I'll Make A Deal With You

It's been almost a month since I weighed in here, and really haven't been a consisted blogger in a long while now. Mea culpa.

I know, I know, readers want new content every day, but I have the age-old suspicion of many writers in that I wonder if I have enough to say every day. It's not that I don' t think I don't have anything worth saying; oh, Lord, I've never had that problem. It's that I wonder if I have enough to fill up a blog every day. I think it's the curse of our age that 24/7 cable networks have ruined this country. I remember when CNN was started. Good Lord, who can fill up 24 hours with news? Well they sure did, didn't they? Actually, I don't think they have. It's a lot of useless commentary and rehashing of old news and making news where none is to fill the space (every hurricane season, for instance) and bring in the advertisers. Let's face it, there are few people on the earth who are that interesting.

But try telling them that, right?

But for the folks who I know are interested in what I'm up to (yes, I know who a lot of you are; it's the Internet: You can run but you can't hide) for you I should be adding more to this space. So I do know there are people who are Googling my name and this blog and checking in from time to time. And when you visit you can at least see my Twitter feed to the left. (Extra points if you start following me on Twitter.) And to my loyal friends and fans and those folks who are simply hoping that something bad has happened to me, I say, Hola!

Things are intense with school. I'm hopefully finishing up in about a month. I'm in the middle of the summer session, where they take 15 weeks of work and jam them into six. The upshot is you can really chalk up the credit hours and they charge about a thousand bucks less for the class. The negative is it's 15 weeks of work crammed into six weeks; you honestly think your head's going to bleed.

I'm in the second half of the summer session and the only thing that's standing between me and graduation is French and two ten-page papers and two oral reports. If you don't think that's not a load you're not seeing it from my perspective.

And then beyond that? Well, it's wondering what I can do with this Masters. Boston University hired me again to teach creative writing in the fall. I'm very excited about that. I had a great group of students in the spring who I loved meeting once a week. That class was in the CAS--arts and sciences. This fall I'll be teaching in the Metropolitan College, which would be BU's night school if BU had a night school. It's geared more toward working people, with classes in the evening. Again, I'm very excited about meeting a new group of students.

And there's the big question of how can I get my plays produced. I think it was Tennessee Williams who said a play's not a play until it's on stage. It's interesting to see English grad students in drama classes reading scripts, and reading them like they'd read a novel, and saying they are reading plays. With a script you're looking at a blueprint, not the building. You read scripts and watch plays. There's a huge difference, and as soon as you wrap your brain around that you've suddenly got your foot firmly wedged into the stage door that was about to slam in your face.

Phew. Okay, remember those ten-page papers I mentioned earlier? One's due this Thursday. I'll try to write more on this space. I know I've made that promise before. But here's the deal, it would a whole lot better for me if a few readers would drop a comment now and again. It would let me know I'm not howling in the wilderness. And isn't this whole Internet thang supposed to be about conversation? So...join the conversation.