Though You Sometimes Do Come By The Occasional Black Eye

We are having a rejection supersale over here!

Rejection over here! Rejection over there! Rejected from things I don't even know if I care about (BUT I DO!)! Rejected from things I wanted very badly! COMING OUT MY EARS!

It comes in such amazing waves somehow. Bam bam bam.

Anyway. That's great.

This is mostly writing rejection, because I haven't been on an audition in ages! Hooray! I had a few auditions in the later part of the summer and didn't get anything! Yippeee!!!

And now we have this wonderful fall look of not being able to move forward in writing.

It's really hard to keep going and find motivation when you just feel like you're being slammed. Some are just unfortunate (you send a play that you spent weeks on, three days before the deadline, and then they say that they reached the quota that night and your script won't even be read. THANK YOU SO MUCH!), and some are just, 'but...but....why don't you like me?...I did everything right....'. They suck equally.

If I were a cool person I would embed a .GIF here, BUT I'M NOT.

I had a relatively fecund creative period, of creating a lot of stuff and submitting it. I have a lot of projects now at varying stages of development but absolutely no where to put them and no one to work on them with. Hmmm. That thought has me pretty  much bone dry, in terms of both ideas and desire to work.

All I want to do is watch movies allllll the time. All the time! The work that others have already created is somehow much more fulfilling than the angst my own work causes me.

There are three more things I should hear back from in the next two weeks, and I'm pretty sure they'll all be 'no's'. Two more will come sometime after that. In the meantime, I can either keep applying for other things, or I can watch 'GoodFellas' for the fifth time in three days.

Who knows what will happen???

Then From Out of the Blue and Without Any Guide...

I hate my ideas.

I'm so incredibly limited by my own brain. My stupid, unoriginal brain.

Whenever anyone else has an idea I think it is just the best thing ever and then I crap all over it with my stupid ideas about what could happen next. I love step two. If you come up with an idea, I will get really excited about it for you and tell you a million directions you could go with it. I just wish I had a single original idea myself.

I'm trying to let other people's ideas just be: keep my enthusiasm and be a supportive, silent friend who listens and asks instead of saying, 'LET'S SUBMIT IT FOR FRINGE! I LOVE THIS, I'LL BE THE SECRETARY!'. Maybe I just have genius friends. I really believe that people have to own their projects, that a dramaturge or feedback giver or whatever is there as a sounding board, instead of someone who has to 'fix' things. At least before the play gets up. At least when the play is struggling to just be what it is on its own terms, when it can't even walk yet. So I'm working on being excited in a quiet way. In a 'you be you' way.

It's difficult.

The other thing I'm learning about my own ideas is that when I have one, I want to give it to someone. I want someone to say, 'yes, this deserves to live'. But inevitably, they want to turn it into their own thing, or they don't get as excited about it as I am. I don't even know what I'm looking for when I tell someone an idea too early, I just feel a compulsion to do it. And it always ends up disappointing me. I just need too much encouragement, no one could ever give me enough. Plus, I'm so stubborn that the second someone says, 'Do you know what you should do?', I want to never do it ever, out of sheer obstinance. What a monster I am. Impossible to work with or even be around.

So I have an idea now that is so so so far removed from being anything. It's barely an idea. It's like half a thought. It's a 'thoug'. But it has a bit of a glimmer and a gleam to me so I'm trying to keep it to my damn self. See if I can bring something into being myself. Eventually it will need someone. Actually, I have one show that is now finished a second draft and so desperately needs someone, needs someone to come in and look at it and help me. But this idea isn't there yet. If I don't even know what it is, how can I ask someone to love it?

So sit on it, Jessica. Keep it to yourself. For just a minute. Incubate. Mother duck. Mother hen.

This need to share, this compulsion for validation is related, I think, to my original love of theatre, which was that it was how I met cool people. The theatre is the closest I have ever felt to having friends. I want other people to want to work with me and like my ideas. But I'm alone. I don't have a company, or partners. I work by myself. There are a million independent artists in Toronto, and they don't ask me to work with them. No one is interested in what I do. This is an endless sadness to me but is the way things are. And maybe the benefit to this is that I get to really form things myself and see what they are to me before I give them away. So I have to hold on to them for a bit.

It's difficult.

Someone tell the story, someone sing the song.

Read this.

Love it. Causing a lot of pain because I think that's what I'm trying to do in the play that I'm writing that I affectionately call 'the worst play ever written' (or, alternatively, 'the roadside baby', as in the baby that maybe should be left for the wolves), and it's very hard. Damn, it's hard. So easy to talk, to use language in a way to evoke and recreate and image, so hard to make language move and push and stab and run and have characters do the same.

This thing of 'action' that we apparently do all the time naturally and knowingly and unknowingly in life, why is that so hard to bottle and stage? Stop trying to bottle it, Jessica. Then how do you conjure it?

Garrrrrrr. Losing faith that I am, indeed, a writer. Having similar fear about acting, and prospects of ever acting again. Gar. Angst. Blergh.

Life's Lovely When You're a Woman Like Me

Have I returned to blog? I'm not sure. Maybe a bit.

I had some blog posts backlogged about my summer and theatre and stuff I saw and thought about but it all seems like very long ago and as if another person wrote it.

A number of things have kept me from blogging, the most prominent being my endless confusion over whether I should even continue doing theatre in the first place, and if I did, whether I should continue talking about it. I also broke and then lost my camera and as I'm sure I've mentioned already, blogs without pictures are like very bad books.

Right now I'm not acting in anything and am pretty convinced I'll never be acting in anything again. It's awful and worrisome and I don't know what to do about it.

'A ha!', you say, 'You can write!' You are wise, reader. Except I can't. I try, and I'm not that good. I've been writing a lot lately, some creative stuff and some 'please give me money stuff', but I'm struggling.

I'm trying to write a play about friendship and about memory (I AM THE MOST ORIGINAL PLAYWRIGHT ALIVE), and for whatever reason, the characters I've created have come out being girls. Initially they weren't, but I recently wrote something that there is no part for me in, and I honestly can't see myself ever producing it. I need to feel there's at least a chance I can be in the damn thing if and when I write it. Is that awful? Also, I want to write for girls. So that we have something to do onstage.

A while ago I was talking to a girl I really thought I could work with and I said that I wanted to write something for us where we played girls in school uniforms with psychotic tendencies. She immediately said, 'No, why can't we just be girls who are nice and normal and not insane?'

I was really bummed out by that. First of all, I don't think that having psychotic tendencies precludes you from being nice, normal, not insane. Second of all, because no one wants to see the play about four girls who really respect each other and have uneventful interactions full of positivity, and I sure as hell don't want to write it (also, not being a normal positive respectful person, I don't think I'm qualified to write it). And third of all, this idealization of females, this thing that if women aren't paragons of virtue they're bitches, that is just an incredible wad of bullshit. Boys want to play (get to play) Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago: FLAWS APLENTY. The great roles aren't always people you want to be....just people you want to play.

But I'm writing this thing about/for/ with girls now, and it's hard to walk that line with characters that are flawed, and characters that are just heinous bitches. How to write girls that talk back and are insecure, but don't immediately fall into tropes of sarcastic know-it-alls, or secret anorexics, or evil frenemies. I'm trying to write something to give five girls a chance to act (in my head, it would be an all-female team, backstage too), but I might be creating something that's so anti-feminist I would want to die.

I'm having an enormous amount of anxiety about this, second only to the anxiety I'm having that the play is a piece of shit. What is that about??? If I can't write likeable interesting female characters, who else is going to?

It Won't Be Easy, You'll Think It Strange

I'm a part of this:



Which is the playbill for the festival of the culmination of the writer's group I've been going to. For the of the of the.

Tomorrow my play is going to be read in front of people, or empty chairs if there aren't people to come. Either way it will be terrifying, but I'm trying to look forward to throwing up in the bathroom while it happens. We must be positive, after all.

It's a terrifying thing to have your work read in front of people (or chairs). This statement has probably lost a lot of meaning if you know me or have been reading this, as you'll discover that I'm afraid of everrrrything. I'm usually just the most terrified of whatever is immediately in front of me, and guess what, right now it's hearing my work!

There's something personal about it that's different than acting. I'm terrified about how everyone thinks my acting sucks too, but writing is different. It seems as vulnerable as acting, and you don't even get the release of acting. The release of writing is in the writing, and no one's there to see it.

But the cast is lovely and it's so kind of anyone to give you any of their time, really. And so far, every time I've heard the play read, I've been excited to work on it again. I hear the problems first, but I care enough to fix the problems, so it must be of some interest to me.

I went to the first night of this event tonight. Overwhelmed by how things haven't changed. This is what I've done for years, sit in poorly ventilated rooms not conducive to theatre and watch and perform theatre. There's so much beauty in the striving of theatre, you know, how it reaches and tries, and is performed in these poorly ventilated rooms because they're all we can afford, but people kind of come, and everyone tries, and surely all of that effort and all of that beer must lead to something right?

A lot of effort and a lot of beer sounds like a recipe for pregnancy rather than a play, but anyway.  I'll take what I can get.

Small Pleasures, Small Pleasures, Who Would Deny Us These?

I'm in a state of simultaneous rut and panic (Rut and Panic, dibs on the band name) and sometimes when I get like this I think the thing that would solve all my problems is to clean.

Cleaning's not my strong suit, but cleaning I can do. What I am even worse at is Throwing Things Out.



I love Things.



I love any Object of any degree of Weirdness or Antiquity. I love clutter and ornate decorating.

So, I have some stuff. Stuff that doesn't really do anything but that I love. Whatever it does, it's doing it right now. It takes up space and makes dust accumulate and god knows what I ever plan to do with it, but I just adore it. And I don't want to Throw it Out.



Part of it is sentimental, most of it is not worth very much but was given to me, or I found, or have held for so long that it seems like surrender to give it up, but really I want it around me because I feel that The Person I Want To Be has this kind of stuff. Does that make sense?







It relates to this George Bernard Shaw quote that I am alternately haunted and comforted by:

LIFE ISN'T ABOUT FINDING YOURSELF. LIFE IS ABOUT CREATING YOURSELF.





Comforted because I have, at times in the past, created Things, so maybe I can do that. Haunted because I know how hard it is for me to Create Things, and the possibility of failure is so distinctly present that sometimes I don't even want to try. I can't even finish a play that is any good: how am I supposed to create my whole self?

But I am extremely charmed and delighted and covetous of things possessing whimsy, beauty, quirkiness, oddity, color, and I think that might be something close to a character trait. Of this person that I am creating. So I want to hold on to my love of stuff because I feel it feeds in this creation.





So pretty! I'm in love with nesting dolls right now.

I've been thinking a lot about inspiration. Searching for it, although how can you search for something when you don't know what it really (see also: happiness, fulfillment, beauty...) And thinking about it, because I feel full of ideas right now, but hopeless about how to turn them from little snippets of Thing in my head to anything that I can write and then anything I can put on stage and then anything I can act in and then anything that anyone will ever want to watch. Not even about what's possible, because another thing I'm not good at is being realistic, so I don't really care about what we can do, we would figure it out, but I don't know how to make anything happen, and I'm not sure what I even want to happen.



And I feel I need the Inspiration to give me the Idea to give me the Project that I then Create (somehow) and by doing this I become The Person That I Want To Be. Or something? It's not a great plan. Sometimes it seems very clear and other times it is apparent that things don't work out that way. However, I am good at delusion.

But in some tiny way that isn't working right now, I think my stuff inspires me. I really hope it does.



One of my favourite things ever is this blog, The Style Rookie. Now there is an accompanying website for teen girls and it is everything you could hope for, even if your'e not a teen girl. The amazing creator, Tavi Gevinson, of these things does these wonderful collages of images, sometimes all put together, and sometimes just randomly assembled on a web page.  This blog is so amazing to be because there's like some alignment of the creation of who she is, in her style, in her words, and who she actually is. I guess in a way that's just honesty, but I also think it's something more. There's aspiration and inspiration in there, too, I think, picking up pieces from what you've seen and carrying them forward with you thinking about them, or not thinking about them, but them becoming some part of you in some way. The you you are and the you you want to be.

There's something about her brand of  clutter and my brand of clutter that makes sense and beauty to me and I think that's what I want to put in my theatre work.

I think....

I'm not sure all of this has much to do with theatre, but I kind of think it does. I'm trying to write some plays, and some grants for plays, and this is happening while I'm in some sort of malaise that is mitigated by cleaning, and cleaning always makes me think I should Throw Everything Out and Become a New Person, except I love Things, and so...here we are again. Inspiration and Creation. And Not Knowing. 

See You Later, I'm Going to the Back of the The-atre

Sometimes the urge to misbehave in the theatre audience is so incredibly strong I think I could ruin my whole career and everybody's night for the satisfaction of one huge well-placed groan.