Tuesday, May 26, 2009

A blog in the moment

In the moment here. I have no idea what I'm about to say. Sue is practicing Lucinda Williams, Side of the Road. I just worked out a sticky part of Act II of Red Dog. That's how I've been writing it. Bit by bit and it's coming along. It's almost writing itself, which, as any writer will tell you, is pure heaven when a piece does that.

I'm excited. I haven't been this excited about a writing project in a long time. I've handed Act I over to one person, and she liked it. I'm hoping to finish Act II this week, at night after coming home from this little contract I have. My goal is to have a staged reading in the fall.

I've been going to this office for the past two weeks now. It's really quiet there. People just sit at their desks and do their work. Intent. I guess that's the way an office should be, but any office I've ever worked in has been bloody noisy. Ad agencies and marcom departments. I did a couple of stints in a news room. Try telling reporters to shut up. You'd get a knuckle sandwich.

Monday, May 25, 2009

The digital world: Back in the cage...

It's been over a month since I've blogged. The digital world and I are slowly parting ways, even though the work I've been able to scrounge of late is all Web work.

I last blogged about a week before we left for Spain and Morocco. That last week was pretty hectic. I purposely didn't take a laptop or even a cell phone with us, and the two times we stepped into an Internet cafe it was reluctantly and only because I had to get messages to Allison. Those two weeks of not constantly glancing at a cell phone for messages that either were or weren't there, not thinking about a status line on Twitter, not wasting 45 minutes at a crack on Facebook, just randomly clicking with drool coming out of my mouth, were golden. Then, on returning to the States, I got a small contract working for two weeks on-site where they block Facebook, MySpace, and all that.

All those digital tools are great. I wouldn't want to live without Google, or something like it. Just today I was talking to Johnny, and wondered which band Peter Frampton was in before he went solo. Johnny Googled it, and the quick answer came. I'm not going to say the answer; that's for you to find out. And just this week I connected on Facebook with an old, old friend. But in the two years I've been on Facebook, this has happened exactly once. Yeah, it's a nice service, but that's about it. It's not much more than a time suck, that I can see, and I've been meaning to hit the delete button for a while now.

I actually leave the apartment more and more without a cell phone. I like being untethered. I like being untethered in so many ways.

I'm writing a play, and think that communicating that way might be a better way than even this blog, which I still think is super, but...I know people read it, I know some read it consistently (because they tell me and I also run some pretty decent analytics on it, so you can run but you can't hide) but I miss the face to face. This weekend we went to a friend's 50th birthday party (happy birthday, Joan!) where we saw some old friends and new people. Yesterday we went to Sue's niece's graduation party (congrats Jenn!!) and it was great to see some of Sue's family and just sit around and talk and laugh--in person.
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