Still kicking

Hi all,
just to let you know I'm still alive. Hi! You can all breathe a collective sigh of relief.

I have been busy, you see. I know, I've said that before, but I have. I'm leading what a friend called a "crazy double life," which sounds so much more exciting than it actually is. But I have a job that I work during the day and a second job that I work at night. It's just that I don't get paid for my night job. Yet! Yet, yet, yet.

Marie Curie is thisclose to being done. The lack of a space is not a typo; it is for additional emphasis, on top of the italics. We can see it, feel it, taste it. (Not literally, you understand. Literally, right now I can only taste the candy I'm eating. Peppermint patties. Must tide myself over until lunch, which I ordered from Chipotle but which, I was informed, wouldn't be ready for another half hour! What's that about?) We've sent it out to some rather reputable companies and people, and gotten really good responses. But they all have the same complaints: they're fascinated, but they're not MOVED. Anil and I are sure that MOVING the audience involves only a few tweaks, so I did a pass, adding some things, and he did a pass, adding some more, and when he sent it back to me I really got a sense of what they mean when they say "you can't see the forest for the trees." We're so set on individual scenes and tweaks etc, we're not sure how the entire script is coming together. So we decided to give it a month's rest and come back to it fresh. Another couple of weeks for that.

Book 2 is finally-actually-finally getting written. (I love talking about writing in the passive third person. "Getting written" makes it sound like it's just spontaneously happening and requires no work from me. Believe me, I wish that were the case.) I'm taking a class from the novelist Alison Pace and it's been very helpful, full of insightful critiques and insights into how to make this thing work. I'm reading others' pages and sharpening my own critiquing skills (always a good thing, because then you can turn your knives on your own work) and it's motivating me to work more on the book. The goal is 1000 words a day, which is sometimes easy and sometimes like trying to pull out my entire head of hair, one strand at a time. Painful, and not very efficient. A couple of weekends ago I was really tearing through pages, doing very well, and then tendinitis in my right arm came roaring back. Ah well.

On the drama side, Anil and I are thinking of new projects to get into. I have one script that is finished that perhaps we could try to sell. (It may be a little too small-scale, though. Not really commercial.) I have two other dramas that are in various draft stages, and I could bring one of those out. To sate the current appetite for all things comedy, I may get out an old comedy I wrote at NYU. We'll see.

Meanwhile, the sun is shining and New York is having a remarkably cool July. Time to go to Chipotle and take my Bol out to the park and enjoy!