The Secrets of the World

That's the name of the new play which was read at City Lights tonight. That's two hours of my life I will never get back.

The blurb says the author is a five-time recipient of the PlayGround Emerging Playwright Award. How many times can a playwright emerge, anyway? Too many, apparently.

I think what we have here is an author who writes a really catchy proposal, and that's where her skills end. The synopsis sounds pretty good, actually. Christopher Columbus makes his first voyage, accompanied by the Virgin Mary, sees all the gold jewelry, and force-baptizes a handful of natives as they try to tell him in their language to go bother the Caribes, who have more gold. He brings them to Spain, where they become pets of Isabella, who has visions of great wealth coming from this enterprise. The native who had been Chris' translator sees through all this, escapes, and becomes a multi-lingual world traveler. He and Chris finally meet in Spain when both are old and feeble. Mary has deserted Chris, who says he did it all for the glory of God.

The writing is tedious. The characters are shallow. There are 14 main characters and 20 scenes in a 90-minute 1-act play. Except for a too-long scene where Isabella plays hackysack with her pet Indian, there is nothing which lends itself to action of any kind.

And of course, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but the author has Isabella chatting with Ferdinand and suddenly declaring that all the Jews must leave Spain immediately, and the crown will grab all their land like Ferdinand did when he conquered the Moors.

IRL, the Moors were kicked out of Spain 200 years earlier, the Inquisition was declared by the Church, not the crown.

The reading was not helped by several obviously bored readers.

I hope this is the last we hear of this work.

Writer's Block: School Ties

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I had two majors, Communications and Medieval History. The Communications school had four tracks: Advertising, Editorial Journalism, Radio & TV Production and Communications Theory. We had to take at least on class in each of them, but most of my credits were from working at Radio and TV stations and taking studio operations classes. Since I was on the campus newspaper staff, the journalism classes were an easy A, and I may have had enough credits there for a double major.

Medieval History was an accident, I enjoyed my first class so much I signed up for all that professor's classes for the next two years.

For the first 10 years after college my career was as an editor, journalist, photojournalist and Audio-Visual department tech, so yes, I used my major all the time. After it was clear there this career wasn't going to pay the bills, I went to night school in electronics, and that landed me my first well-paid job. As the hardware world evolved, less and less of what I learned in school was applicable, but I'm still on the career path which it started me on, and it still comes in handy at work from time to time.

Writer's Block: Pants on Fire?

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No. There is no such thing as a lie by omission. A lie is an active thing, one cannot lie without saying something.

Why We Write

Am reading John Scalzi's book on being a writer. One of the things he suggested was to build up a following at one's journal. I have no idea how to do that. Well, I have some ideas, but am wary of implementing them. One idea was to start allowing anonymous comments, which I have just done.

How did I discover Scalzi? Someone at BASFA said John had taped bacon to his cat, and there was a photo on John's blog. Months later, someone here or on FB linked to a book John had written, and was selling online. I figured at the very least it would be creative, so I went to Amazon and bought a paperback copy.

It was a very good book, well written, a couple of notches above creative, so I bought the next two in the series.

His book starts by suggesting a good plan if one wants to be a writer is to get a job writing. He walked into the Fresno Bee and got himself a job writing reviews. And the rest is history, and a lot of writing.

So where did I go wrong? I worked on my university daily newspaper for four years, got jobs on three different newspapers after that, and have yet to have a single book published.

Maybe I need to actually write a book.