An Expected Absence

Well friends, as with so many things in my life, I got cast in a show and completely quit this blog. It's been three weeks since I've posted and probably two months since I've annoyed my facebook friends with posts about posting. Which I'd apologize for, but acting is what gets me to wake up in the morning, and it's all I want to do, ever. So I can't apologize. But, I can give a bit of a recap of what has been happening in my life and what you can expect to see in the next couple of blog posts!

Wargrave suspects me, I mean Vera...

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie was the play, though I linked to the novel, which I hear is quite good. Our end was a little happier then the original, which I liked because my character had a much more satisfying ending. Now, for this show I was extra busy because I had NO down time during rehearsals. I was off stage for about five pages in Act One (to change) and then was just on stage running around and generally freaking out, which was great fun.
Ten people are brought to an island, where they are accused of murder, and start to get killed off one by one.

(***SPOILERS AHEAD,*** skip to the next picture if you don't want things spoiled :) )
Now, a few extra exciting things happen in this one, as we get killed off, tensions of course get higher, and by the last five each character suspects another in a perfect circle. And finally, it's just me and Philip Lombard, who was previously Vera's love interest, and neither of us can convince the other that we didn't kill off the last guy, so we finally get in a tussle over his gun and I shoot him. Which is awesome, except for preview, where in front of our first ever audience the gun doesn't go off. I just stared at Scot (playing Philip) and he just refused to drop. So then I stared out into the audience, right where I knew our director was sitting, and realized that I was mugging the audience and we had to do something. The show must go on.

And that is when Scot grabbed the gun out of my hands. Which makes sense, since I shot him because he was going after me in the first place. But this is very bad because he has to get shot and drop so the murderer can come in and give his big speech. But now he has the gun. So I lunge for the gun, and he just hands it to me so I shoot him. We almost made it look ok. Almost. So then we had to have a pep talk before the last scene every night, where we held hands and went through our just-in-case fight choreography and reminded each other that no, we could not just give up and go home, because the audience was still there and the show was almost over. Use it, as my Junior year acting professor would say.

OH THANK GOD THIS PLAY IS OVER, is what we were thinking.
Vera was, of course, thinking OH THANK GOD I GET TO LIVE,
which is basically the same thing.

The next thing that has taken up a lot of my time is National Novel Writing Month, which I won in 2011 and have promptly failed at ever since. I am currently sitting just under Day 10's word count. Whooops. You see, the thing about 2011 is that I had this idea that if I finished a novel I could become an author and make a living writing stories and then I wouldn't have to work as a waitress anymore. Which would be great, if that's how life worked. I even took a writing class afterwards so I could edit my brilliant first novel. And then I woke up to the realization that my novel wasn't brilliant and I still had to work. And then I got cast in six shows back-to-back and didn't have time to do anything.

The thing about NaNoWriMo that I'm trying to focus on this year, is that creating is important, and opening up my imagination is important. By the end of NaNo the year I won, I was churning out short scripts at an ostentatious rate. I had silenced my inner critic and was ready to take on the world. And as a theatre educator, I write a lot. And as an actor, I get rejected a lot, so that giddy freedom of NaNo, where you took something that seemed so impossible and finished it, seems nice.

Although, it would be a bit nicer if anyone but me cared what happens to my heroine. Because I'm starting to really like her, and I'm really worried about what's happening to her right now, and I can't talk about it with anyone because no one else has read my book.

Upcoming books?