Fire on Earth reading tonight!

Tonight, the Fresh Ink Theatre will be presenting a reading of my play, Fire on Earth, at the Factory Theatre in Boston at 7:30 pm (791 Tremont Street).  It's free.  It's fun (well, "intense" might be a better way to describe the play than "fun", but it depends on what you call fun.  It's the kind of play that I find fun.).   It's got a terrific cast.  And I'm baking brownies.

This is the start of the development and production process with Fresh Ink, which will continue with a workshop in August and a full production in February.  I've been working on this play for a very, very, very long time, so it's extra sweet to finally see it work its way onstage.

Here's what the play's about in a nutshell.  If you're around, I hope you'll join us.

1524. John Tewkesbury is a savvy trader and smuggler, smart enough to know William Tyndale's illegal translation of the Bible will be a hot commodity. But, to sell the good book, he must elude the spies of Sir Thomas More and escape the fires of the Catholic bishops. In this true story about the struggle between dangerous information and powerful knowledge, one man journeys from merchant to martyr.

Numbers Guy: What I Did In My 30s

My 40th birthday is just a few weeks away. A milestone like this calls up a fair amount of self-assessment and navel-gazing. Working for myself means that I don't have a boss or supervisor to whom I offer reports of my progress or accomplishments. So in my case, I make lists to give myself an idea of how I'm doing.

So, how productive was I in my 30s? I didn't start any theatre companies (I started two in my 20s, along with a marketing newsletter for playwrights, and ran a nonprofit playwrights organization). In my 20s, I wrote a lot of screenplays and full-length plays, but in my 30s, my writing was more diverse.

Here's what I did in my 30s:

I wrote:
One novel (Tornado Siren, published)
Two drafts of a new novel (hope to finish it this year)

Three non-fiction book proposals. (none bought. Yet.)

Lots of rewrites of various scripts.

2 ½ full-length plays: Pieces of Whitey (produced), Constant State of Panic (incomplete), God’s Voice (workshopped but not produced),

1 one-act play: The Sky is Falling (produced and published)

16 ten-minute plays: (15 of them are published and/or produced)

1.5 screenplays (The Three Great Loves of Christopher J. Tomaski, 1/2 of another)
4 outlines/treatments for screenplays

a Dramatists Guild magazine article

Also I started:
the Rhombus playwrights group in Boston
the online playwright submission binge.
(tried to help start the Kansas City Playwrights Cooperative, but I think it didn’t make it.)

Published a bunch of issues of Market InSight for Playwrights (and then sold it).

I submitted:
854 play scripts
515 queries for plays
171 queries for screenplays
28 screenplay script submissions
75 queries for book manuscripts or book proposals
a handful of book manuscripts.

All these submissions resulted in:
145 productions and readings of my plays
27,058 people attended these shows (approx.) Another 4,000 or so heard my radio shows
8,675 high school students bought my published scripts (resulting in $6,396 for me) and used them in competitions
1 screenplay optioned, and it came very close to getting made.

All the book, play, and screenplay productions and sales earned me about $14,057


I read 463 books
I watched 199 plays and readings (this # is low, because I lived away from big cities for a while)
I watched 615 movies

Moved 5 times. (bought 5 houses, sold 7)
Adopted our son.


That's about it. I'm not quite sure what to make of it all. In terms of writing output, I generated 7 full-length works, which seems close to what I'd like. Moving as many times as we did makes it hard to be as productive as I'd like. And having babies in the house can also cut down on time.

Though I didn't earn much money, when I look at the number of people who saw my plays, I feel pretty content.

The truth is, I can always find people who are more prolific or more talented than I am. In the end, the trick for a writer is be simultaneously content that he's done as much as he could, and be determined to do more and better work in the future.

Now, I'm looking forward to some time to think about what might come in the next decade.

Book Stores Make Me Think About Dying

It's true. We have this fantastic independent bookstore nearby, Brookline Booksmith, and I've gone in a fair bit lately, and I love to browse. But when I'm standing there looking at the fiction section, I can't help but think, "Man, I'll never be able to read all the books that interest me." Which depresses me a little.

I'm almost 40. So maybe I have a good 40 years of reading left. At 25 books a year (I'm slow, I know), that's 1,000 books. Which seems like a lot. But they keep publishing new good books every year. And there's plenty of classics I want to read but haven't. Last time I was there, I picked up Bleak House and then Maugham's The Painted Veil, and thought I want to read these. And then The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Banks caught my eye yet again, but she's got a new one out that looks good, too. I bought Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian for my step-father last year and now I want a copy of my own.

And that's just fiction. I keep meaning to read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. And I need to round out my Michael Pollan collection with Botany of Desire, and actually buy a copy of Omnivore's Dilemma, because my wife loved it, too. And I'm reading Wendyll Berry's The Hidden Wound right now, and feel like I should probably just read all of his work.

Sometimes I fantasize about being locked in a bookstore overnight. (It's fun to spend all night in a theatre, too--I did that for South City's May Day Play Day a few years back, and ended up writing a play, The Sky is Falling, that I still like.)

When I'm in a library, I don't have the sense that I want to take it all in. Maybe because the collections are too large. But something about a bookstore makes me lust for the books, lust to read them backwards and forward. I guess I'd better get going. The clock is ticking.

What I'm Reading: Mission to America

I came across Mission to America when it was recommended by a friend, after I told him that I was looking for an American Nick Hornby. I've become a big Nick Hornby fan over the past year or so (and adored his recent books on books, The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt), but I figure there have to be a few American novelists out there who have the same sort of wit, insight, and ability to get under the skin of interesting characters, while still being funny, and sometimes serious without having to be tragic. At the moment, he's one of a few writers from whom I just want to read everything he's written, because it's just so much fun, and I hope that if I read enough of it, maybe I'll at least subconsciously figure out how he does it.

I liked Mission to America quite a bit. It was the first book of Walter Kirn's that I'd read, though I've had an interest in reading Thumbsucker, and the film made me want to read the book. The premise of Mission to America seemed interesting: that an obscure and isolated sect in Montana, on the verge of dying out due to generations of inbreeding, sends out two missionaries to essentially bring back some women converts that will help flesh out the gene pool.

Along the way, they interact with the corrupting influences of America, and while trying to stay true to their beliefs, get entangled in a world that's more bizarre than the one they left.

The book does a good job of not being heavy-handed in either direction. The simple life in Bluff, Montana, isn't exactly perfect. And the two missionaries do meet some interesting people out in the world who aren't totally crazy (though not many).

For me, the book started out fast, and then got lost a bit in the middle. At the very end, though, I couldn't put it down, and I probably came across as fairly anti-social this Easter weekend at my in-laws, as I read through to the ending.

Kirn's writing can be wonderfully sharp and sometimes I'd reread passages, just to make sure I didn't skim through it (it's a fast read overall). However, I have to confess that I wish that the two missionaries hadn't ended up bogged down in an Aspen-like town in Colorado, amongst freakishly wealthy families and ski bums. It seems like his social satire would have taken a bigger risk, but maybe had more of an impact, if they fell in amongst a slightly more typical set of Americans. The people in his Aspen stand-in don't feel like me and don't live anything close to the way I live. And their problems and their personalities barely interested me. So the satire's reach ends up feeling limited.

Still, Kirn's clearly a talented, experienced writer, and he writes a complicated story and set of interactions. I look forward to reading more of what he's written. However, I'm still looking for the American Nick Hornby. Suggestions?