Sunday, May 29, 2005

The New Project

I've been busy. I've written a couple of short stories and done a flurry of submitting - nothing yet. It's a little discouraging, but I'm not sure what to do.

I've come up with the plot of the next novel/play. When I wrote "Leif the Buddhist Viking," it was originally conceived as a play, but I had gotten the advice to write it as a novel first. It worked well as a novel, but I'm still committed to turning it into a play.

This new work is similar in that it occurs to me as a play, but I should novelize it first. The working title is "Trinity of Days," and it's about the three days that Mary spends between the time Christ is crucified and the time that he is resurrected. The themes are before and after, the Holy Trinity (which, interestingly enough, has no room for her), the stages of grief, and women and middle age. It's a lot to work into one play, but that's one of the things I like about the form. It's elastic.

I've been talking to The Pirate's parents, who are chock full of Biblical knowledge. They're giving me a ton of information - so much so that it's getting hard to decide what to include and what to leave out. I'd like to make the action of the play something that can be staged in a variety of ways. Contemporary, period, etc. We'll see.

I'm happy to have something to work from. Sometimes the ideas come thick and fast, and sometimes not at all. It's always nice to have something.