Just made it under the wire, but I get to credit myself the completion of the first draft of a major project for the month of May. As I noted back in this post, I have first drafts of major projects to celebrate in February, March, and April as well. And early this afternoon I wrote the last bits of Survive and Sing – the one-woman show my friend Norma Jean enlisted me to script based on interviews with her about her often-strange life.
At present it probably runs about 65-70 minutes, although we’ve floated the idea of writing a song to close it, and late in the process I introduced the idea of having some interspersed blackouts to give the audience (and Norma Jean) a breath and provide us the space to create some theatrical transitions from one segment of her life to the next. The original plan was for a one-hour show, but I don’t think it’s a problem running the length it is right now, especially this early in the process when it’s all workshops and she hasn’t booked any gigs with it yet. Well – not a problem for me – it’s Norma Jean who now has 29 solid pages of text to memorize!
I was fighting off a post-show funk a couple of days ago, and I think the sense that I could muscle through and finish this thing was a big help in fighting that. I still have a mammoth job ahead of me with the 7 Red re-write, which I’ve pledged to finish before I leave on my vacation. That means I have only 9 days, and I’ll likely need to write as many as 30 more new pages before it’s done.
I told myself a couple of days ago – I just don’t have the luxury of time it would take to be depressed.