I have decided to cave into the peer pressure (ok the peer envy) and create a site for my creative endeavors.  So this is it, my first blog post in my play writing, producing, directing site.  I’ve created pages for the  plays that I have had produced or in staged readings.  I’m preparing to embrace and acknowledge the creative life I live outside of my professional business career.

I’m in the process of taking “Pitchfork and Light” and making it a full-length piece.  It’s a murder mystery.  I like the outline and am satisfied with what I’m going to do with it, but finding it hard to concentrate on writing these days.  Also, I’m vaguely avoiding some of the emotional territory I’ll need to take the heroine into as she discovers her father was not who she thought he was.  More importantly, she’s not sure she is who she thought she was and has to reconcile herself to save her marriage.  I’ve always been interested in how our perceptions of ourselves, our past, and our present collide when people from our past interact with our present lives.

I have another piece “Beneath the Above and Below” that I’m cleaning up and planning to submit.  I had a reading of it at Pacifica Table Readers last month and a number of people who were there encouraged me to lengthen the play.  I’m on the fence and not sure that it’s where I want to go with that particular piece.   It pits two sisters against each other – a journalist who has uncovered the fact that her sister was an engineer on record who may have known that an accident on a job site was likely; an accident that lead to a fatality.  As someone said after the reading “I’ve never seen a 10-minute suspense thriller,”  which in this context was good; she liked it and was one of the few who didn’t want me to lengthen the play.  With this one I’m looking at how every-day, seemingly inconsequential actions can lead to bigger repercussions.  When I originally wrote it, I had a simple question to pose “what would you do”, and hadn’t really intended to go any further with it.  But after getting the feedback at the reading, I’m seeing that there’s a lot of potential for some deeper, darker substance.  How to delve into that without answering all the questions I intentionally want unanswered is my sticking point.  I realize the answer to that problem is probably abandoning the original concept.

I’m a little surprised that I am most interested in writing mysteries and suspense these days.  I like reading in that genre and like movies and t.v. shows that play in that space, but I’ve never thought about writing plays that fall into that category.  However, my characters are telling me those stories, so I’m going with it.  Also, I like the dark matter and electricity of it.