Here’s what I’ve been working on since we last checked in…
- Remember last year when I had The Love of Three Oranges (one-act version), Sell Their Stuff, New Year’s Thieve and the paperback of Beyond Amazon, eBay and Etsy all coming out within a few weeks of each other… and during NaNoWriMo (which I am an ML for)? Remember how I nearly lost my mind with stress and work? I very nearly did it to myself again this year but wisely decided at the last-minute to cancel both the pre-order for my NaNoWriMo book AND my newest eBay book to give myself a little breathing room.
- The Love of Three Oranges 2 aka The Green Bird is available now and there’s been lots of action behind the scenes with setting up productions and whatnot for that. I hope to be able to give you a full list of upcoming performances very soon and start sharing video and pictures. It’s all very exciting!
- I am well into my Tale of Tales adaptation. Right now, I’m leaning very strongly to this becoming several things…
- Firstly, comprised of adaptations of my favorite fairy tales from the collection, will be a full length play in commedia style comprised of one-act plays within a frame story that can also be performed separately. I have written four of the plays for this already plus one I wrote a few months ago and I believe there will only be five or six total so I am tale or two away from being done with the first draft of this. (It’s actually already way too long as it is but I’m hoping editing will work its magic to get the length down.) When this is done, it will essentially be six or seven plays at once all looking for premieres so stay tuned if you want a chance at that. If I end up adapting more tales than I can fit in the full length, I’ll also make those available as standalone one acts.
- Secondly, I’m working on a really weird play that I can’t even describe yet but it will use the fairy tales in an unusual and more modern way. It’s designed for anywhere from 1 to dozens of actors and is a little experimental so I’m going to start testing out pieces of this play in play competitions and submission opps so you may see glimpses of it before the whole thing is done. If the excerpts seem to play well, I’ll work towards expanding it into a full length play next year.
- Finally, I’ll also be taking a little bit of each of the fifty plays and weaving that together into an “original” full length play. This will be a brand new plot of my own creation in the style of the original tales and using elements of all of them. This project is still in the planning phases so you won’t see it for a while.
- It’s taken me far long than I’d like to admit but I finally managed to completely rework the plot of the MG novel adaptation of Polar Twilight that I wrote the first draft of like a crazy person the week after Christmas and have been working on revising all year. I actually took the time to meticulously outline everything this time and while there’s still some random research left to do before I can get down to rewriting it with the new plot, I’m feeling much better about the story this time. The characters are still wonderful and I’m still madly in love with this world so, fingers crossed, maybe I’ve finally figured it out this time. I would REALLY love to get the next draft of this book done before the end of the year but I’ve got so much else going on, I’m just going to keep my butt in the chair and see where it gets me.
I wrote 34,423 words in August, my lowest month of the year. And, weirdly, I’m not upset about that. I summer-ed really hard with my little boo and I don’t regret a moment of that and it was also a really great writing month for me in terms of things finishing and figured out. It’s a good reminder that, while numbers are a way to measure, they’re not always the best way.
How’s your writing going?