As the title might suggest, Lordy, Lordy, have I been busy. There is a lot to be said for trying to assemble an infrastructure from the ground up, and it's definitely given me a new appreciation for the entrepreneurial spirit that I never believed I had. Now, let's not get too crazy. I haven't gotten around to attempting to self-produce (not that there's anything against that). If you know me, you know that's the thing I fear most. I want to sit down opening night and see the show for the first time, having never met the cast, if at all possible. To me, that is when I know how well I did my job. But I'm not there yet, and I'm writing today to talk about the road I've been building to that end. So...
Where to start? That was one of the battles I had to face after attending the Dramatists Guild Conference #WriteChange a few weeks back. There was a lot of chicken-and-the-egg conversations I was having with myself. Honestly. Here's my post-conference to-do list:
Register copyrights
(verse Drama for the modern age vol 1)
New play exchange
Website (Go daddy?)
Twitter (hootsuite?)
Instagram?
Mission statement
Playbooks? Print to order?
Google alerts
Simplemind mac
Blog posts
DG conference
The process
Rainn, glaad, suicide hotline, dg, npx, domestic abuse
Tweet dg conference thanks
Links page on website
Look into the theatres you jotted down in your note
I've actually checked off a fair amount of those. Trust me, I'm as surprised as you.
So, where did I start? Actually, I started trying to develop my Mission Statement, or as otherwise known, my Artist Statement. I decided to start there because it made sense as a means to hone and hew all of these disparate elements together. I had bits and pieces of a statement that had slowly begun to develop over the years, but it was really only in the past year or two that I have begun to understand that what I have been doing all this time was a form of Creative Advocacy. (I didn't even know the term until a Social Worker friend of mine told me that's what I was doing.)
At the same time I was developing my Artist Statement, I joined Twitter, and set up my Facebook Page. (No Instagram yet.) Honestly, though, I had started developing my Page, I just hadn't published it yet. Mostly because I didn't have the direction that my Artist Statement gave me. I also started building my website. Not too bad a start.
But there were other things, too, like the New Play Exchange (NPX), and making my plays available online. I've been thinking of other things like Createspace and self-publishing. I haven't gotten that far yet, but many thanks to Kate Danely (link is to her blog and said information) for the sheer volume of information that came about from that session. But before I got even that far, I first had to register my Copyrights.
When I decided to set myself up on the New Play Exchange, they asked if I had a website, and that pushed me from developing to publication, mostly so I could begin cross-linking all of that together. So, as it turns out, it isn't a one or the other. It's both. But I've also had to read proof each piece before making them available, and when I do get around to self-publication (if that's how it goes) I'll have a lot of reformatting to do, too. And somehow, I'm still trying to squeeze in writing on top of my regular day job shenanigans.
To paraphrase: Gaaah!
I think, at this point, I've already updated my website 6 times between adding Advocacy Links, and connecting synopses to NPX, and I'm sure that that is only going to continue.
But finally, here I am checking another thing off of my to-do list. How's that for momentum?
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