Sharing your work with people online produces a variety of outcomes. One of my favorites is waking up to fan mail from someone on the other side of the world. One of my least favorites is waking up to rejection notices, like I did a few mornings ago.

In related news, my “Chimera” project is on the market for anyone looking for a good science-fiction/action series. Otherwise, it’s going back in the file cabinet and will likely serve as raw material for the novel I’ll write after I finish the one I’m going to write after I finish the one I’m writing now.

Go ahead and try diagramming that last sentence, kids. But don’t blame me if your head explodes.

Speaking of recursive oddities: The advertising agency I work for specializes in differentiation — that is, helping our clients identify and promote the things that make them stand out in the marketplace. Our corporate tagline is “Exactly Like Nobody Else” and the company bought all of us very nice Land’s End shirts with the logo and tagline embroidered on them. The irony of everyone here having the same shirt reading “Exactly Like Nobody Else” wasn’t immediately apparent, but it’s now impossible to ignore — particularly on days like today, when seven out of the ten employees all wore our shirts. The atomic weight of such recursive irony could collapse around us and form a black hole. Of shirts.

In my last post, I mentioned I was finishing up a new play called “Drawing Away”. Well, it’s all done and you can find out more about it (and download a copy) on the Works page. If you do give it a look, let me know what you think.

With that out of the way, the next revision on my list was some long-overdue refinements to my adaptation of “The Odyssey”. A week or so back, someone who worked on the original production at Northwestern College contacted me to see if the script was available for production at a theatre in Illinois . . . which put just the right amount of heat under my efforts to get things cleaned up. I got everything done just in time to send it off to their selection committee last week and I’ve also put up a copy here for everyone else. As always, let me know what you think.

It was interesting, coming back to those scripts after such a long time. As I said in my post last week, “Drawing Away” is a reboot of the first play I ever wrote — taking the basic premise and reworking it around a slightly different plot and cast of characters. I ended up using much more of the original dialogue than I’d planned; through no grand planning on my part, it just seemed to fit better into the plot than I expected. All in all, I like this version better. But check back in another twenty years.

Tightening up “The Odyssey” presented a different set of challenges. By the time it got to the rehearsal process, I’d done nearly fifteen drafts on the script. The original text, of course, is a massive and wandering story — and I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to do it justice without getting lost forever among the twist and turns. Coming back to it now, I was pleasantly surprised at how well I’d managed on the whole thing. Here’s hoping the selection committee agrees.

(The production at Northwestern was a lot of fun. The music in particular has stayed with me. The composer did an excellent job with the score and I’ve always regretted losing touch with him before I could get a copy of it for myself. Reading back through the script again, I could still hear the haunting voices singing . . . fortunately, I have a DVD of a brush-up rehearsal and was able to pull the scene out and share it here. These, of course, are the sirens…)

…deur’ ag’ iôn, poluain’ Oduseu,
mega kudos Achaiônn, nêa katastêson,
hina nôiterên op akousêis.
ou gar pô tis têide parêlase nêi melainêi,
prin g’ hêmeôn meligêrun
apo stomatôn op’ akousai,
all’ ho ge terpsamenos
neitai kai pleiona eidôs…

The next major revision will probably be an adaptation I did of Calderon’s “Life is a Dream” from a few years back. Once I catch my breath, I mean.

It seems strange to think of it now, but there was a time when I was convinced that I was only a playwright. With the exception of the occasional poem or short story, everything I wrote was meant to be performed by live human beings in front of live human beings. This wasn’t by design or even preference, however. Everything that took shape in my head naturally seemed to gravitate towards the stage. There were a couple of odd things here and there — good ideas I still haven’t figured out how to write in any form — but it was overwhelmingly obvious that I was a playwright, first and foremost. For whatever reason that was where my creative energy naturally flowed (some people have offered their theories about this but I won’t get into those here).

Somewhere along the way and 30+ plays later, the tide has shifted . . . well, broadened might be a better way to describe it. There are a lot of different tributaries branching off of that flow now. If anything, it’s the theatre branch that’s the weakest these days (the same theories mentioned above provide a compelling reason for this as well).

I’m not complaining. But it does leave me with a lot of work that’s never seen the light of day . . . yet.

Recently I went through my files and cleaned everything up, reorganizing forty years of detritus as best I could. There were lots of fun discoveries — plays and stories and poems I’d forgotten about, most of which were forgotten for a good reason. And there were plenty of little scraps from past lives that left me cringing — but like the bad writing, it’s all just prelude to where I am now. And here is good.

But there was some good stuff, too. As well as a surprising number of things that I just flat out don’t remember writing at all.

Which has left me wondering what to do with it all. Apparently I’m not the only one. My colleague Tony Delgrosso recently posted he was gathering up all his oddments at The Half Empty Moleskine and it’s pieces like this one that make me glad he is.

The regular (and patient) readers of this blog know I’ve been making noises for a while about a new podcast. The good news (pun intended) is that it’s out there and now you can hear some of those literary orphans that have been hiding in the back of the file cabinet.

There are a few episodes already, ready for download. If you want the fancy .M4V iTunes version, click here to subscribe. If you’re more interested in the RSS feed, you can get that here. If you want to get your grubby little mitts on the individual files or an MP3 version, they’re right here waiting for you. And if you want me to come to your house each week and perform it live in front of your closest friends and/or housepets, then make me an offer. No freaks.

Just for fun, each show comes with a free PDF download of the readings from that week — just in case you’d prefer not to have to listen to me all the damn time.

And if that weren’t enough…

A few days back I was sorting through a number of things and realized that I’d never been “between projects” during National Novel Writing Month before. Usually when NaNoWriMo rolls around, I’m balls elbows deep in something and can’t stop what I’m doing to participate. And although I’m currently hard at work on my next novel entitled “Pantheon” (at least, that’s what my bio says), the truth of the matter is that I’ve allowed myself to get distracted by too many side projects over the past few months and “Pantheon” hasn’t really gotten the attention it deserves.


Which leaves me at a crossroads. Do I keep “Pantheon” on the back burner and fire up NaNoWriMo? Or do I use November to work on the thing that I was already planning on doing, which was going to leave “Pantheon” out anyways?

Very difficult decision. I’ve got a couple of good concepts that could fit nicely into NaNoWritMo. But then there’s the matter of the other November project I’d been planning.

Who know . . . maybe I’ll do both. It’s certainly possible but, either way, it seems that poor little “Pantheon” might just be getting short shrift once again. At least until November has come and gone.

As I said above, winter is here. We haven’t seen snow yet, but I’m told by Girija that in Hindu culture you sacrifice two goats and leave their heads at the gates of the temple, making a stew to serve to the first two strangers who happen through the gate.

As much of a fan as I am of snow, it seems rather hard luck for the goats.

And besides, the snow will be here soon enough.

*******************

When I’m this busy, the first thing that invariably gets cut down is sleep. Next is reading. I can do without the first one but not the second.

I don’t get a lot of magazines (apart from the comics, of course) but a few years back I discovered Esquire at my older brother’s house and have been hooked ever since. Usually I spend thirty minutes or so with each issue some afternoon and then set it aside. But lately I haven’t had time enough for that. I finally caught up to the June issue and this photo accompanying the Stephen King story ‘Morality‘ took me aback.

I sat there staring at the page for a few minutes with an odd feeling at the back of my head, like someone’d snuck in during the night and burgled a few things and I’d just noticed.

I showed the photo to my wife and asked her what came to mind. She got it on the first try. It was like someone had taken a snapshot of the opening of my play ‘The Red Boy’ and I thought for a moment that my citizenship in Alan Moore’s IdeaSpace had been revoked.

However, once I got up the guts to read King’s story I was relieved. Not a bad story, overall. But from a completely different territory than ‘The Red Boy’ fortunately for my sanity.

But, boy oh boy, take a look at this picture and then go read the first few pages of this play. You’ll see what I mean.

Having a long daily commute has made it easier to listen to books, fortunately. I just finished listening to Scott Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” and, I have to say, I found it to be a fascinating (and inspiring) study. Highly recommended.

On the strength of a footnote in Anderson’s book, I picked up a copy of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, and am enjoying it a great deal as well.




And, here and there, I’m reading another book by my wife’s grandfather — the inestimable Ken Jones, that original Mad Men character I’ve mentioned here before. Like the last one of his I read, this one involves the Advertising business. Only this time around, it’s set in Singapore and somebody’s been murdered.

Ken just turned 90 this past weekend. Still writing every day, too.

I should be so lucky.

As far as Samuel French is concerned . . . well, it happens. The two plays in question have earned me over a thousand dollars which, despite being about forty-five cents an hour in terms of writing wages, I feel is somewhat of an (albeit whorish) accomplishment. God forbid I should try to ply my wares on the upper class, eh Sammy?

Anyways, I’ve got a DVD and, of course, I haven’t watched it yet. I think it was poor Rick Hansen who said, way back when, that if watching a live play in the theatre with an audience was the closest thing to intercourse, then watching a video of a play was the equivalent of, um, what people do instead of intercourse.

So, no, I haven’t watched it. I just don’t have the time on my hands.

(That’s comedy.)

But I will . . . eventually. It’s a very good show, in my memory. I don’t want to spoil that with the time and distance represented by the DVD.

But I might even post a clip here, just for fun, if it turns out all right.

More to the point, though: I’m off to bed…

There’s a scene or two in the movie The Commitments where the character Jimmy Rabitte is seen interviewing himself about his own (self-imagined success).

I’m not too proud to admit that I used to do that, from time to time. At a certain point, I had some long commutes between school and work and home, so I’d talk to myself about what I was writing as a way to keep my brain from turning into mush after hours of driving. It also may have satisfied some other, more narcissistic need, but maybe that’s just the mush talking.

But I’ve been interviewed for real as well, a few times here and there. Recently, I got an e-mail from one of the cast members of the recent production of my adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’ asking me some questions as part of an interview for/from their playwriting class. Since I completely missed any opportunity to record the many brilliant things I said while I was there for the show, I thought I’d include it here as a sort of coda to the production.

I don’t pretend for a moment that this is in any way an informed point of view. For what it’s worth, reading over this a few days after I sent it, I found any number of spots where I should have said something different. I’ve resisted the urge to clean things up a bit and make myself smarter. For whatever that’s worth…

What?s the hardest part about the work of a professional playwright?

Full disclosure: If a professional playwright is someone who works full-time and supports themselves as a playwright, then I am most certainly not a professional playwright and should be immediately ejected from the interview.

However, if a professional playwright is someone who has had their work produced by a professional company, then I suppose I can continue without feeling too much like a poseur.

To your question then: There’s no single overwhelming challenge working as a professional playwright. The internal and external difficulties you face are myriad and often overwhelming. I know many, many people who started off down a similar road and — for any number of reasons — decided to stop. In most cases, their internal motivation/desire wasn’t sufficient enough to overcome the external pressures.

You have to want to write, to write plays. Not for money (God knows), not for fame (don’t get me started), but because you love to write . . . and you have to be strong enough in that love, that you can tune out the external realities.

Externally, it’s difficult to find a theatre willing to take a chance on new work. Most theatres simply can’t afford the risk in the current economic and creative climate. An unknown play by an unknown playwright isn’t a particularly compelling draw for audiences, whereas more established work (last year’s Broadway hit, Shakespeare, Sondheim, take your pick) is more reliable at getting people in the seats and keeping the doors open.

Added to this, I am my own worst enemy. I don’t write the sort of plays that might have an obvious hook for producers or audiences. I don’t write about social issues for instance, which is often what people are looking for. That’s a convenient position for me to adopt, as it allows me to adjust my monocle and beret, dismiss rejection and keep writing under the assumption that I’m just too daring or unique for the commercial mainstream.

Which all goes to say that I am extremely grateful when someone does choose to produce one of my plays.

Internally, I struggle as well. Because there is little or no financial reward for playwrights — at least nothing substantial enough to survive on — then I have to spend my days paying the bills in other ways.

Finding (and sometimes fighting for) the time to write is the biggest challenge I personally face. Invariably, it’s in the evenings or on the weekends, stealing an hour or so (sometimes much less ) wherever and whenever I can in order to write. I liken it to the people you see scrounging for spare change in the couch cushions and picking up pop bottles on the sidewalk in order to make ends me.

I scrounge for time. Fifteen minutes between meetings, a good half hour while the kids are having baths and getting ready for bed, five minutes waiting for my turn at the barber . . . that’s when most of my work happens. When I get a longer block of an hour or more, I’m in Heaven.

What was your first published work? What did you think when it was published?

I’ve never had work published, although a number of my plays have been produced so I’ll talk about that instead.

It never really hit me, having something produced for the first time. I loved seeing it done, but I was fortunate to know a director who wanted to do the play and so it was fairly seamless the first few times I had something produced.

But the first time that someone produced one of my plays without any connection — not a friend from college, a colleague, someone who knows me — well, that gave me a hope I didn’t know I was lacking: “Someone wanted to do this, not because they knew me but because they loved the work I’ve done. It wasn’t charity or obligation all those other times.”

But in each and every case — whether it was a connection or a cold reading that led to the production — I have always said the same thing to myself afterwards, since the very first one: “Please God, please please please don’t let this be the last time…”

What did you have to go through to get it published?

Since I’m unpublished at this point, I’ll answer the question from the production side of things: I had to get used to the necessity of promoting my own work and commit myself to the task.

I have worked for years in marketing and am fairly good at it. But when it comes to marketing my work, I lack a lot of confidence. Sending scripts out to contests and theatres around the country, agonizing over the cover letters and application forms, worry if I should have typed the envelopes instead of handwriting them . . . it’s a grueling process and it’s very easy to let it slide.

But it’s the crucial last step and if you don’t do it, then all you have is a box full of paper no one has read. Getting rejections back is no big deal to me. I’ve had some fairly significant rejections in my life — on a creative level as well as a personal one — so that doesn’t bother me.

What bothers me is the feeling that I should be doing more. Finding the time to write is hard enough, as I said earlier. Finding the time to do the right thing with the writing is even more difficult.

Typically, what you have to go through — either for publishing or production — is just a lot of boring, grueling paperwork . . . the sorts of activities that have about as much interest as doing your taxes and are in many ways the opposite of the activity of writing.

What is your favorite part of being a playwright?

Apart from the actual physical act of writing — which is my favorite thing in the world to do — the best thing about being a playwright is watching someone else bring it to life.

I had the good fortune to hear the author Neil Gaiman give a lecture a number of years ago. He’s an award-winning novelist and screenwriter, but he made his mark writing comic books. At the lecture, someone asked him what his favorite medium was and he said comic books — because when his part was finished, he got to hand it off to someone else who would bring it to life and, in essence, he got to shift from being the author to being the audience.

He likened it to being an architect and designing a house but being delighted and surprised when you walk through it and see how they’ve built and decorated what you did in the blueprint.

Being a playwright is an awful lot like that. I know some writers struggle with feeling like they lost control of their work — the recent profile of Edward Albee in the New Yorker a few weeks ago really horrified me at how obsessive he is about the direction and performance of his work. That kind of thing seems to be the opposite of theatre to me. Or, at least, the kind of theatre I love.

I have good ideas and from time to time I write them well. But it’s the electrical charge of someone else’s mind rubbing up against those ideas — the director, the performer, the audience even — that makes them glow with life.

I get way too much credit, in my opinion, as a playwright. I have the easiest and the most fun of everyone involved in the process.

What kind of education did you get for the job? What would you recommend?

I am so uneducated, I’m not sure that I’m even qualified to answer this question.

My education as a playwright was fairly informal, trial-and-error. I had a head start because I was an actor for a number of years and worked with a very good director who tolerated my lack of training and process and helped me cultivate my skills as a performer.

But even as an actor, I had a very textual and meta approach to the character and the play. I was, in essence, looking at things from the author’s side — understanding the shape of the story and what my character needed to be in order to bring that to life for the audience.

There was no presence of Method at all, no emotional connection internally. I was never “in the moment” and I was always aware, at a microscopic level almost, of what the audience was seeing.

I’m not certain that, had I been educated in the process of playwriting, that I would be a better writer. However, I would be more connected to the professional side of things. I’d have better connections, I’d know more about how to get things out there in front of agents and producers, I’d have a professional foundation and training that could better support my writing. That’s the biggest value I’ve seen with my educated colleagues.

My cousin is a professional playwright, she went to school for it. It’s odd because we were never close, grew up thousands of miles apart, and both ended up in very similar pursuits. I’m not a competitive person at all, but there is a sense for me when I look at her accomplishments and experience. All of that came from her education.

My advice would be, if you want to do it, start as an undergraduate and major in Theatre. Forget about trying to find a proper major to make your parents happy or to give you something to fall back on. Now’s the time to do what you want, lay the best foundation you can for yourself. Dreams have a shelf life, after all.

So pick your major and take every damn class you can, work on every show (play your part, if you get one, but also work backstage and in the box office and in the costume shop, know it all inside and out), go to auditions during the summer at your local repertory and civic theatres, direct short scenes with your classmates, dig in to every aspect of the world that you can, and above all else you need to write every day and ask people to read it.

If you’re up for it and you can afford it, find a good graduate school — not the one that has the reputation for turning out great writers but the one that’s a good fit for your personality. Beg, borrow, and steal to get accepted. Mortgage off small portions of your immortal soul if necessary . . . and then do it all again: Take every class, go to every show, audition, etc.

And write every day. Even if you skip all the rest, you have to write every day. You are not a writer unless you’re writing. Having good ideas don’t count.

I didn’t do all of those things, some days I wish I had.

What are the most important skills? Most overrated?

Most important: Listening. Keep your ear to the ground, there’s a lot to learn from if you pay attention. And there’s a wealth of voices out there. Listen to everyone around you and learn how they show everything about who they are and what they care about in their words, the things that they say and don’t say. It’s all right there and if you can learn to see those things, you can learn to create them for your characters.

But also learn to listen to your own work, learn to listen for the false notes and find the broken pieces that you need to fix.

The most overrated?

(pause)

Despite what I said earlier, I think education can be extremely overrated. It’s not a magic bullet and I know plenty of writers who spend their time in graduate school being coerced into writing like their professors, playing the name-that-literary-fad game. I’m not convinced that it’s necessary for everyone.

But, on reflection, I think that money is overrated. Especially for a playwright. This isn’t the place to cash in. Get your work out there, get it seen by as many people as possible . . . it’s not the remuneration (although, again, God knows…) but the audience.

Clive Barker is not a favorite of mine by any stretch, but someone who’s career and singular vision I respect. A few years ago I found a couple of volumes of his plays in a used bookstore. They were from his early days and, although I more or less hate reading plays, I picked them up out of curiosity more than anything else.

I didn’t expect them to be very good, so I was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading them. There were little flashes of Brecht and Stoppard and Beckett — playwrights that I like a great deal.

But what impressed me most about Barker was his foreword which said (paraphrasing from memory): “If you’re a small theatre company with no money but you’d love to do one of my plays, don’t be afraid to ask. I’ll make the big professional companies pay royalties, but theatre is meant to be done and not just read. We can figure something out…”

I thought that was terrific and quite surprising since this was at the height of Barker’s popularity and he was selling millions of copies of his novels and writing/directing films and making a lot of money (actually, maybe that made it easier for him to say…)

Regardless, it’s an approach I’ve tried to have with inquiries about my work. Getting paid is great, but let’s not stand in the way of getting the show up and running. In that same spirit, I put scripts out there for free download at my website in the hopes that someone will want to do them.

I don’t worry too much about people producing my work without permission — it’s a small enough world and instant karma’ll get them in the end (if I don’t get them first).

How often do you write? What sort of thing do you write?

I try to write every day. At one point in my life, I had over five hours of uninterrupted writing time. I was younger, less experienced in my own process, so I wasn’t very productive. I wish I had that time back now.

But, one way or another, I’m writing every day.

As far as what I write, it’s a fairly broad spectrum. Plays, obviously. A lot of short stories and poetry. I am about halfway through my first novel, so that’s what is taking up a lot of my focus these days.

But I also write as a big part of my day job, which has been very helpful for me in my creative life as it’s taught me how to be more economical and efficient with my time, how to manage and keep deadlines, and how to know when (and when not) to listen to input.

Topically, most of my work deals with a handful of issues related to the supernatural, mythology, and fantasy. Even if it’s a realistic setting with naturalistic dialogue and action, the undercurrent of the play and plot is likely to be supernatural. I like living in a world where we’ve got something larger and unseen superimposed over everything around us. I like writing about it as well. Neither the world nor writing would be as interesting to me without that other, unseen world.

The most personal aspect of my writing is my poetry.

What is one piece of advice you would give an aspiring playwright?

Oh, you only wanted one piece of advice? Sorry.

Well . . . not just for playwrights, but everyone who wants to write, I think I’d have to reiterate what I said earlier: Write every day. This is your only chance — this fifteen minutes, this half hour, this afternoon — to write what’s needed today. If you wait, you will be different, the opportunity will have shifted, and what you could have written will have been lost.

Neil Gaiman, again: “We owe it to each other to tell stories…”

Don’t be afraid.

One of the questions I prepared for when I went to lecture to classes at Northwestern College a few months back was this: Why do you write?

No one asked.

Taking a show to the festival is a big task — you have to remount the show, go through rehearsals again, move costumes and actors and sets to the festival. It’s all a delightful hassle.

So, while there are some disappointed people out there, there are some relieved ones too.

So that’s okay.

Sleep now, post more later…

I’d been prepared for this and, because I was exactly that kind of writer, responded by asking what they thought it meant?

They said “I think you were just trying to be as weird as possible.”

After a long moment I said, “Well, right now I’m just trying to be as polite as possible.”

I’ve always had a kind of love-hate relationship with talkbacks. There’s always one person out there intent on asking questions just to show how smart they are. There’s usually someone who has an axe to grind about something. But there are also plenty of people who like what they saw and were interested enough in it to want to talk about it.

The talkback for ‘The Odyssey’ is the best I’ve even been involved with, either as a performer, writer, or audience member. The whole thing is moderated by the exceptionally capable Jeff Barker who has come well-prepared with very good questions.

As usual, I talk too much. Hopefully I avoid putting my foot in it, but there was that one question…

“Tell me, T.M. — I’m interested to hear more about how the world of the play bumps up against your own world view. Particularly in relation to the role of women.”

Pause. Look at the audience. Stand up. Remove coat and hang it on the back of the chair. Roll up sleeves. Loosen tie. And say: “Well, how much time do we have?”

All in all, a good evening for everyone. One of those nights where you wish your mom and dad were there, because you know they’d just love it so much to see you doing what you do.

Argh. I realize afterwards that I forgot to record it.

Teetering on the cusp of collapse, I head over to the Director’s house for the cast party. I say hello to people, eat some snacky treats, and say thank you to a lot of people . . . but not nearly so much as they deserve.

The long slow drift of fatigue and too much coping-with-my-natural-introversion-by-being-an-extrovert-and-talking-to-lots-of-people-too-much has taken it’s toll on me. We make our good nights and head back to our hotel rooms to collapse.

I fall asleep, very happy — mostly because I get to see the play one more time.

The phone rings — My wake up call arranged the night before. Only, I can’t remember what time I told them to call. So I have no idea what time it is.

I’m not this stupid in real life. Traveling has made me this way.

Eventually I decide to subtract an hour and hope for the best. When the clock says 9:00, I head upstairs, hoping I’m not an hour late.

In the lounge of the Dutch Colony Hotel, the Director is watching a ‘Dukes of Hazard’ rerun.

“Looking for some last minute inspiration?” I ask.

We swipe a quick continental breakfast from the hotel and discuss the day’s events. Bob, the Director, is worried about the response to the show — not the sexuality so much as the darkness, particularly in the Underworld sequence. I say that the best we can hope for are questions, a chance to have a dialogue.

He agrees and heads off to teach.

I and my entourage repair to Nederlander’s diner up the street to eat a proper breakfast and discuss Bob’s concerns about the Underworld scene. As usual, Keeley has more insight into the solution than I could ever hope to find on my own and so I rehearse a few answers on the off-chance that a fundamentalist Christian might show up to the talkback later in the evening. If they’re Reformed, they’ll want to talk . . . if not, it’ll be letters to the President and Board of Trustees.

I highly recommend Nederlander’s, if you’re ever in Orange City. Great service, warm and hospitable staff, and a most excellent cup of coffee.

After breakfast, we head over to the school to get a tour of the facility and theatre. I get to see tables of masks and props for a show I started writing almost five years ago. Everything looks amazing and inert and I can’t quite put it together with what I’ve been seeing in my mind all this time while I’ve been writing.

There are Barbie dolls on the table, cut in half and joined by a circlet of elastic. Bob won’t tell me what they are for. I am not sure I want to know.

But it’s a relief to see that someone put a giant teddy bear in there. That makes me happy.

Keeley holds up one of the masks — Hermes — and suddenly I can see him there, bobbing and babbling.

The set is gorgeous. A beautiful swooping rake painted like a vase with these finely textured nets hanging around it. I get to walk around on it and all I can think is . . . well . . . I’m very lucky.

Eventually I (gulp) get ready for my lecture to the Theatre as Arts class. Bob, the Director, tells me that he postponed a quiz due to my visit . . . I figure I can say something worth testing them on later.

When he introduces me, they applaud.

Gulp, bob my head in gratitude, start talking…

Stealing heavily from the process at work, I babble about my process, taking the notes I wrote three weeks earlier and adapting them into something mildly coherent. Apparently, do a fairly good job of keeping everyone engaged . . . except for a girl in the third row who obviously isn’t buying it at all.

The best bit was Stan Greene’s story about The Maze…

Do you know the one foolproof way to get through a maze? You close your eyes, put out your left hand, and lay it on the wall. Then walk, following the wall. Eventually you will get out.

If you open your eyes, you’ll start to doubt where you are. You’ll want to find a shortcut. You’ll take your hand off the wall and follow your eyes instead. And then you’ll be lost.

Stan Greene is a really smart man.

When you’re adapting something, the original text is the maze. If you take you hand off it, you’re lost.

They get it. They ask me questions. Some of them are in the Playwriting class and, although they haven’t seen the play yet, they have studied the script.

I’m staggered by the thought. Students have been studying my work, writing papers about it.

There is nothing better than this.

I survive. I enjoy it. I do a fairly good job lecturing about something I barely know anything about. And I think I avoid most of the visiting-pretentious-writer pitfalls (although the girl in the third row might disagree) and most everyone laughs at my jokes and, for the second time, they applaud.

Afterwards I realize that, although I went out of my way to purchase a microphone specifically for the trip, I completely forget to record the lecture.

All my wisdom and clever jokes are lost to the mists of time.

Which means, fortunately, I cannot post them here for download.

And then we head off to lunch.

No jitters, not worried at all.

The faculty potluck is a bigger concern than the show, oddly enough. I shouldn’t have worried. Everyone is very hospitable and kind and in a way I wish I’d gone to grad school. I could have ended up teaching at a small college somewhere, talking about writing all day.

But, hey, I’m using my major. Which is more than what I can say for most people.

The food is good and everyone is terrific but I end up doing what I’ve typically done at faculty parties for the past fifteen years. I find a little kid and start talking about comic books. Daniel is just a year older than my son and he tells me he’s working on something. He shows it to me and I’m more or less blown away. It’s got drama, good writing, nice page composition . . . I mean, it’s not Jack Kirby or anything, but it’s amazing that an eleven year old kid put it together when he’d only seen for or five comic books in his life.

Seriously. There’s no comic book store in Orange City. The kid found some comics at a garage sale and, apparently, figured it out from there.

Warming up to his subject, Daniel gets started on how he wants to hire some more writers and artists and start a company of his own and I realize I’m talking to a young Stan Lee — which is impressive and scary all at once.

There’s a hallway at the back of the stage with these huge roll-down doors made of corrugated iron or something. When you walk through the hallway, the doors rattle. When the lights are off, it sounds like you’re being stalked by clumsy skeletons. It’s creepy and we’re turned around and don’t know where we’re going and we’re late but we take a moment for ourselves before heading on to the Green Room where everyone is in various stages of makeup and costume, holding hands in a circle and, mortified, we try to sneak in.

Amen.

A few minutes later, the curtain goes up.

It’s amazing what they put together in four weeks of rehearsal.

I had no idea how funny the play was. I sent them a script that had some jokes here and there, but they’ve transformed it into a comedy and, not surprisingly, it’s a thousand times better than what I wrote.

The audience loves it. Keeley loves it. I love it.

I’m really quite lucky.

At intermission I prowl around the lobby (quite inconspicuous in my black suit, thank you very much) and eavesdrop on conversations. No one’s talking about the show, near as I can tell. But most of them head back in for the second round.

Ah. This is a lot easier than I thought. The performers are working their hearts out and making me look far better than I deserve. The Direction is a huge and incredibly pleasant surprise, Bob found so much in such a short amount of time.

I wrote one sentence: “The sailors silently plot to kill the cyclops.”

Bob directs (and the actors perform) a ten minute sequence straight out of a silent movie, so funny in so many different ways that my stomach hurts from holding the laughter in (I realize, afterwards, that I was afraid of waking the monster, just like the sailors).

And it isn’t everyone who can take something like a giant teddy bear (which I thought was a kind of funny little detail in the script) and turn it into a one of the funniest things I have ever seen on stage.

The show is terrific. The ending moves me more than I realize. I didn’t for a second imagine that so much of my personal life had ended up in the script. It’s all jumbled together, messy and noisy and hurting — just like the past year or so of my life — but it’s there and it hurts a little to watch.

But it’s a good show. The performers do a great job with it and it’s obvious that they had a terrific Director with vision.

Everyone stands up and yells at the end.

Again, lucky lucky lucky me.

From the stage, the performers gesture to the booth . . . and then to me.

My cover is blown but that was going to happen soon enough. The audience has been invited to stick around for a talkback with the Director and myself.

Two hundred people, free to ask questions…

No problem.

The airport in Minneapolis is like a mall, a very grumpy mall full of very grumpy people dragging around very grumpy children. No gods . . . but they have a monorail, which is a very cool thing to watch zipping by while you’re eating a steak and drinking a beer. I never realized I would live in the future of my youth. I hope I live long enough to see flying cars.

And giant robots. I want to live in a world with giant robots.

We wander through the newstand. Neil Gaiman lives in Minneapolis, or just outside it somewhere. But none of the stores seem to be carrying any of his books with a “Local Author” sticker featured prominently on the cover. Browsing the magazines, I wonder who Jessica and Nick are and why I should care?

In the waiting area, a little girl named Ireland plays with her toys, very much aware that everyone is watching her. A young Alpha in training.

Another plane, this time just a short jump. Keeley discovers a self-help book in the seat pocket in front of her called “Living the Centered Christian Life” and also a copy of ‘SELF’ magazine which appears to be ‘Maxim’ for Morons (which is already ‘Esquire’ for idiots).

I don’t write, I do some fantasy shopping in the Sky Mall magazine and make a mental note that Sam wants “Gadgets, lots of them…” for Christmas.

Then, before I know it, we’ve arrived.

Well . . . nearly so. Apparently Orange City is remote. So remote, in fact, that I fly in to Omaha (which, I assume, is the closest major airport).

You know you’re deep in the map when Nebraska is convenient.

My entourage and I disembark to an airport wasteland. Someone is meant to meet us and drive us back to Iowa. Under questioning, I confess that I do not know who the someone is, what they look like, whether they are male or female. And, no, I don’t have a phone number for anyone.

I had assumed someone would be there at the gate to meet us with a neatly lettered sign reading “Tim Klemp” but there’s no one.

Waiting for the baggage carousel to start grinding out everyone’s suitcase but mine, we scan the crowd looking for people who appear to be looking for people.

“What about the purple windbreaker. I bet you a hundred bucks that’s her.”

“She’s getting away!”

“I’m sure she’ll find us…” I say as the woman in the purple windbreaker embraces a teenager coming down the escalator “…or not.”

The older, vaguely academic guy wandering nearby is promising as well and I try to meet his eye with the nonchalant intent of someone who might be looking for him but not too direct so that, if he’s not the one, he’ll think I’m crazy. He looks like a professor at a small midwestern Christian college . . . only, apparently, not the one we’re going to.

“Well . . . I hear Omaha is very nice.”

“We’re stuck here.”

“It’ll be an adventure.”

“That’s what my parents used to say.”

I’m already planning for a three day stay in the airport, just in case no one shows up.

There is a sign, apparently. And someone to hold it.

Keeley points with her chin. “What’s that girl holding?” she asks through clenched teeth, like we’re spies.

I look over to see someone, speaking into a cell phone. There’s a sheet of paper in her hand and I read it, upside down.

I squint. “That’s her, that’s my name.”

Someone is holding a sign with my name on it.

We walk over to make introductions.

It’s our contact, talking on the phone to her husband, Jonathan, who is apparently waiting in the car.

And she has two signs. One with my name, spelled properly and with all the periods in the right places (“There was a debate in the department,” she tells me.)

The other one reads “Song to You” — which I would have recognized instantly.

I steal both the signs from her. After a moment her husband arrives and we set off across the dark prairie towards Orange City.

It’s a two hour trip and, after about five or ten minutes or figuring out who everyone is and what we’re like, we settle down into a stream-of-consciousness ramble through the world of theatre, resumes, academic performance, politics, and a lengthy discussion on where the actual Ice Cream Capitol of the World really is.

I don’t recognize it at the time, but the whole thing is the start of a pattern that will repeat itself throughout the trip: People introducing themselves and then being amazingly kind and hospitable, over and over and over again. At first I thought it was just people being polite. But I was wrong.

Eventually, we make Orange City. We drive past the theatre — a beautiful glass-fronted building — and Jonathan notes that people are still working, putting up the lobby display and finishing up the set for Opening Night.

Opening Night? Not for the last time I realize that I’m a captial-W Writer on this trip and that I should act more aloof and professional and so on. But all I can do is smile goofily and babble about how terrific everything is and think how lucky I am. Again, another pattern is emerging.

We pick up a car at the school. I try not to act too amazed that they’re giving me the use of a car, like I was some sort of person who might somehow need or deserve transportation — and then we head over to the Dutch Colony Inn to check into our rooms.

The clock on the nightstand says the same time as the clock on my laptop. I didn’t think Iowa was EST and worry for a few minutes about what time I should set my alarm. I don’t want to miss breakfast with the Director in the morning.

I finally decide to assume Michigan time is correct, no matter where I’m sleeping. That way my biggest danger is being early for breakfast. Although that also means that it’s 2:30 in the morning and I have to get up shortly.

Bed. Finally. Collapse. Sleep.

We have lunch with the cast and, once again, I forget to record the conversation. People keep showing up throughout the meal and Bob introduces them to me: “This is Telemachus, this is the Merchant, this is…” It’s hard to reconcile the faces, the street clothes, with the characters I’ve been carrying around in my head for almost five years.

We eat, they ask questions — some very pointed ones, actually — and I realize that they’re the ones who have had to do all the heavy lifting on this project. It all comes back to me from my college theatre days, how In The Dark you are when you sit down with a script for the first time, trying to find a character in there.

I didn’t give them much help, I’m afraid. The script was written in a near-vacuum with Bob breathing some fresh air into it every once in a while. I wrote it for his eyes. It never occurred to me that actors might be looking at it.

I eat lunch, I answer their questions as best I can, I tell stories, I hope I’m not repeating myself too much.

“I have a question.”

“Yes. Okay.”

“Have you seen the costumes? The masks and the set?”

“I have. Bob gave me a sneak peek backstage.”

“What do you think?”

“I think they look great. They’re wonderful.”

“Do they look like what you pictured in your head?”

It’s a good question, one that I’m going to have to answer four or five times before I leave.

I realize, answering it, that they don’t in fact look like what I had in my head. But that’s because I didn’t have a play in my head while I was writing. I didn’t see a stage and actors and mask . . . I saw Hermes arguing with Calypso in her cave two steps ahead and half a day late . . . I saw Athena — pale and owl-like, almost luminous — nagging her father, Zeus, sculpted from living marble — I saw Poseidon, streaming green rage, riding on the clouds, pursuing Odysseus…

I didn’t see any of them and I feel a little embarrassed about that. They’re there, obviously. They’ve done the work. They’re the ones who deserve the applause (and they will get applause) and I didn’t write one line thinking about them.

It occurs to me that I never have. When I write plays, I don’t see a set. I don’t see actors. I see the characters and the place itself — am I the only one who does this?

At any rate, we finish lunch. I manage to hide my ignorance (I hope) and they manage to hide their disappointment.

They must be disappointed. I’m not nearly a real capital-W Writer at all. Just a guy willing to dare to wear black in Northwestern Iowa.

Back through the maze of buildings and hallways after lunch. The most excellent Jonathan tracks me down and hands me a sheaf of papers explaining how to connect to the wireless network in the theatre building. For a PC, it takes sixteen pages to explain. It takes two sentences for a Mac. Case closed.

Bob heads off to grade papers and, I assume, get some relief from my delighted babbling. I check e-mail, relieved to be able to do so but also annoyed that none of my e-mail is worth reading. I fire off a few of my own to coworkers and clients and even one to my attorney (it’s almost like being a grown up, folks) and I’m grinding my teeth over a late-night drunken rant that someone sent me the night before when the Director walks by with an envelope and says “Oh, hey, I’ve been carrying this around all day and almost forgot to give you your royalty check.”

Oh. Um. Yes. Thank you.

I’m so shocked to be paid that I forget to even open the envelope — something I’ll forget to do until after I’ve been home for three days, so it’s not like we do it for the money or anything.

But still . . . to be paid to tell stories?

It’s a good job, if you can find it.

I abandon the e-mail and go wandering through the building, worrying over the next class I’ll be teaching — well, facillitating. It’s not a class, more of a workshop really. A writing workshop that either four people or forty will show up for.

I start wishing I’d brought some hand puppets with me.

Keeley and I prowl through the lobby, looking over the lobby display. There are costume and make-up renderings, a model of the set, and this article that appeared a week earlier in the student newspaper…

Vaughnahue’s Top Ten Reasons to see “The Odyssey”
by Vaughn Donahue

1. A brand new adaptation – Homer’s epic in its original form is not an easy read. While this might be a major reason for being wary of the play, have no fear! The script has been adapted by playwright T.M. Camp into a hilarious and pleasing modern masterpiece.
So despite what you remember from high school English class, this play is actually about love, murder, sex, revenge and redemption. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!

Ahem.

You gotta love a preview that’s got a Your Mom joke in it.

The director walks by and hands me a copy of the latest edition of the student newspaper, which has a yet another preview of the show.

It’s opening night. I have a writing workshop to give. I collapse onto a small, um, divan in the lobby and talk to Keeley and wish I were taking a nap.

I have a writing workshop to give in a half-hour. I assume that my subconscious mind is working on how to take the two or three things I know about writing and extend them into a meaningful hour or so of workshoppy things.

After a while I go and buy two cans of Mountain Dew and go in to get ready for class. This mainly consists of playing Tom Waits on my laptop and shotgunning the two cans of Mountain Dew while Keeley assures me it will all work out.

Then student start to come in, some of them I recognize from the morning class. And from lunch. My repertoire is suddenly very limited.

Bob, the Director, introduces me and then leaves me in charge of thirty-plus students (and a few faculty members).

I am John’s spastic colon.

We muddle our way through. I do a few exercises which, it becomes painfully apparent, they already know inside and out — at least most of them — and I read a few somethings from one of my own exercises which, even more painfully, sound flat and stale.

When all else fails, change the rules.

We split up into groups, writing together, one line back and forth.

A few minutes go by and it suddenly feels like there’s something happening. Keeley and I slide a pad of paper back and forth, the sheets dripping with my own fear and flop sweat.

Eventually I call time and a few groups read what they came up with. Some of it is very good and, yet again, I miss that Writer’s Group I used to meet with.

I end off by reading “The Face Game” and asking for a response.

Everyone confirms what I have know since college: You can hide a lot behind a good performance.

The truth is, I love reading my work out loud.

All in all, not too bad a way to spend an afternoon in Iowa.

Afterwards, I realize that I completely forgot to record the afternoon session, too.

Then it’s off to the hotel to primp and get ready for a department potluck followed by (!) Opening Night.

I call a client from the car. She’s from Iowa and laughs when I tell her where I’m going. “I’ve read some of the stuff on your website. Doesn’t seem like they’d be up for it in Orange City,” she says with a hollow chuckle.

Then, a quick stop to drop off some keys and make sure Vincent will get his crunchies while I’m gone. I still make it to the airport with plenty of time to sit around wondering why I always insist on showing up for flights two hours early.

Security runs my bag through three times. I see a group of people huddled around the monitor, discussing something of concern. One of them makes a stabbing motion, shaking her head. I rack my brains, wondering if I somehow forgot that I was carrying a Bowie knife.

It’s my fountain pen, I realize. They’re worried about my fountain pen.

“Well, it is mightier than the sword,” Keeley remarks.

I’m rehearsing my defense, ready to have a debate with Security (hey, I’m early), when the send my bag through without any further problems. Only slightly disappointed, I continue on to the waiting area to read Paul Auster’s ‘The Red Notebook’ and worry about Sam and Julia.

Not even the gaggle of Alpha females who show up at the last minute, getting their mojo all over everything, can distract me.

Eventually, we hit the sky.

With the exception of the very, very old god that’s on the same plane, the flight is uneventful. I write for a bit, trying to figure out in the novel I’m working on just when exactly the sweet little fox should show her teeth. Once I get things far enough along, I set it aside.

The old god looked very tired and he had a ring on that was topped by a flat disk of dull gold about three inches in diameter, studded with five different colored stones. I make a mental note to include him in the next novel I write.