New Plays, Soundtracks

I've been on a bit of a playwrighting kick lately, and I'm excited to see where that leads.  I just finished my first new full-length in a while, a weird comedy about love and housing.  I wrote it based on a bunch of stories people told me about strange things they'd witnessed or been part of at night in the city.  That, and a dream one of my fb friends had.

Anyway, I think an out-loud reading would be super helpful right now, so I might try and get a few friends together and see what it sounds like.

I've been thinking about soundtracks lately, namely that a great soundtrack is rare, and a great original soundtrack is even rarer.  By that I mean a soundtrack written for a film, rather than a soundtrack made by putting together some previously released songs.

I can't help thinking its because either composers haven't historically taken soundtracks very seriously, or movie producers haven't been interested in really developing that part of the film to a truly artistic level.  Granted, evidence suggests there isn't any part of most movies where the producers are interested in making something truly artistic, so there's that.

It seems like most original soundtracks are in the 'classical' line - think Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, or even the Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary (one of my all time favorites!)

However, there have been some that really break the mold.  These soundtracks can stand alone as great albums, but also bring the film they're paired with to a new level.

Suspira, an Italian horror film by Dario Argento, is one such film/soundtrack. A band called Goblin does the soundtrack, and it is AWESOME.

What are some of your favorite OSTs?

Today was a poem kind of day

Old clothes are an armor of memories

My dad's shirt is strong and stubborn and quiet

These jeans I've had for more than half my life
A reminder
I've come a long way but it's still me
Growing up in the country
Walking in the woods

The red coat I borrowed from my uncle
But never returned
Used to be my grandfather's hunting jacket
Bright red wool
Stained with grease
That time I wore it to work on my car

Those shoes
Bulbous, leather, heavy
Ancient slippers
Worn daily in the workshop
I think my brother has those now

Even socks
The heavy wool ones
borrowed during a visit
when it was colder than I thought it would be
I still have them

I wear these things
When there is work to be done
But I never wear them all together

Memories of Zeppelin

I've been thinking about how strong music can be for evoking memories and the complex emotions associated with them.  When I was about 16 or 17, I had very strong emotional reactions to a variety of songs, probably just like every other teenager.  Sometimes as a result of something bad happening, a song would get caught in the crossfire and I'd find myself unwilling to listen to it, because of the unpleasant memories associated with it.  Over the years, the initial pain of the experience has gone, but I've rarely regained any emotional attachment to the songs I lost.

The most pertinent example of this would be the song "Stairway to Heaven," by Led Zeppelin, which was a song that was played at one of the Junior Proms I went to with my first girlfriend.  She went to a different school than I did, so we ended up going to both my prom and her prom.  We had actually broken up prior to her prom, but she'd bought the tickets and convinced me that we could just go as friends and have fun.  That didn't work so well for either of us, and it kind of reached critical mass when a mutual friend of ours convinced me that I should dance with her at least once.  We danced together to Stairway to Heaven, and it was very awkward.

After that, I had a much stronger feeling that breaking up should be an absolute, and that no one does anyone any favors by pretending that they could "just be friends" afterward.  For several years after that prom, I simply avoided listening to Stairway to Heaven, although I enjoyed their other songs just fine.  I realized that this was silly when I was in my 20s, but by then Led Zeppelin had kind of fallen off my radar as a band to put on the stereo.

Secret theme songs

I love the first two minutes of this song.  The rest is great, too, but there's a lot happening in those first minutes that really get to me.  It's like a secret theme song for me.  Secret, in that if I went around telling people that "If I Go Mad" was my theme song, they might get the wrong idea about my mental state.  And it's not like it's every day.  Random days.

On alternate days, my secret theme songs include "The Sound Of Silence,"

"Fat Waves" by Torche - particularly the musical breakdown that starts about 90 seconds in:

And if it's Monday:

3 Random Prog albums

I had a bunch of work to do today, so I went to youtube and found an obscure prog rock album and got it rolling.  Youtube abhors silence, so when it was done, another album started, and another after that.  I had a LOT of work to do.  Some weird stuff out there:

Iceberg - Sentiments - 1977 Spanish prog rock band:

Visitor - 2035 - 1978 Electronic Prog band sounds exactly how you would think it should looking at the cover:

Cybotron - Cybotron - 1976 Australian electronic prog band:

I think I like Cybotron the most, but only because of that cover.  Wow.

2015 Q1 Writing Summary

Writing Updates:

Novels

Gilly Frank's Record Collection

I've sent query letters to nine agents since the beginning of 2015.  I've gotten one request for the whole manuscript (yay!), and 4 "no, thanks" letters.  One agent did not respond at all within the time-frame stated on their submission page, so I'm assuming that's a rejection too.  3 agents have not responded, but this is still inside the time-frame they've stated on their submission pages, so there's still hope!  I'm still honing my query letter, but I feel like I'm at a good place with the full manuscript and I'd like to let it be what it is for a few months before looking through it again for revisions.  I'd like to have a few more readers give it a read through and tell me their thoughts as well.

I have some ideas percolating for sequels, and I've written a couple scenes and started making lists of different music.  I want to give the first book time to fully become itself before I rush into the next part of the story, however.  I feel like there could be at least three books total here, and I'd like to have the whole story arc through the three novels plotted out in my head before I start the second book.

Playwrighting

Writing:

I've written 4 short plays so far this year, 3 of which I like a lot, and one of which is not great.  I rewrote a short play from two years ago, and I like how its turned out this time.  I just finished a very rough draft of a short full length or long one-act comedy.  I'd like it to be at least a full length, but we'll see what happens in the editing process.

Submissions:

I've sent 7 different plays 21 contests.  In some cases, I was only able to send one play, and in others they allowed for up to three plays.  So in total this year I've made 33 submissions.

Results:

My short play Deal Breaker was accepted for a short play festival in Independence, MO. 

It's a bit early yet to see the results for most of the competitions I've submitted to.  I have gotten 6 "no thanks" messages, three of which were immediate, because I live too far from the competitions.

I try to submit plays to every contest that I'm eligible for and that I think my plays will fit into.  That usually means about 5 - 10 contests per month.  I've focused almost entirely on short plays so far this year because I haven't had a new full length in a while.  I'm hopeful that this new rough draft will flesh out into a good evening of bizarre comedy hijinx.  Maybe some shenanigans thrown in there for good measure.

Playwrighting with an earworm

I love writing plays.  Let's just say that up front.  The reason I love writing plays is that I have a passion for creating voices that sound authentic without being an accurate recording of the way people actually talk.  What I mean by that is, when a normal person is talking they add in a ton of stuff to what they're saying.  This stuff is like white noise that we start blocking after a while, like the guy who lives next to the train tracks and doesn't notice when the train goes by any more.  On stage, if you were to recreate a regular person's speech with all the "um" and "like" and pauses and circling back to restate an idea and jumping in time and referring to shared moments that might be summarized by a single word or a facial expression, it would be maddening for an audience.  Authenticity, for me, is about finding the right balance of that stuff for each character.  In a way, all that stuff becomes part of the symbol of a character that I, as the writer, am presenting.  There has to be enough of it to make that character unique, but not so much that it becomes the focus of the audience.  It's like good make-up - it's best when an observer only takes note of the things you want them to notice.  So there's all this make-up that you don't want anyone to notice, and there's just a couple things you do want them to notice, like your perfect cat-eye or whatever.  I have a teenage daughter and we watch Project Runway and so I think about things like this just as a matter of course now.

Too many nuances overburdens a character.  Not enough nuance leaves them plain and uninteresting.  The right balance of nuance draws the audience in, makes them interested in discovering more about the character, trying to guess what the character might do or say in different situations and then being surprised sometimes when the character does something new but still in character, and gratified other times when the character fulfills their expectations.

Also, I have had the same song running through my head for days.  Actually just part of a song.  I know it's from the Yes album Fragile, but I couldn't remember which song, and some of the songs have a bunch of different movements or sections and so finding that moment has become a major focus of my morning.  I think it's from the very short "We Have Heaven," but it's also kind of a mash-up with the final moments of "Heart of the Sunrise" when he says "I feel lost in the city."

Top 10 Albums Discovered in 2015

Like the character in my novel, I enjoy making lists of things.  A list is a cross section of an idea, and depending on how you slice that idea, you get a different list.  I'm thinking about the gap in time between when music is recorded and when you hear it for the first time.  Are there meaningful divisions that can be articulated that put that experience into different categories?  For example, say you hear ten new songs today, songs you've never heard before, never even heard about.  For you, would it be meaningful to discover when those songs were recorded?  What if one of them was from the 70s, one from the 90s, and the rest were recorded in the last year?  Would it be important to separate out the old songs from the new?  What if you didn't know which ones were the old ones without being told?

As you can see, this is an idea I'm exploring, and I don't have a solid grasp on it yet.  But do you see what I'm trying to get at?  How much of the pleasure of music is tied to the context of its production?  Do we enjoy some music more because of when it was made?  Is there a threshold behind which all music is equally 'old?'  Do we toss Nirvana, The Clash, The Beatles, and Elvis all in the same pot?

Okay, anyway, back to the list, which is simple.  It doesn't need all this thought.  It's just a list, and a very subjective one at that.  Researching for Gilly has led me to discover a ton of new music, some of which I wrote about in the novel, but most of which is just an interesting bi-product of research.

My Top 10 Albums Discovered In 2015, as of 3/17/2015

1. The Modern Lovers - Self-titled - 1976
2. Eloy - Ocean - 1977
3. Kraftwerk - Computer World - 1981
4. Romeo Void - Benefactor - 1982
5. Nina Hagen Band - Self titled - 1982
6. Payola$ - No Stranger To Danger - 1982
7. Deafheaven - Sunbather - 2013
8. Tobacco - Ultima II Massage - 2014
9. St. Vincent - Self titled - 2014
10. Torche - Restarter - 2015

This is only in order by release year.  I won't say how much I like any of these albums, because I don't know any of them that well yet.  We only just met, see?  I can tell you though that I like where the relationship is going in most cases.  The only one that I feel disappointment around is the Tobacco album - it feels incomplete, somehow.  It's like the vocals are so fuzzed out that they no longer have any kind of emotional resonance.  They're just another instrument in a haze of experimental instruments, and I kept searching for a more meaningful thread to the songs.  The album has some fantastic moments, too - but lately those moments just remind me of what the rest of the album is lacking, and how much I love Black Moth Super Rainbow's Cobra Juicy.

1990s quintessential?

Searching for "not very well-known alternative rock songs that, even if you had never heard them before, you would know they were from the 1990s."  This has led to:

and

The Rentals are coming to Portland in May, and one of my friends is trying to convince me to go.  Maybe I'll go.  It's on Mothers Day, though, so...

The 12 Rods song was on the soundtrack to Orange County, which has my favorite Jack Black role in it. Now, the song was on Separation Anxieties, which came out in 2000, but I think it really captures the previous decade, and I'm guessing they wrote it and started playing it in the 90s.

What are some obscure but quintessential 1990s songs/bands I should track down?

Holger Czukay, Jah Wobble, and The Edge

I remember picking this up on cassette during one of those trips to Hastings as a teenager.  I thought "It has The Edge from U2 in it!  It's going to be awesome!"

It was very different from what I was expecting/hoping for.

I have no clue what happened to it, but I know I kept it in my collection for many years.

Writing and Sisyphus and Gabor Szabo

Writing is something I've done my whole life.  Sometimes its pure pleasure and other times it feels like a curse.  This is probably nothing new to any writers out there.  Every day I do a little writing, and more often then not it's like the myth of Sisyphus, where I spend a bunch of time pushing this really heavy rock up a hill, and before I get to the top it rolls back down again.  Unlike Sisyphus, though, there are times when I get the rock over the hill, and I watch it roll down the other side.  Like the words just won't stop, and they flow out and out and out and suddenly I have something in front of me that I like and that I want to work on and figure out and finish.  And then the rock stops, and there's another hill I need to push it up.

I'm part of a few different groups of people who write, and sometimes people say things like "I feel like I have writer's block, what should I do?"  Most other writers respond with a variety of tricks and ideas designed to get you writing, to jog your creative juices, to inspire you to keep pushing that rock.  I am usually tempted to say "Just quit."  That sounds awful, but I feel like it should be something people confront themselves with.  What would happen if they just quit writing?  Would they find something else to focus on that fulfills them in a better way?  Would they sink into a dark depression?
Most of my writing has been plays.  I write a lot of plays.  Over the years, I've written a few novels, too.  It's only this latest one that I've decided to try and get published.  The others, thankfully, are lost to history.  I don't think I even have a copy of them any more, except for the memories of them in my head.  There was one about a girl who discovers she has latent magic powers.  Super original!  Well, when I wrote it 13 years ago, that idea wasn't totally done to death yet.  The second one was about a girl who gets turned into a vampire.  That was before Twilight came out.  So again, I think if it had been a good book, I would have had a shot at getting in on the ground floor of YA vampire fiction.

There was a period between 10 and 5 years ago where I did very little writing.  Almost none.  Certainly nothing that I can remember as being meaningful.  I just quit.  The sky didn't fall, and the world didn't end.  Then about 5 years ago I had an idea for a play and i just went for it.  I had nothing invested in success, and no fear of failing.  I just wrote it out.  And I had fun editing it.  I slashed the heck out of it.  I cut out scenes that I loved and wrote new scenes.  I worked it into shape and sent it out to a bunch of places.  It won an award, and I got to fly out to New York and get a check for $2,000 and meet some great theatre people.  After the award ceremony we all went out together to a bar in Manhattan that had a mechanical bull, which of course I rode.

And now every day I write a little bit, or a lot, or nothing at all.  I can quit any time. But I like pushing the rock up the hill a lot more now.  It's good exercise, whether it rolls back down the hill or rolls down the other side.  I like exercising my brain in that way.  Every part of the process is part of that rock, from writing to editing to querying.

On a different note, I found this album at a library book sale for a dollar.  I wasn't going to buy it until I opened it up and found a note inside.  Then of course I had to buy it.  The note didn't lead to any mystery or anything - it was just a gift from a daughter to her father, but it was just a pleasure to see something I had written about represented in a real life way.

This is very pleasant, multi-layered 70s music.  Perfect background for working, for homework, for dinner, for driving down the coast in the sunshine.

Kraftwerk vs. Coldplay

My daughter just got Computer Love by Kraftwerk on vinyl.  It's a great album, on BLUE VINYL! We were both excited.  Listening to it, we had this crazy moment during the title track where we recognized the song, sort of.  Turns out Coldplay (with permission from Kraftwerk) used the melody for parts of their song "Talk."

Give them both a listen:

Computer Love:

Talk:

Who wore it better?

Workin' music

What do you listen to when you need to get a lot of work done in a short period of time?

In my case, 'work' sometimes involves a lot of data getting moved from one place to another to get sorted in different ways.  If no one bothers me, I can get into a rhythm, and work through a huge amount of data.  It's very satisfying.  I like listening to music while I do it, but it has to be something that won't jar me out of my 'zen state.'  So a lot of the time I'll put on the Vangelis album Spiral.

Unless I don't feel like trippy 70s techno prog.  And then I might go for something completely different, like the Torche album Harmonicraft.

Covers, Modern Lovers

I've been having a dynamite time today listening the The Modern Lovers self-titled debut album from 1976.  It's magic.  My intro to these guys was a bit roundabout.  There's a great track on the Repo Man sountrack called "Pablo Picasso," performed by a band called The Burning Sensations.  Which is a great band name.  Seriously.  It's an oddball song, and I didn't realize that it was a cover until TODAY when I started listening to the Modern Lovers album.

I think this album sounds like a cross between The Replacements and Cake.  Only, since it came out in 1976, it's more like this album had babies, and those babies were The Replacements and Cake.

Oh just listen to it.

Columbia House Records

My middle school years were a series of negotiations with my parents about what music I could buy on cassette, and later on CD.  Being a bit conservative, they were concerned for my well being, and the effects of rock and roll on that well being.  My brother and I managed to convince them that we should join Columbia House Record Club.  The deal was you selected 15 albums out of this catalog, and they sent them to you for free.  Then every month for maybe nine months? (something like that) you had to buy an album.  Because we were joining together, we selected most of the albums together.  The ownership of these albums became somewhat contested over the years, until my brother left for college, and then it wasn't an issue any more.  I think I got to keep four or five of them.

I think I can still remember all 15 of those first free cassettes...

By R.E.M.:  Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Life's Rich Pageant, Document
By U2:  Boy, October, War, Live Under A Blood Red Sky, Unforgettable Fire
Midnight Oil: Red Sails In The Sunset, Diesel and Dust
Weird Al Yankovic: Dare To Be Stupid
Big Pig: Bonk

I was twelve when we got these in the mail.  I'm thinking it was 1987, because I know for sure we got Document and every R.E.M. album released up to that point.  The Midnight Oil albums I'm not as sure about - they may have come later.  It may have been Huey Lewis and the News instead.  Sports.

U2's Joshua Tree may have been in this order.

Does anyone remember Big Pig?  They had one song that made it anywhere, because it appeared on the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure soundtrack:

Big Pig was one of the albums I got to keep when my brother went to college.

Prog around the world

It's interesting to see how different genres of music were interpreted all over the world.  Where did Prog Rock start?  Easier to read the Wikipedia article.  In short, King Crimson may have the earliest full-on prog rock album with In The Court Of The Crimson King, in 1969.  Within five years, there were bands all over the world experimenting with long, multi-faceted, mult-layered, symphonic rock music, infusing it with unique nuances drawn from local flavors.

Example:  Osamu Kitajima's album Benzaiten:

It has such a great opening.  I'm thinking if Gilly Frank has a sequel that this song would be good 'tone setting' music.  Or not.

Side note:  Psychedelic folk music from Korea in 1973:

translating lyrics

For the longest time, I thought the lyrics to "Autobahn" were "fun, fun, fun on the autobahn."  But no.  My daughter is taking German, and informs me that it's actually "Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der autobahn."  Which translates roughly as "We drive drive drive on the highway."

23 minutes of awesome.

Research is fun!

One of the pure pleasures of writing is research.  No, I'm serious.  When I started GFRC, I wrote the story and dialogue first, and had maybe ten or twelve albums sprinkled throughout the text, with lots of placeholders.  Once I had narrowed down the timeline of when certain events would have had to have taken place, I was able to generate a list of bands, albums, singles, and concerts that would have happened around those times.  Then I had to listen to all that music.  Some of it was familiar, for sure, but it was good to listen to it in the context of all the other music.  I was also able to flesh out the content of the 'record collection' in the title.  Out of the 400 albums Gilly inherited, I feel like I have a list of about 120 right now.  So that leaves 280 to be explored in the sequels, I guess.

It's given me a great excuse to listen to a ton of music that I hadn't really given a lot of time to before, and really listen to it and find pleasure in it from the perspective of my characters.  What would they get out of Giorgio Moroder?  Where would that take their music exploration?  After hearing Tubeway Army's "Listen To The Sirens" where would they go next?  Would they like Iggy and the Stooges, or would they backpedal and look somewhere else for something they like better?  Would any of their listening experiences being them into contact with the Sugarhill Gang?  It's a ton of fun, because the more I got to know my characters, the easier it was to find their adventure through music.

Hearing this in 1979 where do you go next?

Or this, also from 1979:

Incidentally, I love this version of Rappers Delight:

"My" music

My daughter and I were in this huge vintage store down in Portland, wandering through room after room of mostly old clothes.  There were about ten or twelve places where records were for sale, in crates and boxes and on shelves.  Sometimes they were shoved into the back corner of a stall, and sometimes they were front and center.  It's always interesting to me what people try to sell their stuff for, in different contexts.  Like garage sales, for example - when I go to a garage sale and there's a big shelf of paperback books there, they better be a quarter each, or three for a dollar or something like that.  But a dollar?  Two dollars?  That just means that at the end of your garage sale you have pretty much the same stack of books you started with.  On the other hand, when I go to a good used book store, I'd feel just fine paying three or four dollars for a book I really want.  I think the reason for that is that in a book store I'm paying extra for them to have a large enough variety to have something that I want, whereas at a garage sale I'm only, at best, hoping to find something interesting or weird, but I don't imagine I'd find any of the books/authors I'm actively collecting.

Anyway, back to records.  In a big vintage store where clothing is the primary focus, I'd expect records to be selling at a bit below what I'd find in a record store, because the likelihood of finding exactly what I'm looking for is so low.

However, there are moments when being a cheapskate goes out the window.  Like when I found The Damned Phantasmagoria for ten bucks.  This album was a central component of my teen years, and more important to me than many other albums of that time, because it was uniquely mine.  Between my brother and my cousin, I was the youngest.  We'd all hang out together and listen to music, make mix tapes, make lists of songs and bands and albums, all that.  We'd save our money and go in to Spokane and go to Hastings to look for music on cassette.  We joined Columbia House music club and got 15 free albums.

My brother and cousin were kind of a gateway for me to great music.  Through them I discovered R.E.M., U2, Sonic Youth, Midnight Oil, and more.  But I was hungry for something that felt like it was "my" music instead of always "their" music.  That's when I discovered Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, and The Damned.  Those three bands became the center of my music collecting, and I searched out various intersections of punk, new wave, and goth of the 80s.

Phantasmagoria was an album I listened to three times per week or more while I was in high school. Objectively speaking, it's not a great album.  But that doesn't matter, because for me at that time it was a great album, and I loved how it made me feel when I listened to it.

5 Albums At The Center Of My High School Universe

1. The Damned, Phantasmagoria
2. Bauhaus, The Sky's Gone Out
3. Bauhaus, Burning From The Inside
4. Love and Rockets, Express
5. Peter Murphy, Deep

So I'd pretty much pay whatever for those albums on vinyl and force my daughter to listen to them, I think that's what I'm saying here.

The first song is important

I did a little digging to find other YA novels that have soundtracks, or at least have characters that love a certain song or band that actually exists, as opposed to a fictional band, etc.

The big one that keeps coming up is Eleanor & Park, where "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" by The Smiths playing a major role in the book.  I haven't found a book where a large amount of real music moves the plot, so I'm hopeful that Gilly Frank will be an interesting new direction that will get an agent excited.

I've been struggling to find the perfect first song for Gilly to be listening to in the book, because I think it would be fun to encourage people to listen to music while they read it.  So the last thing I want is for the first song to be something that is hard to listen to, or weird, or too much of a niche.

Currently, the first song she listens to in the book is by Deodato, his version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra."  I love this song, but it takes a little time to really open up.  Knowing where the music is going, I get chills now pretty much from the first note.  If there's ever a movie about Gilly, I want this music to cover the opening credits, with a long, long single camera shot of the Earth, slowly descending through the sky to the suburbs, and into the house where the record is on the player and her parents are sitting everyone down to have meat loaf for dinner, where the music kind of fades into the background while they talk.

I've gone through the book and counted all the bands, songs, and albums mentioned, and it's hovering at around 175.  Gilly likes to make lists inspired by unique situations or random thoughts.  One of her lists from the first chapter, for example, is

8 Bands My Dad “Would Rather Stab Out His Own Ears Than Listen To:”

1. Hall & Oates
2. Air Supply
3. Foreigner
4. Chicago
5. Poco
6. Toto
7. REO Speedwagon
8. The Cranberries

I wanted to capture Gilly's parents in a way that resonates with her, so there are several points in the book where her experience with her parents, together or separately, is enhanced by music. Later on, she rides with her dad in his car and they listen to Bauhaus together, and at another point, she takes note that he is listening to an old Pixies album (Surfer Rosa) while hanging out in the basement fiddling with his vintage telephone collection.

Her mother, by contrast loved the poppy, lighter music. One of her favorite bands from the 90s was The Cranberries, for example. She doesn't get into new music much any more, but she's recently taken a liking to First Aid Kit.

I think when you look at a couple and see their relationship, your understanding of them can really be enhanced by knowing something trivial like their favorite and least favorite kinds of music. The fact that her parents dislike each other's favorite music doesn't stop them from having an all around healthy relationship with each other. I wanted Gilly to have both her parents in this book, and I wanted them to be interesting and quirky without dominating the narrative. Music, I hope, helps those characters look and feel real without taking too much time from Gilly's storytelling.

When the record skips...

One person that has inspired me throughout the writing of Gilly Frank has been my daughter.  She decided last year that she wanted to start collecting records, so we've had a lot of fun going to record stores and looking for new and old records.  Most concerts we go to, the band has something for sale on vinyl, and it makes a better souvenir than most anything else I can think of.  We've discovered the single worst thing that can happen to a record collector, though, and that is when one of your favorite records gets A SKIP IN IT!  This is the worst, because it's a loss of something you had.  If you buy a record and discover a skip immediately, that's almost as bad, but at least there you have a chance of getting your money back.  But to have played it through a few times and then all of a sudden you're hearing half of a phrase of your favorite song repeated endlessly, well... that's the worst.

Last night, she discovered that her copy of Journey's Escape had a skip in it, right in the middle of "Don't Stop Believin'."  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

And, just in case you need some sweet sweet air keyboard action, here's the video for "Separate Ways, Worlds Apart," from Frontiers:

Playwrighting and disco

Before writing Gilly Frank's Record Collection, I concentrated on playwrighting.  I really enjoy writing plays, and continue to write and submit them to theatres around the US and beyond.  I've had plays produced in Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, New York, Minnesota and Missouri.  Maybe I need one of those magnet maps that people get for their RVs that show which states they've visited.

My plays are very different from my prose, as far as what I choose to write about.  For the most part, my audience is adult, and my preferred genre is dark comedy.  I enjoy exploring strange topics and putting unique characters in difficult situations.  I think the stage is a great vehicle for visual symbolism.  There's a thing that happens when the words are paired with real people in a physical space that creates an extra layer of content for the viewer that can't be replicated any other way.  A movie or tv show is a window at best, looking in on mostly pre-recorded events.  It has it's own art, but it's not the same art as what happens in a theatre.

So, I continue to write plays, and will probably keep at it as long as I live.  There's a magic in theatre that I enjoy too much to let go.

In other news, Gilly Frank wants you all to know that it's okay to love disco.  It's great music to dance around the house to.