Library Play

I wrote a ten-minute play for the Heartland Theatre Summer Festival contest. I've submitted to them 4 times before. I've only made it into the festival once. But those are pretty good odds, all things considered. A ten-minute play is a fair amount of work, but if you're under enough pressure it can be written in a day or two. As a matter of fact, when you write for a 24-hour festival, you have to write your ten-minute play in about 9 hours, max.

I liked the way this one came out, which makes me a little more optimistic about it. And my wife was enthusiastic about it, another good sign.

They choose blind, without knowing the author of the play, so they don't discriminate either way as to prior successes in getting into the festival. And despite my success there with Space Cat Graduation, I didn't create a "space kitties in the library" play, so they won't identify me as the author that way, either.

The theme of this summer's festival is "The Library". You might say it's more of a writing prompt than a true theme, but you get the idea. They get a lot of submissions, and I heard from them that there's a tendency to get multiple submissions touching on familiar ideas about a topic. So I figure they will get a bunch of plays about long-overdue books and the "Shush!" rule, and probably a bunch of pieces touching on the fact that books are going digital.

I had a complete false start on Saturday. Wrote about 3 pages and froze up right where I was going to put a 3rd character onto the stage. Rethought the whole thing, and stuck to just 2 characters.

Well, I'll know in a couple of months.

It was fun to create,
And now I wait.