The Last Lap

I guess I’m continuing with the running theme…

So I’m at the tail end of this 4-week writing sprint, the same class I took last year around this time which resulted in this play I was pretty happy with.

I’ve got four days left to wrap the whole thing up. I’m supposed to get to page 40-50 by the end, ideally. Right now I’m at page 29, and last night I may have sliced and diced enough to pull me back to page 27.

So that’s like 5-6 pages a day for the next few days. Probably not gonna happen.

Also, as my son and I discussed, I’d rather have 5 quality pages of something than 50 pages of crap. So I’m struggling with that a bit, whether to just write for writing’s sake.

But maybe I’ll track here just to keep my honest and motivated.

Monday: Page 28 (being generous)
Tuesday: Page 30 (ugh, I know…)
Wednesday: 36
Thursday (by midnight): 38

FRIDAY UPDATE
All right, I sent in my 38 pages. I kept cutting stuff that wasn’t working and then had to just throw an ending on there. I wasn’t crazy about it, but there is some good stuff inside. Here’s what I wrote to Caridad:

Sending everything I could get done in the 4 weeks we did this.

Thanks again for everything. I have an article from you to finish reading and a podcast to listen to as well, and I will.

I hastily tacked on a temporary ending to the 38 pages I have in total. Not as far as I wanted to get, BUT I feel like there are good chunks in here, and I realize that the piece is about end-of-life issues, and complexity, and competing desires.

Some things don’t quite makes sense yet (a father figure who returns as a ghost and is sometimes visible and sometimes not) but I do think there’s the skeleton of something I can come back to.

I can’t figure out if it would have been better to come to the workshop with a play in mind, or just come with a wide-open mind and see what happens.

Anyway, I appreciate your feedback, wisdom, experience and especially your openness to many new things.

Sending this now so I can have a restful night.

I’ll see what she sends back, and at some point decide if I’m gonna keep working on it. I feel cautiously optimistic about its having a future at the moment…