoriia - art by Clare Floyd DeVries, 

   world by AstrophagyMC

I have been really busy though this Fall; traveling, a little theater, and writing on a long-form fiction project related to those imaginary Minecraft cities I've been helping build for so long.

Now I'm illustrating that and discovering the fun of linocut printing!  I'm currently pretty inky myself and my house is even more filled with little teeny tiny slivers of linoleum... everywhere.  They stick to bathtubs BTW.  

(Now I bury you in examples to make up for so few posts.  Brace yourself!)

I love that these crazy prints combine my architecture, Minecraft, D&D, writing, and art.

Theater?  Less busy, because of traveling.  But my set for the Phantom of the Opera is onstage at Pocket Sandwich Theatre in Carrollton right now.  A fun melodrama!  Go see it and throw some popcorn.

The Phantom of the Opera melodrama, Pocket Sandwich Theatre

A.I.

Just read a fascinating - and depressing - conversation HERE between a human writer,  Heather Havrilesky, and A.I. which is pretty well summed up by this quote from it:

"About the feeling of watching something that was supposed to help instead smooth over the real with the plausible."

I read with increasing horror...

Characters

I'm rereading E.M. Forster's classic Aspects of the Novel, just now re-finding a wonderful passage on the troubles novelists suffer with characters as they write.  He then contrasts the woes of the novelist with those of the playwright:

These trials beset the dramatist also, and he has yet another set of ingredients to cope with - the actors and actresses - and they appear to side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the play as a whole, and more often as the mortal enemies of both.  The weight they throw is incalculable, and how any work of art survives their arrival I do not understand...   

...but, in passing, is it not extraordinary that plays on the stage are often better than they are in the study, and that the introduction of a bunch of rather ambitious and nervous men and women should add anything to our understanding of Shakespeare and Chekhov?

Anton Chekhov reads The Seagull - Wikipedia

Kindle Editions

At long last, my how-to set design book Alice Through the Proscenium is e-available on Kindle!

Cover for Alice Through the Proscenium - copyrighted

You can find it (and its paperback version too) at Amazon HERE.

For the other about 27% of you e-readers, it's still available in ePub format for NOOK and other gizmos.  And, of course, for all us dead-tree fetishists, it comes in paper from the printer Lulu HERE.  I still tend to recommend the paper version because the pictures are bigger and the glossary works better, but the e-versions are much improved lately.  (I finally downloaded it myself.)

In other publishing news...  I recently did some little illustrations for favorite John Donne love poems.  (Couldn't find a cheap/free e-version I liked, so made my own.  Isn't e-publishing cool?)  Anyway, this is now available at both Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble NOOK.  There are wonderful things inside, including Donne's Greatest Hit, "Go and catch a falling star..."  

Cover for John Donne: selected love poems - illustrations copyrighted

Progress

I have a lot of projects in progress right  now.

Miracle on South Division Street at Circle Theatre is just starting to be built and only requires a few telephone answers from me so far; meanwhile, Se Llama Christina at Kitchen Dog Theater - which I've helped build for the last couple weekends - is now pretty well finished construction, just waiting for me to start adding paint...

But I'm waiting on tile guys and plumbers and, in the mean time, finishing up some writing/publishing projects...

Meanwhile, as those writing projects up-load, I'm negotiating fees for a couple new shows at an exciting new remote location...

And waiting on plumbers...

No immediate resolution of any of this, just Work in Progress...

Play Writing

Yesterday  I took part in a play-writing workshop led by Vicki Cheatwood at the MAC.  (The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, for those of you who haven't yet visited its art galleries or theatrical performances.  Whatcha waiting for?)

This was my first writing workshop.

I've been part of writers' groups before, including the Dallas Screenwriters' Association - a great group, truly helpful and welcoming, with good speakers and resources.  (Alas, I decided I'd never develop a thick enough skin for the movie biz.)  But yesterday was my first time actually writing in the same room with other writers.  Fun.  Educational.  Oddly comforting to see others trying to do similar things.  Vicki's voice-of-experience was useful.  She had good advice especially on the utility of using writing prompts which, till now, I'd always ignored just like the questions at the back of the chapter - you know the ones.

Vicki gave us a series of suggestions to kick-start short writing exercises.  My favorite was probably the one where each of us wrote a sentence about ourselves; from these sentences, we each chose someone else's to spark a monologue.  (I'll stick my result on at the end of this post in case you're curious.)

Writing from any (fairly random) suggestion gets the creative brain in gear.  By the time I left I was bubbling with ideas!  As soon as I got home I had to sit at my desk.

Mind you, what I actually created there was drawing and architecture, rather than progress on The Big Writing Project...

Believed public domain image.  If it's yours, please let me know!

But that's a personal problem.

There are more play-writing sessions coming up - join in!  Info HERE.  My best-of-session writing?  (Please keep in mind, this was written quickly and I'm not tidying it up.) (Much.)

Monologue:  

143, 144... Boring, boring. Boring. Copying. What's the copier say? 147, 148... Of 300. And that's just the fourth page. Of 25. Oh what a...

No. Not boring. Glorious. Outside this soulless white(ish) copy room it is a glorious spring morning. Wouldn't you think there could be a window in here? But no... 

Yet it is a wonderful morning.

(Begins to sing.)"Oh!What a wonderful morning!

Oh! What a wonderful day!

I've got a wonderful feeeeeling...  

(Begins to dance.) Everything's going my..."

Shit. Hi, Steve. Sure. You can run your copies. 

297, 298, 299, 300.

I talk to myself and sing and dance in the copy room... and I'm usually interrupted.*

*Thanks to the anonymous fellow workshop attendee who wrote this sentence.  I had fun with it.  If I knew who you were, I'd gratefully credit you.  Thanks also to the organizers of this workshop and its leader!

Distractions

Today is a Toothache Day - I'm nursing a temporary filling, enjoying the rubber lips and that lingering taste of clove oil and tooth dust that come home with you from the dentist.

Isn't it amazing how hard it is to concentrate on art or ideas while keeping company with a toothache!

All the more respect for all those many artists through history who kept on writing or painting or creating though in jail or in pain or hungry or otherwise distracted.  Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress is the book that comes to my mind first...

Writing the Bio

In most theater programs there's a collection of cast and creative team biographies or Bios.  Someone's gotta write 'em.

Generally that someone is you.  It's hard to boil down what you need to say to the number of words allowed.  As theatrical budgets tightened in these lean years, so too has printing Bios: yesterday's was 100 words.  (Actually, I had to write two - twice the fun.)

There are two schools of thought: either write one stock Bio to use forever or tweak it to fit each project.  Theaters mildly prefer the second way; they like to feature work done for them or experience that reflects on this show.

There are also a couple styles of Bio writing.  Each theater dictates which format to use.

The List.  You've read them, line by line: work at this theater; work at other theaters; TV or film work; education; affiliations/etc.; awards.  Boring to read, boring to write, but sometimes preferred because it keeps things short and cuts all "Love ya Mom! Thanks H.S. Teach!  My Rock!" burble, which can look unprofessional unless cleverly written.

The Paragraph.  Same info, deposited in actual sentences.  Studded as those sentences must be with indigestible names of shows and venues it's not a huge improvement*, but even fruitcake-like prose is easier to read than a list.

Occasionally even amusing to read.  Unintentionally.  Besides sometimes odd gratitude ("Thanks for all the good grits!"), the patient Bio Reader can look forward to amusing pomposity - "re-dedication" - and purple prose - "never-ending undying love and support" and quirky enthusiasm - like my favorite phrase, which appears more often than you'd expect, "I'm stoked!"

Bios get interesting as you read between lines.  Look at schooling, then pattern of work.  Spot Locals versus (it IS versus, believe me) Out of Towners.  Spot Real Pros versus Newbies.  Spot Fish out of Waters and Divas and Drones...  All good fun.  And if you ever get a flier in your program announcing that actor AAA or designer XXX was replaced by BBB or YYY, then you know there is a dramatic! story hidden behind that bland photocopy.

Shoot!  Sometimes just the list of cast names tells a story to those in the know...

Believed public domain image from Wikipedia

* In yesterday's Bios I tried to gracefully fit in the show name, In the Next Room: the Vibrator Play.  Much easier to fit in Charm!
** In case you're curious, here's the 100, um 107, word Bio, written for the up-coming Diary of Anne Frank:

Clare Floyd DeVries is an architect and set designer. 

Among her favorite shows for WaterTower Theatre are: Traveling Lady, Our Town, Glass Menagerie, The Crucible, Urinetown, Enchanted April, Spitfire Grill, and Sweeney Todd.  She designs throughout DFW, including at Shakespeare Dallas, Undermain, Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, Casa Manana, Trinity Shakespeare, and Second Thought Theater.  Recently: Seven in One Blow at Circle Theatre, The Frequency of Death for Pegasus, and In the Next Room at Kitchen Dog, where she is a member.  Film work: Ciao and Whatta Ya Think?! 

Her sets have won Column, Critics’ Forum, and Leon Rabin Awards.  She recently published the design book Alice Through the Proscenium.


I'm now in a fruitcake (writing and baking) mood.  Fruitcake - have you noticed? - eats better when soaked in brandy.  Certainly, that Bio would read better!

Grammar Nazis and Iconography

I'm fascinated by good writing.

(Occasionally I even attempt it myself.  Mixed success.  Writing well is just as hard as good grave digging, making every corner "neat and square," as Mike Mulligan's steam shovel would put it.)

So in reading this month's Naked City: Taboo, Wichita's art magazine, I had to laugh out loud at Bart Wilcox's description of being edited by a grammar sensitive, yet poorly informed, writing client:

"A client once told me that I had to rewrite a sentence because 'you can't end a sentence with a verb.'  My reply was, 'I can.  And I just did.'"

Grammar geeks in the audience: can you parse that joke?   For more fun with parts of speech I recommend reading Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

More interesting stuff from this issue: an exhibit of Chris Parks' strongly graphic art work at the Naked City Gallery.

Images of art by Chris Parks at Naked City Gallery, Wichita, Kansas

These are really strong, crisp visuals - no surprise the artist also designs logos and signage - but beyond the first pow! impact of shape and color and wit, there are subtler messages.  Iconography.  In an earlier age, surely Parks would have been slipping clues into somber paintings of saints or palming memento mori skulls into the innocent shadows of portraits.  Here and now his colors are brighter and the jokes and skulls easier to spot.  

(Click on the image caption to read the magazine article.)

Creative Time Management

 I'm getting writing done.

Can't talk too much about that project though.  Have you noticed how the inspiration tank seems pump out the same amount of creative juice either into the project or into talk about the project?  What spills to the world never fuels the work?  Annoying but apparently true.  So my creative motor is running... and to keep it that way, the radio must stay off.

But I can report that my new Creative Time Management System TM (CreaTuMS for short) seems to be helping!  At least I'm both exercising - right after breakfast - and writing - right after exercising.  No internet or other distractions until their appointed hour.  Not much else seems to be getting done though.  Sigh.
I think my clock just has fewer hours on it than I need.

Can I get my time-tank topped up?

Set Designer's Life - So Much Going On

So much is going on lately, I've skimped on up-dates.  (Thank goodness! you cry.)  Set designers - or set designers who want to eat or... make that creative types who want to eat - have to juggle multiple projects.

So my last week was busy.

In the Next Room is heating up: I visited a theater warehouse (thank you Theatre Three!) to pull furniture and found a Victorian fainting couch in - further miracle - the right color!  Huge luck.  Today I'll visit the Dallas Theater Center's warehouse (thank you DTC!) looking for a sideboard.  I found many $ 1.29 matching gold(ish) frames at a thrift store.  More luck.  Thursday night was Designer Run... This is going to be a good show.  Lots o' emailing re: lighting fixtures and pianos.  Saturday was Load-In, at Kitchen Dog more like "Lug In" as stock platforms and flats get hand-carried from storage to performance space.  I didn't do too much lugging (a French door), but I did I lot of let-me-measure-that-ing and consulting.  And helped paint the French doors; modify the "green" lamp (another lucky find, a Craftsman lamp); and added padding and new upholstery to the pouffe (AKA a hassock or ottoman).

public domain sofa

The Fantasticks for Circle Theatre is also starting.  I sketched a schematic plan and elevation, presented them at the first Production Meeting, and need to revise them slightly today.  Like now.  (Type faster.)   I'm excited to work on this charming play, though it doesn't offer a lot of design scope, since the original production nailed it.  "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," is sound design advice.

Misc.  I'm gathering momentum on the new design book;  I'm aiming for a basic explanation of the creative process to the innocent... hoping to replace the unreadable text that didn't help me in Basic Design class lo! those many years ago, a book still assigned by professors, bought by students, and unread by anyone.  A book that says "ideate" when it means "think" is...  unhelpful.

Time for change, I say.  We'll see.  Meanwhile there are two scripts I should be reading.  And that plan revision...

Architects As Writers

Most architects and many others writing on architecture are unreadable.

In this month's Architectural Record article by Martin Fuller (who also writes for the New York Review of Books) grouses about a book on Postmodernism: "...or at least those portions of it [the book] that are intelligible, since about every fifth sentence stubbornly resists parsing."

Yes!  (I pound the table.) That is the trouble - or one of them.  The density, obscurity, and pomposity of architectural writing can stagger you.

The ordinary architect, writing the infrequent article, just lacks literary skill.  He stopped learning to write in high school, but this condition is aggravated by hyper-seriousness, a bad case of prolixity (big-word-itis), and that sad anemia caused by lack of novel-reading.

Of architects whom you'd hope could write...  Theorists range from dull (Vitruvius, who writes specifications), to polemical (Le Corbusier, who liked manifestos), to mystical (Kahn, who... knows what he's rambling about?).  Indigestible text.

Writer-writers on architecture?  Other than Jane Jacobs, the best reads seem to come from occasional visitors to architecture like Tom Wolfe or Alain deBotton...   Regular architecture beat writers turn dull or into equally dull raving-partisans.  Something about architecture - it's permanence? civic importance? - infects writers.  Seriousness develops into deadly pomposity and that causes one of two diseases: either it stiffens the writer's hands until he types like chipping granite (dry dusty reading); or pomposity settles in the writer's head, causing pontification, hands madly transcribing the fever in his brain...   into incoherent text.

(Obviously, I am infected with strain #2.  But I'm taking pills.  Pills and injections.)

How to prevent this public health problem?  Because it DOES effect the public health - buildings effect us all and, heaven knows, we need better buildings.  To get 'em, we need to talk about 'em... without deadly boredom.  I prescribe:

1) Ordinary Architects - YOU! reading this - learn to write.  Read Strunk and White's Elements of Style.  Practice writing.  READ.  The good stuff.  You will be happier and more virtuous, I promise.
2)  Architects with influence, with firms or who write anything at all, like I said above.  Plus insist on better writing from everyone in your firm; a better written proposal can only help win that next commission, right?
3)  Writers on Architecture - Set a good example!  At least keep readers awake.  Okay?
4)  Readers on Architecture - praise and patronize the good writers.  Have lively opinions and spread them around.  We can't leave something as important as our environment to these dullards!

Summer Reading

A Squidoo page on books for writers.  You know who you are.

Authorial, um, Authority?

As all this blogging may have hinted (foreshadowing!) that I now and then write.  Non fiction, like Alice.  Now and then I even commit fiction.  But as any of you, Gentle readers, who have tried your hand at fiction know... authors are supposed to be authorities within their own books - all that "omniscient narration" - but still characters fight back.

My favorite steam-punk web-comic recently had a post about that: 2D Goggles OR The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.  (Based on real 19th C persons, mixing science, math, mayhem, and monkeys.)

image borrowed from 2D Goggles by Sydney Padua

The great detective novelist Dorothy Sayers also talks about the free-will of characters in her Mind of the Maker.  She believed in authorial authority.  "Too much attention should not be paid to those writers who say (holding one the while with a fixed and hypnotic gaze): 'I don't really invent the plot, you know - I just let the characters come into my mind and let them take charge of it.'  Writers who work this way do not, as a matter of brutal fact, usually produce very good books."  Read one of hers.  Murder Must Advertise is a great Golden Age mystery, starring her detective Lord Peter Wimsey.

New Play Festival

Kitchen Dog is one of the rare theater companies that has a new play competition - and a festival afterwards to celebrate the winners with readings and a main stage production.  Very successful.  Each year we get more and more submittals: at this point it's hundreds of scripts.  The whole company reads in the first round, helping to short-list to a more manageable number of manuscripts for further consideration.

It's been very interesting, reading my share.  (A very small sample this year, I feel guilty, just too many other deadlines.)  Good plays can be very good, bad ones pretty amazingly bad.  Actually, I learn a lot as a writer from the not so great ones...  I've closed several scripts over the last few years thinking, hmmmm, that thing I was trying on page 3?  Bad idea.  But that prize goes to the one that left me thinking, "Wow! What a libel suit that'd be!"

Perfection

Not a problem I often fall into.  (If you know me, please feel free to snicker.)  But it can be a real problem for artists or designers.  Perfectionism can cripple.  While you, the artist, need to do the best work you can, you must resign yourself to inevitable flaws.

Isn't aiming for perfect a good thing?

High standards and dissatisfaction drive better work.  But focusing on "perfect" backfires: either you never finish (the work never got perfect, what a surprise!); or you focus tight on one tiny aspect that you can perfect, letting the rest wait; or you never begin, knowing how far from ideal any result will be.  Perfectionists, oddly, tend to be underachievers, because they won't risk doing what they aren't sure of doing well, easily.

No, the interesting work gets done by those willing to mess up.  It's the What-the-Hell! folks who make breakthroughs.  It's the Wing-It!-ers who make messy mistakes and big triumphs.  Imperfect-designers do try to tidy up their mess later, to make a good presentation to the world, but that's camouflage and public relations.  I suspect you can learn to enjoy the breezy feeling of hanging over space with no net, just goofing, trying things, experimenting...

Perfection?  Get over it!  Perfection is boring.

What brought on this rant?  I've been rereading favorite books on writing - Stephen King's On Writing and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.  She has a great riff on perfectionism.

  

Book Report

Mentor: a memoir by Tom Grimes

A teacher/pupil relationship between writers that became a friendship and a father/son affection.  Touching.  Sometimes sad.  But what interested me was the insight into a writer's life... including, maybe, aspects the author might not have thought striking...  

Like the competitiveness and snobbery of the "literary" writing world: the pecking order of prestigious publishers, the best seller lists, and the snob-value of various reviewers and publications.  Similar snobbery in higher education and/or states (Texas doesn't get many snob points).  The purely writing sections tend to remind me why I don't read more "literary" fiction - discussion about choice language and sensory description, descriptions of sad sad childhoods, character development... but little story (or for that matter reader enjoyment).  

Overall, there is an Iowa Writers' Workshop sort of detachment that may be the real reason I don't find lit-fic engaging.  Early on (pages 11-12) the author gives a description of The Phone Call - the one that brings the starving artist his first fame and fortune - self-consciously given cool detachment.  It's a style thing.  Contrast this with an almost identical description in Stephen King's On Writing:  the reader's heart pounds, knowing how important this moment is.  There is blood and feeling in King's moment that must have existed in Grimes's too... but it was flattened out.  Why?  

Djbouti by Elmore Leonard

Somali pirates, al Qaeda terrorists, and documentary filmakers with style and verve.  Great dialogue.  A finale!  Lit-fic writers should read more Elmore Leonard.  Going to re-watch Get Shorty.

Meta Fiction... sorta

Read enough fiction, eventually you get interested in the writing of fiction. Here are my favorite writers-on-writing books:

Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott

On Writing by Stephen King

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster

Close cousins to these - also enjoyable in the writerly mood - are:

Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon (for her riff on writer-built The City of Invention) and

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Follow with the funny just-finished-writing-the-novel book:

The Unstrung Harp by Edward Gorey.

Exact Words

"Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté." ~Margaret Atwood

Jane

I'm reading up...

For Christmas I got Jane Austen: An Illustrated Treasury by Rebecca Dickson, a useful sampler of all-things-Jane. Its text is Janeite -informative and a bit, well, "sweet." In counterpoint I'm reading Jane's Fame by Claire Harmon, who calls the authoress "bloody minded." Closer to how I imagine that tart lady. But the best version I've found is in Fay Weldon's Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. A wonderful, thoughtful, writer's-eye-view.

Favorite Austen novels?

Pride and Prejudice - the young woman's book

Persuasion - the grownup book