Applying John Scalzi’s 10-point plan for getting creative work done in the age of Trump, I turned off all the daily digital upsets this afternoon to sit out back in my newly radiant back yard, freshly bedazzled by heavy rainfall that filled the coffer of our local aquifer and washed away all the gloom of the past two weeks, and work on my new play.

The story goes that Arthur Conan Doyle could write anywhere, under any circumstances. His children said that while the family was waiting for trains, he’d sit on their luggage on the platform, journal in hand, scribbling away. Sometimes, I can be like that. Today was like that. The neighbor kids, aged 7, 5, and 3, came over and romped around the back yard with my teenage daughter and our smooth-hair Fox Terrier while I sat in the near corner enjoying my scotch and an Arturo Fuente and wrote about two brutally unhappy people arguing over meaning, relationships, and the monetary value of a painting neither one likes. The gulf between what I was writing and what I was living couldn’t have been greater.

I’ve got almost 80 pages on this play, and it feels like it should be between 90 and 100. I’ve got all the scenes at least sketched out, hopping about in writing them, spending more time where it feels more right, at the moment, to work. I know I’m missing lines connecting various pieces. Most of the writers I know work the same way.

Meanwhile, my son is in the back corner of the lot trimming down some of the hundreds of pounds of branches we cut from our overwhelming front-yard tipu tree last Sunday. I took lots of photos of that adventure last Sunday, and maybe I’ll be posting them. I think when this 14-year-old goes off to college I’ll either outsource the tree-trimming or sell the house.

Now I’m off to our local Big 5 sporting goods store. I need new workout clothes — my current ensemble being completely worked out — and he needs running shoes. Maybe later tonight I’ll return to the play. I’d like to get a full finished draft by the end of this month.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2017 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.