Play stuff

I do try not to tell my dreams, because other people's dreams are inherently dull (I think this is why I don't much like Alice, because the books are built on dream-logic, which fails every test for me). However:

So I dreamed I was in London, special trip, to go to the theatre. And I was in the hotel and I only had fifteen minutes to get to the theatre and I didn't know the way and I forgot my watch and should-I-have-taken-a-taxi and yadda yadda, you know. Until I remembered that I was dreaming and so, okay, I could just be there, okay? And so I was.

But all the way I'd been forgetting what show I was going to see, and every time I saw a poster it was for something different, and when I got the programme it was different again; no matter. Significant thing, there was a page in the programme talking about other upcoming productions, and one of those was called "If I Shake You Off My Shoulder, You'll Go Splat!"

And by all the gods, I do so want to write that play...

All of which serves to remind me: m'theatrical producer had a word at the Summer Phantoms gig last week, and the regional tour of my play "A Cold Coming" is definitely on. We have four or five venues lined up for November, so I get to play a dying man again, maybe a dozen times, through seventy-five minutes of constant anxiety, only waiting for someone to forget their lines. Oh, joy.

No funding as yet, but we'll go ahead and do it anyway. Also, the Customs House is holding a slot for November next year, for my presumptive next play. Eeek.

*goes back to writing novels*

Beating myself up

matociquala was posting about beats a few days back (and if you didn't read that, go do); so here's a whole nother kind, the line-by-line stuff that I do instinctively, barely see I'm doing it.

Coming to the end of a paragraph, where a woman and her family are trying to keep ahead of soldiers caught in a killing frenzy (think the siege of Jerusalem, the rape of Nanking), she's hoping they'll just exhaust themselves before they reach the river, and this was the last line:

"perhaps by then they would let be, walk past doorways they would have kicked through before, not search in darkened warehouses, not care."

And then I thought, whoa, this is the East, they have their word for warehouses, which is godowns. Which makes the line:

"perhaps by then they would let be, walk past doorways they would have kicked through before, not search in darkened godowns, not care"

- and that's wrong, because there's a beat missing from that final cadence, it jars and you lose the dying fall. So you remake it:

"perhaps by then they would let be, walk past doorways they would have kicked through before, not search in darkened godowns, just not care."

And that's all it needs, that unstressed syllable either side of the comma, doesn't matter which: just a verbal hesitation between the last two stresses. That flows, where the other stumbles.

And yup, I do this every sentence, every clause. Sometimes I wonder if I worry too much. (But, with reference to another subject that crops up here, what words you can or can't use in a fantasy: I'm reading a book I'm enjoying enormously, but it's a second-world fantasy and the author used the word 'sophist' and I tripped over that because it is so explicitly linked in my head with a school of Greek philosophy, never mind what other meanings it may have acquired since; and anything that makes a reader trip needs smoothing over, so no, I don't worry too much. It's impossible to worry too much.)