It doesn't rhyme with Kennedy

I have a friend who has a character whose name she always pronounced "Al-SEEN" until she met someone who pronounced it "AL-kin" and ever since, that's been the character's name. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just thought it was a neat little anecdote, but it's more complicated in theatre where a character's name has to be said consistently by the entire cast. It's even more complicated when the name is foreign and needs to be pronounced correctly, the way characters who are native speakers would.

So, like, the name Gennady? It doesn't rhyme with Kennedy. And deep down I knew that but then we got into practice and suddenly every name was getting pronounced a million different ways and I was like, "I'm not even sure how these names are supposed to be said anymore." Which is always an awkward thing to do because I don't know if I'm the only one who gets weird and OCD about looking like she knows EVERY SINGLE THING about the world of her play. So, I always feel like admitting "I'm not sure" about something is a sign of weakness. Like I should have thought about this, why didn't I think about this.

LUCKILY SOMEONE HAD FORESEEN WE MIGHT HAVE THIS DIFFICULTY and a really nice native Russian speaker stopped by rehearsal to confirm, once and for all, how to pronounce all the names. And we took careful notes and parroted back to her and watched as she shook her head at our flat American accents like, "No, no, that's wrong," until we'd approximated it to her satisfaction.

Even something as simple as that morning makes me feel more solid about the play moving forwards: in the future if anyone asks me how to pronounce Valeri or Anatoli or Milena, I know with pretty good authority what to tell them. No more wincing and telling them I have no idea.

Still working on getting a cast picture, but we have our first actual run through and off book day on monday, so I'm looking forward to finally seeing it on its feet all the way through. Even though I've been present for most of the rehearsal process, there are still two scenes that I haven't heard out loud, and it's really important to me to see them tomorrow in case there's something I need to tweak anything - they're two pretty early and important scenes that I want to make sure are spot on since they come so early in the play and give us so much vital information, and I'm actually the tiniest bit uncomfortable that I'm a week into the rehearsal process and haven't managed to see them.

I mentioned before, I definitely feel the pressure this year, because it is my last year in the festival and I have done it for four years and I am one of the two oldest kids in the lineup, and because I saw my mentor from last year last night and he mentioned that "I've heard this is the script that everyone wants to read," although by "everyone" I assume he just means "festival staff" and I'm pretty sure that I'm getting more milage out of the title than I really ought to. Also, that was all one sentence.

I am really, really impressed by some of the summaries for the plays this year - things that just look incredible, written by really young kids (Okay, not so young... fifteen and sixteen years old, which is how old I was when I got into this crazy world). There's one in my week that I am really, really looking forward to seeing and meeting the playwright because she's a sixteen-year-old who wrote a historical piece about a really, really cool topic and when I was sixteen I was writing poorly-planned and poorly-executed magical-realism pieces about greek mythology and bratty kids.

There are also some plays in later weeks that I won't get to see, but I'm really curious about them. There's a guy in week four who I met back when we were both sixteen, and he was lightyears ahead of me then (INCREDIBLE WRITER), so I can only imagine how much better than me he is now.

My first year at Blank, there was a guy a week ahead of me who'd done the festival for five years. I was already missing a year to catch up with him, but I was just some kid from Florida and the whole fact that I'd managed to win three separate competitions with this little play that I'd written on a bet was baffling to me. I was still at a point in my life where I was writing to prove to myself that it wasn't a fluke. I couldn't have known then that I'd go four-and-four in the festival. Now, knowing other kids who've done Blank, who I know from previous years and didn't make it back this year, I'm now realizing that that kind of winning streak is the exception, not the rule.

And I can't explain why I'm here, and some of my brilliant friends who I've met in previous years or at other festivals aren't. I really do not know. And I could chalk it up to luck but that would be belittling the selection process, which I have been assured doesn't have any favoritism involved and actually is harder on returning playwrights. ("We only bring you back if you've improved.") But the more I work on Like a Dog in Space, the more I realize that it's really nothing like my last three years of plays. Structurally, thematically, my choice of characters - it's not like my usual work. Maybe it was the novelty of it that got me in, or my apparent willingness to take risks, or just because it's so damn weird.

I really don't know. And this post is a lot longer than I originally planned it to be, but once I got onto the subject and forced myself to write about it, it turned into a huge monster blog post and I could probably go on about it for another four pages but it would just be me expressing how I'm still not very certain of myself and my skills... and that's not really interesting to read, is it?

It's that time of year again.

I'm back at Blank, doing lots of writing, laughing way too much, and chilling with amazing, talented people. What am I going to do with myself next year when I'm too old for this?

Oh. Be an adult. Oops.

I'm going to talk about revisions, because for the amount of time I spend bitching about them, I actually really love revisions. I love doing them. I love doing them well. I love being given the chance to fix things that I didn't get right the first time and looking at things in new ways.

I feel like revisions are actually a really important part of the writing process. A play is an organic medium - if you finish your first draft and never touch it again, you're missing out on something. Your play is immature. I mean, I guess to each his own, but I love taking a play apart and putting it back together - I always find stuff new in the process. I also think that the actual ability to do that - to break it down and then reconnect the pieces - is a really important skill to have.

I'm working on Like a Dog in Space at Blank this year, and it's going really nicely, but I'm in a sort of funny place with the play. The version they're producing is by no means the final draft - I'm fully intent on expanding it back out to a full length at some point in the future - but the process of cutting it down to its barest pieces has changed the play. It's given me really excellent insights into the characters and their relationships, and I feel like I've learned and grown a lot as a writer through the revision process.

This is my swan song year at Blank, so I do feel some pressure to impress people and show them how much I've changed since the time that I was that awkward child who didn't really know what she was doing there or understand the importance of the revision process. Some plays require less revision simply because there's less to revise, but just because your idea and execution doesn't change from the time you write your opening stage direction to the time you write "end of play" doesn't mean that you've crafted a perfect Pulitzer winner.

But I wouldn't revise the last four years of my life. I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of myself and what I've learned and what I've accomplished. I'm still reluctant to call myself talented, but if enough people keep saying so I guess I'll have to believe it. At any rate, I've stopped trying to prove to myself the first play wasn't a fluke, wasn't beginner's luck, because it wasn't. I've worked to get where I am today. And I'll have to keep working, to get to where I'll be tomorrow, in five years, in ten-

But I wouldn't go back and change anything. That's the funny thing about revisions - they're in the future tense. The old draft is still there, tucked away in a folder. It's in the play's DNA. You can only do the revision because you wrote the previous draft. So it's not like you're really going back and changing things - you're still moving forward. Every new draft takes you deeper into the world of the play, taking you towards some plutonic perfect form of it. I'm not sure that you ever reach that perfect point. But it's fun to try.

Also my cast is amazing and I'll get a picture on saturday when we've finally got everyone together because oh my god oh my god life is awesome.

Thought for the day:

I got called "professional" (by someone I really admire) for being able to meet a revision deadline. Shouldn't this be a basic life skill? I mean, I really do appreciate the compliment, but haven't we all been trained since birth to meet deadlines and due dates for assignments?

But apparently it's not. Because I know a zillion and two people who can't meet deadlines. I was one of them last semester, and I went a few days over on my screenwriting projects a few times, but deadlines are still deadlines for a reason. The expectation should be that you're going to meet them, shouldn't it? So theoretically, this should be like patting me on the head for being able to tie my shoes, but instead the expectation is that most people don't make an effort to meet deadlines and what is that. :|

Deadlines, summaries, elevator speeches. Learn 'em, live 'em, love 'em, they're make it or break it.

So, children, what have we learned this year?

I learned that you can dick around with a screenplay idea for a semester, write sixty pages and four treatments, and still not have anything that resembles a finished product, and still not have wasted the semester as long as you plan on someday coming back to the idea and actually writing it the way it's meant to be written.

I learned that it's not actually essential to do the Anthropology homework readings, but it's better if you do. And by better, I mean, "Do you want to pass the class?" So maybe Professor Grant was on to something when he said to do them. Which I did.

I learned that I am not a person who can be ignored.

I learned this after finding it written on a fortune cookie at the start of term and taping it above my desk.

I learned that I don't entirely know what I want to do with my life.

I also learned that this is okay, because I'm studying things in vaguely the right field and sooner or later I'll get it figured out.

I ♥ my mommy

Just to give you an idea of what kind of childhood I had, the biggest fight I've ever had with my mother was that she wasn't mean enough. This ended with me shouting something incomprehensible about "THIS WHOLE FAMILY IS FUCKED UP AND NO ONE SAYS ANYTHING ABOUT IT" and her shouting back, "WHAT, DO YOU WANT ME TO BE AN OGRE?!"

The only thing that this proves is that I was an incredibly melodramatic fifteen year old, and it should be recognized that I have most certainly changed since then.

Anyways, I was talking to a friend a few days ago, and we hit upon the subject that every one of us, if we're lucky, is born with the best mother for us. That means that you might describe something your mother does for you to someone else and they might be like, "Man, that is incredibly fucked up," but to you she's perfect. And I don't know if that's because we grow up to be adapted to our own parents idiosyncrasies, or just because fate is funny. You could argue nature-vs-nurture until the cows come home and it doesn't change the fact that my mother might be perfect for me in an entirely different way than your mother is perfect for you.

When I was in second grade, I had ridiculous second grade projects for which there was always this expectation that your mother was going to help you make your Endangered Species Mask, or your Historical Figure Costume, or your President Macaroni Sculpture, or whatever. My mother... did not help me. And on project day, I had a shitty lemur mask made of construction paper and everyone else had, like, I don't even know, Manatees made with grey paint and cardstock and socks? Pandas hand-crafted out of felt? And I got to class on project day with my sad little mask and was like, "WHAT THE BLEEP IS THIS BLEEP." Because it was so ridiculously clear that I'd done mine all by my second grade self and everyone else's moms had stayed up until 2 AM gluing macaroni to a cardboard giraffe.

And then at some point I realized I was smarter because my mom made me do my own work, and started looking down on everyone whose parents obviously did their projects for them. Thus creating my fifth grade superiority complex.

My mother has always encouraged me to do my own work, and to be proud of my work, and that is why she is the best mommy for me. :)

ALSO, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR ENGAGEMENT, ELLEN AND HOUMAN.

(I bet you thought I was not going to call you out on my blog, right?)

A thought:

Being a grown-up means starting to hammer out the plot of a play where the characters are a grown man and a teenaged girl, and taking far more interest in the father's arc than the daughter's.

In the past, I would have focused in on the kid.

'Ships passing in the night

This is fandom blabber that's not going to make sense to basically all my readers.

Reading the fanfiction recommendations on TVTropes usually just makes me sit back and go ...PEOPLE 'SHIP THIS? Like, why is the most popular pairing in Titan AE Korso/Preed? It doesn't make sense. Or why do whoficcers 'ship Doctor/Donna? She's the only companion you can't make a case for pairing him with. And, I mean, it gets worse. Shipping wars can tear a fandom apart.

Of course I shouldn't really say anything because I used to 'ship Jacen/Nen Yim back when I was ficcing in Star Wars.

But really, who in their right mind 'ships Trotsky/Stalin?

OH WAIT WE JUST MADE THAT ONE UP.

I'm about to piss a lot of people off.

Was 9/11 terrible? Yes. I was nine years old when it happened, and it stands out in my mind as the first truly terrible thing that I was aware of. Did wars and natural disasters happen in the years between 1991 and 2001? Yes, but I don't remember them. But yes, let's all agree (for the sake of argument and because it was) that 9/11 was terrible and lots of people lost their lives and it's basically shadowed American culture since. Never forget.

Was Osama Bin Laden a horrible, vile, disgusting man who deserved to die for what he did? Yes. Absolutely. He's probably sitting in a hell-as-a-bureaucracy right now, holding a will-call number and trading dirty looks with Hitler and Stalin. Which is right where he belongs. Because he killed innocents, lead a crooked, violent, dehumanizing regime, and spent ten years trolling our country with viral videos clips while we couldn't find the guy.

Is it terrific that our troops have finally managed to find and shoot him? Yes. I'm not going to argue with you. The world is better for him being dead. Absolutely.

I am a red-blooded American. I love this country and I love progress. (I would love to see more of it.)

Do I think that setting off fireworks, partying in the streets, and making t-shirts is absolutely the wrong way to behave upon hearing that we have killed the FBI's most wanted?

Oh my god, you fucking rednecks, are you kidding me.

Our army shot someone. We did not win the world cup. Have some class.

It is traditional to save the ticker tape parade for when the troops/politician/astronauts/whoever COME HOME. This is not a victory until every last American soldier is out of Afghanistan. We won a battle. Let's not forget that we still have to finish the war.

Do you guys know my brother?

Because he's hilarious. And kind of nerdy and adorkable. And if any of my friends are in the market for a 6'6" Nice Jewish Boy who likes video games, computer programing, and over-analyzing movies, I will Set You Up.

Also you should read his blog. Because he is my brother and he's hilarious. I mean, how am I related to this guy? My siblings are so much more talented than I am, *cry forever*