Man, it’s been a quiet year. Here, anyway. For the past two years I’ve been telling both myself and you lot, those of you who still check this site, that this will finally be the year that I begin blogging more, and here we are nearly halfway through the year without much to show for it. I’ve been busy, it’s true, and that’s some of it. Some of it has also been a quixotic mix of high hopes and equivalent disappointments.
It’s been a little over a year since the opening of Skazki: A Spell of Ice and Snow, and around the same time since I dove into querying the novel the musical was based on. High hopes in both regards. I cannot overstate how thankful I was for the experience of having that show come to life, how much I owe everyone who put their work and passion into making my work and passion a reality in ways I honestly never expected. There remains a constant, deep well of love and nostalgia for that whirlwind period where my words, my songs, echoed through a Boston theatre and nested in my heart. Not a day goes by when some strain of my own songs get caught in my head, where I think of the lessons of my script and characters, when I am reminded of the toil and the drive which helped create that work.
So, of course, I plunged headlong into the querying trenches armed with what I believed to be a kind of proof-of-concept. Three fantasy series, a litfic novel, numerous short stories, and however many poems had charged into that void, never to be heard. Sans one! I still have the five dollar bill The Ana mailed to me for "The Clockmaker," now hanging beside a collage made of ticket stubs, lyrics, and promotional material for Skazki. But Skazki was, of course, different. Not only was it a more commercial length, but it already had an adaptation—one which I had written myself. A lot had changed in adaptation, for the medium is the message, but the core of the story and the characters remained, as did the message.
Skazki was my proof of magic in the mundane, of the power of hot tea and kindness, of the respect owed winter and pain, and of the power of humanity to stand true in the face of chaos, cold, and death.
And for the briefest of moments (by which I mean, almost half a year) it seemed to be working. Skazki went farther than any work since "The Clockmaker". We got a full manuscript request, and then an extension on it. And so, other things lingered. I gave Telgora’s editing a break, I stopped blogging as regularly, I managed to write a new script—an anti-AI musical which will hopefully find its own home in time—and then several others as I joined up with Darwin’s Waiting Room. All of this was, in the words of Hamilton’s Aaron Burr, not standing still, but lying in wait.
Now I stand in the self-made cobweb of hesitation with another rejection (another seventy rejections) in my hands and an unclear path forward. It’s hard not to feel this one, in part because of how far it had gone and therefore how far my hopes had been raised, and in part because of how much I had pinned on it. That latter portion is, of course, unfair to the story, even to the spirit of the story. Katya is a vessel for hope, but she is nothing if not practical. Inasmuch as one hears of authors giving their characters voices, I can hear her chiding me for not preparing well enough for this new creative winter. Maybe it is Koschei calling out from the snow-like swirl of shredded rejection letters and mocking that I should have put so much faith in this story about faith and forgiveness.
Fortunate, then, that Madelen’s magic is plant-based. It is time for one thorny spring. After my pity-party, of course. Beyond plans for Madelen, what remains true is that there is one more book in Telgora yet to come, and it is time I edit it properly and give that world and those characters the place in the sun that they deserve. A fantasy story about the rise of a quasi-fascist government manipulating the public with manufactured that I started seriously writing around 2016? Who would have thought that would ever be relevant? A release in three parts, still, and then the grand finale by the spring of next year.
By then, who knows? I am planning a move. I am exploring all options for my creative life. Recently, I acted in a student film—my first bit of paid acting, my first time acting on film, and the first acting I’ve done since college. I went to a BIPOC Boston theatre mixer and met so many wonderful people in all stages of development, creative endeavor, and fields. Some of them, with luck, will remember me and invite me back when I am ready to dive into that world. Darwin’s Waiting Room has been a creative refresher—letting me stretch comedic muscles I barely knew I had and giving me so many new perspectives on writing, stagecraft, and people.
In between the grand fantasy series (Telgora, Bartender (languishing), and Madelen to come), I have taken breaks from that genre before. Although Skazki was a standalone, with the option for a sequel (queryspeak!), it was not the kind of grand, theatrical, melodramatic fantasy I enjoy both reading and writing. Beyond that, I have written litfic, a romcom, and murder mystery which all went, quite rightly, nowhere. But it’s good to flex different writing styles here and there, and maybe it’s time for a shakeup while I remain quagmired in editing land getting ready for a fall of new releases.
I’ve never been a huge fan of reading or writing entirely one genre, in part because I think it pigeonholes creativity into the same repetitive tropes and patterns which flatten stories. If you want a good horror element in your fantasy story, you had better read horror. If you want good romance, read a few romances. Funny characters? Why not comedy? Great prose? Honestly, read poetry. There is no wasted writing, so says some screengrabbed Tumblr post I saw once. There’s not much wasted reading either.
Except AI, of course. No value there of any kind. Detrimental, even. We’ll get that musical made, too.
But, for now, maybe it’s time to give horror/thriller a try? 2.5k words say… yes?
The week before Skazki’s world premiere in Boston, I watched Tick, Tick... Boom!, and that was probably a mistake. I don’t think I’m dying anytime soon, although as Bojack Horseman reminds us, any one of us could be run over by a SnapChatting teen at any moment—and whereas Bojack uses that as a plea for kindness, I am returning to my roots and using it as a kind of drive. My creative winter is here, and it is my duty to bear it well, and to prepare for spring. It helps that it is actually spring, that the world around me is waking up and reminding me of the circles and cycles of the world. My cycle, as phrased by Tick, Tick... Boom!:
"You start writing the next one. And after you finish that one, you start on the next. And on and on, and that's what it is to be a writer, honey. You just keep throwing them against the wall and hoping against hope that eventually something sticks."