Fallen off on the blogging this year – I would say it’s because I’m busy but I think I’m basically always busy. What really happens, I suspect, is that in very intense periods I can find it difficult to reach a mental state where I can write a blog post. It has to do with the calibration of expectations for the act of “writing” and the purpose for which I’m doing it. I’m just now starting to emerge from basically a nine-month period where I had a mammoth load of writing to accomplish that was financially and professionally important; and the volume was so consistently high that any time I thought about blogging, it was difficult to disengage from the need for everything to have a shape and a theme and a tone and a finite journey; I would be exhausted before I even started.
It’s not wrong to just blog an announcement, or an idle thought, or anything, really. Outlets have diversified, though. I put my little thoughts on Twitter and Facebook; make announcements there and on the individual pages devoted to my various endeavors. Blogging has been incredibly valuable to me as a writer over the years; and I think it would be good, now that I am actively trying to recover some healthy balance after a period of forced unbalance, for me to do some – and to hell with whether it’s a well-made post or not.
So what’s the news? Well, in the “all-consuming new endeavors” file, I have deepened my commitment to Shakespeare-Summerfest Orange County, where at the end of last season I became part of the Artistic Committee, and have stepped into the role of Casting Director. Having never really organized an audition out here in the professional world, and suddenly having to bring hundreds of people around on a tight schedule to audition for three large-ensemble shows; to answer anxious queries, coordinate volunteer staff, get our company up on audition listing services, sending thousands of e-mails, scanning and organizing headshots, resumes, registrations, tracking the data of every actor we review…it’s been an intense education; practically a full-time job for the last two months, and likely to continue through the end of April.
As “Casting Director”, it’s not my job to decide who plays what. It’s more that I try and put the best, most diverse group with the most potential greatness in front of the directors, and give them the information they need so they can make their choices; and organize the whole shebang and run communications for it.
In any endeavor it’s eye-opening to see things from the other side, and having been to more than my share of auditions in the last few years, it’s great for dispelling the anxiety about the hundreds of things actors can convince themselves might make or break their chances. Acting is hell enough on the ego without those extra fears.
I don’t know if I’ll put these skills to use elsewhere – it was a job that needed doing here and I was able to step up and do it. I am glad for the experience though; purely from the perspective of trying to keep life interesting; and what I found within minutes of the audition day starting was that as long as you were on-time and your paperwork was in order, I didn’t really judge anyone on anything else.
Also under the “unusual jobs” heading – I have apparently become an “expert” for the purposes of talk radio. This is all to do with Seeing by Moonlight; we have a PR firm helping us promote the book, and one of their methods is to book me on radio programs to discuss items in the news on talk radio shows. It’s an interesting content sandwich – I come on, the host helps me plug the book, we break down the topic of the day (which is tagentially-related to something from the book), and then we close with a final plug.
Generally I’m brought on to discuss stories relating to World War II, the Nazis, and Hitler. I admit that I didn’t imagine when I got into this field that it would lead to me doing radio interviews about Hitler; but my co-author and I did do some research, and the Nazis, though long past their heyday, do have a habit of popping up in the news. Recently I’ve been doing interviews about the government of Bavaria’s decision to publish a new annotated edition of Mein Kampf. Naturally, people have pretty strong feelings about this.
The reason I put “expert” in quotation marks is – although my co-author and I did enough research to write a thriller that intersected historical events to a standard we could sign our names to, I am not going to pretend to be a true historical scholar. I have a BA in Theatre Arts and Music.
The truth is, though, the format doesn’t really lend itself to drilling down that deep. You would be surprised how quickly a 10-minute block of radio conversation can go by; really you are just trying to get three or four bullet points across to the layman. I’m not praising or condemning the medium; it is what it is. We give people a few bites of the story, then move on to something else. My experience as a performer is probably as useful as any knowledge store writing the book gave me; because I have that internal clock I can wind to the interview and know when answers are running too long.
So I’ve been on radio stations in Anchorage, Colorado Springs, Redding, Wilkes-Barre, Birmingham, Buffalo, many other cities, some satellite radio shows, web shows. The hosts tend to be politically on the right, but that is just as likely a function of that side of the spectrum having a dominant footprint in the medium. The conversations have all been friendly and very focused; they are, after all, professionals at this. Some have had me around as a repeat guest – it is strange to be introduced as “Our resident Hitler expert”. Probably won’t make business cards of that.
I think this comes back to my essential ambivalence about fame. I can accept that the PR firm’s strategy to sell books is to raise my public profile, and Mr. Thomas has asked if I would be the public face of our writing partnership and I’ve agreed. Beyond the utilitarian aspect of it, though, I’d rather be in a show.
I have heard rumblings that Titan: Dawn the indie video game I provided voices for awhile back, may finally be seeing a public demo release. And the independent features I’ve shot over the last year are going to be screening one by one in the coming months before starting their journey out to festivals. We’ve put out three episodes of Earbud Theater already this year. I wrote/directed two of them, but the third – The Creaky Stairs – is, I think, a bona fide classic, one of the best episodes we’ve ever done. We have another episode about to launch and my next script is already drafted for them.
Through Casey Wolfe, the founder and head producer of Earbud, I’ve become involved in another endeavor, Brick Moon Fiction. It’s an imprint for publishing anthologies of new speculative fiction around specific themes, and I’ve already delivered three short stories to them. One, “Fourth Grade”, was published in their first released anthology – Visions on Visions: Stories from the World of Augmented Reality. Another, “4pants”, was released for free on-line as a look into the future of romance in honor of Valentine’s Day. The third, “The Lake of the Dead”, will be released in their second digital anthology. It’s very stimulating to have an outlet for these little pieces – the turnaround on them is often very quick, and because the themes are assigned to us, it’s always a pleasure to see how some of the other Brick Moon contributors attack the idea.
There’s much more, as always, but this entry has gone on long enough; and with no satisfying theme or fun button to end on. What in the world is wrong with me?