Adventures in Commission...and Beyond

Ah, well, if you were naive like me you might have expected that after months without a post I'd return with tales of accomplishment. Long nights and exponentially flowing words. Things finished, heart strung out and brain over-tapped. Continuous dialogue like the ends of a malfunctioning fax. The eccentric progress of a writer's habits. The gravitational pressure of deadlines and ever refining drafts. Hard-won ends. You wouldn't be entirely wrong, but you'd like to see more...oh, I don't know--GLORY--in these tales.

But nay, what I have to show is an unresolved plot in the kind of realife story you're forced to end unnaturally (i.e. by your own hands). The script has been turned over to a production team who are scheduled to begin rehearsals now. Believe me I would like to be done with the affair, but not with this sense of things left to do hanging over me, a cloud of black emotional smoke. However, I've been told that, "Everyone is impressed by your skill and ability...trust that we are just continuing with the shaping process." I just have to move on and await further instructions. How can I do that if the script's not finished? I want to keep working of the damn thing. This is worse than the blank page.

There is some kind of strange irony here; I grind my axe at the stone of structure, letting something with an actual goal emerge from my random bits of teenage life, and then I'm forced to endure a tangible lack of resolution in the drama that is this commission process.

Here are some highlights from the past few months:
*I had to invert gender roles again when casting took place for real and they found out they had two men, three women
*While my family went on vacation I stayed alone in our house to crank out the second draft in the course of two weeks
*Everyone who read the script complimented it
*I had to lose my guitar-playing, blues-crooning character
*The ending changed three times
*Suddenly most of the characters are related
*I was late to my second script-reading and they all waited for me to start...man, I felt important
*Based on the quality of my work, I was offered a season dramaturg position at a theater here in Seattle
*Without any insistence by me, people have started to refer to me as a writer
*I now have about 500 myths engrained in my head from constant reading
*I've realized that comic books are bastions of dramatic structure

Now I know what you're all thinking: he's upset about reaching the final pages of Adventures in Commission because then he's left outside the bright land of writing-what-people-tell-me-to.

Ah, the abyss.

Ah . . .

Well, fuck.