2008 Round Up, Part 3--creative input

Okay, this is really the last post about 2008. I'm a number guy and a list-maker (mildly compulsive, perhaps...), so the end of the year is great time for tallies. I keep track of how many books, movies, and plays I take in every year, which I look on as sort of creative compost for the mind.

Here's how I did in 2008:

Movies watched: 46 (my goal was 52, but I coached my daughter's travel soccer team this year, which meant I coached about 20 games and ran about 40 practices. All that time has to come from somewhere.)

Favorites: Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, Juno.

I had a goal of reading a handful of screenplays, but came up empty on that one.


Plays (and readings of plays) watched: 14. (In the old days, before kids, I might see 75 plays and readings in a year, but that's not possible anymore. Plus, this year, I intentionally dialed back some of my playgoing--I just needed a break (my goal was only 12). This year, I'd like to see a lot more. Luckily I have a StageSource membership, which gets me access to free tickets, because, to be honest, I can't afford to buy tickets to plays very often (see previous post on income).

Favorites: An Ocean of Air by Rough & Tumble, and the Rhombus plays in the Six Views Festival we put on.


Plays read: 9. (my goal was 4. Which I know is very unimpressive, but I've been more into reading books than plays lately.)

Favorite: August: Osage County by Tracy Letts. Intense, high-energy, and obviously theatrical. Reading Doubt by John Patrick Shanley was a big disappointment for me--it just seemed so theatrically uninteresting, and though the stakes are high, part of me felt like it's getting done a lot because it's really cheap to stage (small cast, no set). (Heresy, I'm sure.)

Books read: 29. (my goal was 24. I'm a slow reader, sad to say. And busy with a lot of stuff (see above).)

Favorites:

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
• The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
• Into the Wild and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• The New Kings of Non-Fiction edited by Ira Glass
• Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
• Master and Comander by Patrick O'Brian
• Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
• Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman

I know that's an excessively long list of favorites (especially since I only read 29 books) but I liked all of these a lot. It helps that Tracy reads more than twice as much as I do, and knows what I like, so she filters out the other stuff. And I've gotten terrific recommendations from friends.

So that's a bunch of the stuff that went into my head. I'm curious to see what will come out in 2009.

2008 Round Up, Part 2--the business side of the writing life

Okay, so I had a pretty good year of actually writing stuff. It's worth looking at the business side of the writing life, too.

This past year was about what I expected, in terms of how much I submitted. I was busy with extensive writing projects, so I didn't set any submission records for myself.

This year I sent 17 queries for scripts and 75 actual scripts out, so I guess you could call it 92 submissions.

In terms of productions, it was a slow year, but not too bad. I had 6 productions of short plays in various theatres in New York, Boston, and North Carolina, and 2 readings. Plus I got quite a few productions of short plays via my publishers and about 1,000 students bought my published scripts this year, for use in competitions and elsewhere.

Two of my short plays were accepted for inclusion in Smith & Kraus anthologies, and Playscripts published my short play, Pumpkin Patch. I won one competition, the UMBC competition, which was very exciting. I came up completely blank in my efforts to find productions for my full-length plays this year--they're awfully tough to place right now. I did help produce a new play festival, Six Views, with my Rhombus playwrights group, which was quite successful in many ways and very gratifying.

I sold a handful of books, but Tornado Siren has been out for a while (two years), and like any novel, if it doesn't make a big splash out of the gate, its lifetime on the bookshelves is pretty short.

So in terms of audience, all this added up to a decent year (meaning I met my goals). As far as I can tell, counting theatre and books, I think my worked reached at least 5,282 people this year. (My goal was 4,800.) This was generated by 75 performances (my goal was 52).

So what about the money side of the writing life? What does all this add up to? We tend not to talk about the actual finances of writing, much to the detriment of young writers, I think. They don't really know what writers earn for their work when they get into this.

My goal at the start of 2008 was to make at least $6,000 from my writing work (including freelance stuff). Sounds like a pathetically small number, I know, but my time is limited (I'm the stay-at-home dad for two kids, too, and I do a bunch of other stuff).

This year I made just over $10,000, which is the first time I've beat my goal. However, only about $1,500 of this came from productions and publications of plays and books. The rest was generated by my freelance work doing web work and business writing and editing. Most of the creative writing money comes from my many published short plays (about 34)--these brought in about $1,100. The nice thing about this money is that it's pretty consistent, year-to-year, so I can count on it to help cover my basic writing expenses (paper, envelopes, web costs).

2009 should be better, in terms of playwriting income, because I know I have a $1,000 prize on its way, plus some extra short play publication money (from a production licensed in December 2008).

It really is helpful for our family if I can keep bringing in $6,000 - $10,000 a year (and I have a daughter approaching college age at an alarming rate). Luckily my freelance work is helping make that happen right now, though I'd love for my income from plays and books to cover that full amount. Who knows, maybe the new play or new novel will do the trick for a while (though even if they get published and/or produced, it's likely they wouldn't show income until 2010). The best I can do is keep writing and keep submitting (and try to be smart about it).

2008 Round Up, part 1 (creative output)

'Tis the time for looking back at the year, and for me it's a great excuse to add up lots of numbers and count things, which just makes me happy. And to make lists for 2009, which is just more bliss. (Everyone has his quirks.)

I wanted to look at my creative output first, the actual writing that I put out. The business side lends itself to stats and year-end sums, but putting down words on paper is what the writing life is really supposed to be about.

2008 was an especially productive year for me, writing-wise. I was especially diligent about making sure I got up early to write (not so much in December, but the rest of the year, I was very good) and trying to make sure that when the kids were in school, I didn't give away too much writing time to meetings and errands.

What I wrote in 2008:
Four new ten-minute plays. Two of which may never see the light of day, but at least they were written. Two of which, Confirmed Sighting and Recognition, turned out pretty well. Recognition was part of the T Plays festival produced here in Boston, and Confirmed Sighting just won the UMBC international playwriting competition and will be produced in Baltimore in March.

I also rewrote my ten-minute play, Stick Up for Mars, which turned out well and was produced this summer.

I completely rewrote my new novel, enough that it was almost like writing an entirely new one. Then I revised it again. It runs about 84,000 words right now. This kept me busy all year. I think it's pretty close now, finally (I started the first draft in December 2005), and I hope to be sending it out in February.

I wrote a new full-length play, Constant State of Panic, using a bunch of scenes (half of a first act) that I'd never been able to finish. This play still has a ways to go, but it's almost ready to start looking for a few staged readings and workshops. I'm so glad to finally have a complete draft of this play after it's been haunting me for so many years.

I helped write a short film script, as part of the 48 hour film project.

I wrote a bunch of blog posts. (Hey, those are writing, too, you know.)


That's it. I'd be happy to write that much in 2009. And especially if I manage to keep writing stuff that I like and can find an audience.