“The Audition” in Bards and Sages Quarterly

My fiction returns to the pages of Bards and Sages Quarterly! The January 2023 issue features my 7000-word co[s]mic horror story “The AuditionBards and Sages Quarterly, January 2023
.” As noted in my post about “Hully,” below, Bards and Sages is available in various formats (print, PDF, pub, and Kindle). You may order this issue from Books2Read.

In “The Audition,” Gloria Chen, a young actress, goes to audition for a new play, with her only anxiety being the fear that if she isn’t cast then her acting career will be effectively over. But she soon finds that there are far worse things to be afraid of, namely the possibility that she might not live out the night, as it seems that the play’s producers are less interested in artistic expression than they are in sacrificing a handful of actors to summon… something nasty. If Gloria is to save herself, not to mention the rest of humanity, she’ll have to fight back using the greatest weapon she has: her acting talent.

Once again, my thanks to Julia Ann Dawson and the Bards and Sages crew for presenting “The Audition.”

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Hully in Bards and Sages Quarterly

My short story “Hully” is appearing in the July 2022 issue of Bards and Sages Quarterly, Bards and Sages Quarterly, July 2022now on sale.  B&SQ is distributed in print, PDF, epub, and Kindle format, and is available for free in digital format for subscribers to the Bards and Sages newsletter. (Details available at their site.)

“Hully” is the story of a young boy who gains an imaginary (or perhaps not so imaginary) friend, whom he uses against those who bully him.

My thanks to Julie Ann Dawson and the rest of the staff of B&SQ for making “Hully” to the public.

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Big Eddie to be performed at 4th Wall Stage Company in Lowell

While my writing career these days is centered around short stories (I’ve sold two recently and will post about them as they are published), my playwriting career is not entirely over. To wit: The 4th Wall Stage Company of Worcester, MA, will be including my piece “Big Eddie” as part of “More Naughty Bits,” an evening of “provocative and slightly naughty songs, skits, dancing, and live music.” For further details, and to get tickets, click the link.

“Big Eddie,” originally performed with Image Theater of Lowell, MA, way back in 2006, is the story of a love triangle between a husband, a wife, and Big Eddie. Who is Big Eddie? You’ll have to see the play to find out.

More Naughty Bits
4th Wall Stage Company
JMAC, 20 Franklin Street, Worcester, MA  01608
April 21 & 22 at 7:30 PM

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“On Milligan Street” published by GigaNotoSaurus

Following up on the previous post: My first short story (well, novelette) “On Milligan Street” has now been published on GigaNotoSaurus. It is available for reading without a prescription: All you have to do is click on the link above.

“On Milligan Street” is the story of a young woman who is invited to find out her actual, genuine purpose in life — but finds there may be a huge whopping catch.

Many thanks to LaShawn Wanak, editor of Giganotosaurus, for selecting “On Milligan Street” as the magazine’s story for September!

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Sea Change

Regular visitors to my website, of whom I have none, will have noticed that (a) I haven’t posted anything in the better part of a year, and (b) I did recently make a slight change to the site banner, replacing the phrase “Playwright at Large” with “Writer at Large.” Behind that, my friends, lies a story.

I have noted in a previous posts that being a playwright during a pandemic is not easy. The truth is, it’s no cakewalk being a playwright even when there isn’t a virus keeping people out of enclosed public spaces. Even before Covid-19 rang down the curtains on theaters everywhere, I had reached something of an impasse in my playwriting career. The only full-length play of mine that was getting any productions was Absence, and that hadn’t gotten any traction since its Italian revival in early 2019. I found that I was even having difficulty getting my shorter plays produced. I found it harder and harder to come up with ideas for writing plays, short or long. Not to put too fine a point on it, the magic had gone out of my dramatic writing.

The year-long shutdown of live theater thus seemed an opportune moment to reassess my writing career. I found that I still had the urge to write, but that urge was not pointing to the writing of plays. Rather, I found myself steering (or maybe being steered) back to my first love, fantastic fiction.

When I first had the urge to become a writer, back in my early teens, it was not my aspiration to be a dramatist. No, what I dreamed of was to be a writer of fantasy and/or science fiction. (These were broadly referred to as “speculative fiction,” a term which always sounded awkward to me.) From an early age, I read a ridiculous amount of fantasy: I loved the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (of course), Lewis Carroll, Lloyd Alexander, Alan Garner, and many others. As I entered my teens, my tastes grew to include science fiction from soft to hard: Isaac Asimov, Philip José Farmer, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick. I particularly liked the work of those authors who danced on the edge between the two categories, like Harlan Ellison and Gene Wolfe. I decided that I was going to be an f/sf writer myself.

And yet that didn’t happen. Or at least it took a long time. I would start writing stories but get bogged down almost as soon as I started. Over the years, I would put my ambition away for a while and pursue some other vocation, but somehow I would always come back to writing. I felt like a writer, even if I wasn’t doing any of it.

About twenty years ago, I finally put some effort into writing a few stories, and managed to complete some of them. I sent them out to various publishers, and they were promptly (well, sometimes not so promptly) rejected. And quite understandably; they were terrible. I wasn’t ready to be an s/sf writer yet, it seemed.

I changed gears then, and tried writing for children. I wrote two books, one a comic fantasy and one a comic sf tale, that I thought were quite good. I sent them out to agents who did not share that opinion.

It was about then that I wrote my first short play, “The Little Death.” I brought it before the community theater group with whom I’d been working as an actor, and offered to direct it as part of their group of summer one-acts. (The was in 2005.) To my amazement, the board accepted it, and to my further amazement it did quite well. Having finally gotten some positive feedback on my writing, I plunged into my career as a playwright, getting many short plays produced at festivals, getting my M.F.A. in playwriting at Boston University, and then finally getting a production of my full-length play Absence at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 2014. I seemed to have made it.

But I had not made it. Absence got a few more productions, but none of the other full-length plays of mine got any traction, and as noted above I started having less and less success with my short plays.

And so I returned to my first love, fantastic fiction. (Wait, I said that already.) I started working on short stories, and quickly found the genre that worked for me: Darkly comic fantasies. (Perhaps not surprisingly, as most of my best plays fall under that category. A major exception is Absence which, being a serious tale about a woman suffering from dementia, is something of an outlier in my work.)

I found, when rereading what I’d written, that I rather enjoyed it, and so began submitting my work to various print and online magazines with hope. For a long time, that hope seemed baseless; I kept receiving rejection after rejection. Well, that’s par for the course for a fledgling writer, I suppose. It didn’t help that there must have been thousands of fledgling writers around the world who similarly found themselves stuck at home with nothing better to do than pound out stories and send them off, so that the slush piles must have been even bigger (and slushier) than usual.

And then one day the metaphorical sun rose on my new career: my novelette “On Milligan Street” had been accepted by the e-magazine GigaNotoSaurus.org, and would (will) be published by them on September 1. (Cheers and applause from the audience.)

It’s taken me forty years, but I’ve at last become an f/sf writer.

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Ismene at Titanic Theatre Company

On Saturday, December 12, at 7:30 PM, the Titanic Theatre Company of Cambridge MA will be presenting “A Night to Remember” on Zoom, an evening of humor and resilience. They will be performing two short plays, “Classics for Kids” by the talented Ellen Davis Sullivan (a friend of mine since our days in Playwrights’ Platform) and my own “Ismene,” a pastiche on the Oedipus cycle, in its first performance ever.

The show is free, but you do need to register by December 8 if you want to attend. You can do so by going to their website, or by e-mailing info@titanictheatre.org .

Note that the website seems to imply that my play is being done as audience participation, but that is NOT the case; only one character, with one line, will be chosen from the audience!

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Upcoming Virtual Productions

It’s certainly not easy to be a playwright these days, when live theater is about as common as five-legged cows. And for very good reasons, I hasten to add… I wouldn’t want to have my work involved in any superspreader events! Still, as a creator of works intended to be performed before a living and breathing audience, it can be frustrating to have no venues where one’s work can be performed.

Luckily, we have some resourceful theater companies and producers who are producing “live” theater virtually, and I am doubly fortunate in that two of my short plays will be so produced over the next few weeks.

First of all, the Augustana Theatre at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, will be performing a set of four short plays including my “Evolution.” These will be showing on their Facebook page on Friday, November 20, at 7:30.

Secondly, the Titanic Theatre Company will be producing its own set of virtual short plays on Saturday, December 12th. My play “Ismene” will be getting its premiere in this festival! I don’t yet have the link for that, but I will provide it when it becomes available.

Please help keep theater alive in these troubled times.

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Too, Too Solid Flesh on Zoom

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here; in this age of COVID-19, there’s not much happening in the theater world. However, I am happy to report that my play “Too, Too Solid Flesh,” winner of the Firehouse Center for the Arts‘ Honegger Prize in 2015, will be performed in a Zoom session presented by the Firehouse. It will be directed by Stephen Faria, who directed the original Firehouse production of the play.

The plays will be performed on Sunday, June 14th, at 7:00 PM EST.

Click here for details. 

(Note that for some reason “Too, Too Solid Flesh” is not listed on that site as one of the plays to be performed.)

Addendum June 14th: Okay, the reason the play is not listed on their site is because it ended up not being included in the evening’s shows. However, it is possible that there will be second set of Honneger winners done at a later time, so stay tuned.

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Magic in Cabot

On Friday, July 26, I had the extreme privilege of visiting Cabot Vermont. As noted in my previous post, my friend Karen Mueller-Harder runs a children’s theater camp there, and had commissioned me to write two new plays for the kids: “Reunion” (for 11- to 16-year-olds) and “How I Became the Nightmare Queen” (for younger kids). Karen worked with the kids over the course of the week leading up to the 26th, rehearsing “Nightmare Queen” in the morning and “Reunion” in the afternoon.”

Me (center) and Karen (at far right) with some of the “Nightmare Queen” kids

My wife Vinita and I got to Cabot shortly before noon, giving us a chance to meet the younger set after their last rehearsal. We sat in a big circle and talked about the process of writing scripts and turning them into plays. Though young, the kids were no strangers to the stage; every one of them had appeared in front of an audience before now! They were smart, friendly, and engaging, and asked thoughtful questions.

A scene from “How I Became the Nightmare Queen”

In the afternoon, I met with the older participants. Once again, we sat in a circle(somewhat smaller, this time), and talked about how “Reunion” had come to be, and going into detail about the creative process.

In the evening, it was time for the show! First came “Nightmare Queen,” a rousing and funny production in which the performers gave their all, playing characters like the Software Bug, the Were-Terrier, and the Fish-Eating Zombie. To fit all the participants in, the major characters were portrayed by two actors (and in the cast of the protagonist, Cass, by three). The large audience (there were more people than seats) responded enthusiastically.

Then came the more thoughtful “Reunion,” featuring seven young actors who deftly portrayed the humor and drama in this tale of a handful of cousins at a family reunion, coming to grips with what it means to grow up.

All in all, it was a marvelous experience. I want to thank Karen for bringing me on board, and all the participating kids for bringing life to my scripts.

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