Micro-Sabbatical Summer 2018

Monday: Wrote just over 1400 words of "Accountability Partners," a play I began writing in the summer of 2016 as part of the Stony Brook Southampton Script Development lab. BOOM! I now have three complete scenes. If I accomplish nothing else this week, I will have had these three hours in the Starbucks off the service road of the Sunrise Highway. Living the dream, people.

Tuesday: Ermagherd, peeps. Just over 1000 words today. Not that 1000 words really means anything significant. I'm not exactly aiming for word length with this play. But I'm thinking of word length in terms of commitment. Another three hours of concentrated work on the play today. And another three hours of sitting in a Starbucks. I'm cold and full of coffee and my teeth are on edge between the air-conditioning and the caffeine in my system. But I wrote! And I have another scene! Maybe I'll actually keep it! Who knows! So many exclamation points!!

A noisy-ass coffee shop is the most distraction-free space I could find.

Wednesday: Okay. Around 700 words on the play today, but I spent the morning rereading some poems first and making small edits. Then I began expanding the scene I wrote yesterday -- I think it's the turning point of the play, and I think I'm figuring out what will happen to these characters, and what they will lose and what they will gain. I have some ideas for later revisions, too. There's a thread that appeared early in the play that I haven't picked back up that I probably should -- but I'm going to wait until I finish the main plot before going back in and tinkering. I think. But I'm pretty satisfied with today's work. Which is -- as you know -- a big fucking miracle. 

Thursday: I've been adding lines and cutting lines and revising some dialogue and some monologues to the point where I can't really track word count anymore, but I'd guess I've written around 6 or 7 hundred words this session. Let's say, I put the time in. Ass. In. Seat. And I'm having fun trapping my characters in strange spaces. The landscape of the play -- a golf course and its clubhouse -- is providing all sorts of fun opportunities. Keep in mind, I don't play golf. So I have also spent a good amount of time doing cursory internet research this morning, too, just so that the play won't seem completely ridiculous to someone who actually plays golf. (It's striving to be a comedy, so it's naturally kind of ridiculous.) But I've begun Scene 5! And I'm approaching 29 pages -- so I think I have a one act?

Friday: I spent the first hour this morning polishing two poems I had in rough-draft form in my journal. Then I wrote 700 words of Scene 5. It's not complete, but I know where it's headed. AND there's a possibility the play could be a full-length in two acts. Maybe. It depends. I guess I have to write the scene that follows this, and at the end of THAT scene, I'll have a better idea. I'm having so much fun with it, though. I think that's a good sign?

I would just like to take a moment and praise the magnificent phenomenon that is Summer Camp. Thanks to the kids having their fun from 9-4 each day this week, I've managed to write almost twenty new pages and two completely new scenes of a play as well as five more poems. I'm ridiculously, over-the-top happy with Micro-Sabbatical Summer 2018. I have to move into preparing-for-fall-semester-classes mode now, and, you know, hang out with my own kids (hahahaha) but I've dedicated real, concentrated time to my writing this summer, and used it wisely. I am ecstatic. I might just do a cartwheel across this Starbucks.

I mean, there's also the possibility that I'll read the drafts next week and feel complete dismay when I realize they're no good . . . but for now I'm riding this wave of I-just-wrote-a-crapload euphoria.