Update: DC, Kindle, and QueryTracker Interview

So I've been on the run all week since getting back from DC on Sunday night, just keeping busy with a zillion different things (broken clothes dryer, teaching a worm composting class, lots of snow shoveling, and some writing).  Here's a few quick things:

• The DC trip was great.  As usual, the folks at Madcap, led by Managing Director Shawn Helm, took good care of me and my work. (And so did my friends, Dawn and Chip, who let me crash at their house, and Frank, who drove me home after the Friday show).  On Saturday, we gathered with the cast (Annie Hunt, Kate Hundley, Mike Rodriguez, Jack Powers, and Carl Brandt Long) and director (Paul McLane) around 11am and worked through my new full-length play, Flight, scene by scene, in rehearsal.  It was just the right kind of process for where I am with the script right now--lots of discussion and questions.  Real focused time, to think about the script both in the detailed moments and overall.  At 3pm, we had the reading for a small crowd, followed by a brief discussion.  After going through the script one step at a time, it was useful to finally,read it straight through, and get a sense of flow.   I was left with lots to think about, and took pages and pages of notes, that afternoon, that night, the next day, in the airport.  This week, I've been making more and more changes to the script.
  
• I had a great time at the Madcap Winter Carnival performances.  There's still one weekend left, if you're in town.  I was pleased with how Escape to Wonderland turned out, and all the plays were fun.  The Saturday show was particularly sharp, with a warm, sold-out house.  I was particularly fond of Paul Bunyan vs the Tree Conservation Coalition, a short musical by Shawn Northrip, who wrote Cautionary Tales for Adults and the Many Adventures of Trixie Tickles, which I saw at a Winter Carnival a few years ago and still think is one of the funnier plays I've ever seen.
• My play Blinders is now available for the Kindle, here.  The publisher for Blinders, Original Works Publishers, is trying something new.  I'm very curious to see if people have an interest in buying and reading plays as e-books. 
• There's an interview with me about how I found my new agent for my novels, up on the querytracker.net site.  Querytracker is an immensely useful tool for fiction writers, as they try to find agents and publishers.  They sometimes publish "success stories" about writers who use their site, so there I am. 

That's about all the excitement for me. I should probably start stretching, so I can get ready for more snow shoveling. I like to shovel snow (don't tell anyone), and since we live in Boston, we've been getting plenty of chances this winter.

pinkie update

Good news--I got the pin out of my pinkie today. They knocked me out to put it in, but only used a local to take it out. I was a little nervous about that, with images of the doctor with his knee on my chest and a big pair of pliers. It wasn't quite that dramatic, though it was a lot more involved than I expected--gown, real operating room, bunch of nurses, lots of waiting, the same questions over and over and over again, etc.

A few things I've learned:

--It always takes a little longer to recover than I expect. I figured I'd be able to play soccer on Sunday. The doc nixed that (if I'd known I was getting stitches, I guess I could have figured out that one for myself).

--When the doctor tells you that something is going to hurt, that means it's going to hurt a lot. The two injections into the base of the finger hurt, but not so bad. However, the two injections into the end of the finger--wow. The good news is that once those were over, I didn't feel a thing. And he didn't need to yank very hard to get the pin out. (I'm very grateful to the nurse who listened to me prattle on and on so I didn't have to feel them cutting and yanking.)

--It's hard to type without all your fingers, and it's really hard to type when a few of the others are still numb from whatever the heck they put in there.


I've been reading a bunch of great books lately and will blog about them, once I get all the feeling back in my fingers.