Friday, July 2, 2004

I Want to go Home...

One more performance to go now... Whether it's to do with Oh What a Lovely War, hayfever or my torn jaw muscle, I've had an almost permanent lump in my throat for the last few days, as if I'm going to burst into tears at any moment. I know I'm not, but my throat feels like that. Maybe it knows something I don't... Anyway, today's production went pretty well, but some bugger stole my officer's hat just before I needed it to go on stage. I had to use someone else's. It sounds odd (they all look exactly the same anyway), but sometimes you can get very protective over these things. I do. There's a specific walking stick that I like to use in the grouse shooting and bayonet drill scenes, and I get rather upset if other people take them on instead. I don't make a scene about it, but it's like a comfort blanket. If you've dubbed something as being 'yours', you want it. Well, I do. I'm not being completely strange, am I? "Waft waft ye winds, waft waft ye!" Well, aside from the band being off-cue, playing the wrong introductions and talking backstage, light and sound cues being all in the wrong places from time to time, things have gone fairly well. But... On the first night, during the grouse shooting scene (in which I play France), there is a guy in a wheelchair (playing America). During one of his pieces of dialogue, we heard this rather musical note, rather like that you would on a sick trumpet. People in the front row started laughing. We almost corpsed on stage. Yes, he farted. On stage. Thank god I had a walking stick in my hand so I could cover my smirk by pretending to shoot a grouse... A big fear when performing is drying up, completely forgetting your next bit. Unfortunately, in another scene I was in, my scene partner dried up mid word. So instead of saying "Happily you are powerless", it came out more like: "Happily you are po-ar..." He covered it well, though. Some events haven't been quite so funny, though. One guy decided it'd be hilarious to pull a guy's trousers down just as he was entering the stage in a scene where the Germans and English meet in No Man's Land at Christmas (based on a real event)- a really touching scene. That, to me, is no joke. It completely mucks up the poignancy of the scene, doing something that idiotic. I almost felt like hitting the guy who did it. There are mistakes and there are jokes, but that was neither. Just plain stupid. I've not actually had many problems myself so far, but I always manage to end on the wrong foot for the songs where we all march in line and matrk time with our feet. We're all meant to end with a big stamp on our right feet, but mine's always left. I hope I can get that sorted out by tomorrow. It's the massive Gala performance tomorrow, with all the audience in period costume and poppies falling from the ceiling in the last scene. It's a really beautiful, funny, touching, relevent production when done properly. Solo On: Writing This is what I meant to do a few days ago, sorry for the wait ^_^; I hope people are still reading this, by the way... I know I've not been online an awful lot, but if I'm getting boring or anything, please let me know... I owe almost all of my writing abilities to my mum, actually. When I was in year six, we had to write a story as part of a major assignment. We had to choose from one of two titles: The Building Site or The Old Gate (or something like that) and make up a story around that. I'd written down what I thought was a perfectly good story... until I showed it to mum. She'd spend hours going through the story and while sticking to my original plot, she'd ask me "How did it move?", "How does that character feel?", and direct me as to how to write things in a more exciting way. There was another story we had to write and I had no clue what to do, and this was going to decide what English set we were to go into in High School next year. Mum wanted to make sure I was in a high one, so she set me to work. I guess... in retrospect she kind of wrote it for me, but that wasn't to say it was wasted at all, and I certainly learnt from it. She explained everything to me, all the little bits of detail she put in and why it was there... I learned a lot. There was one more story I did, later that year once I was actually in High School. I (like every other normal student) left it until the last night to actually do, and showed it to mum. I was up until 11 that night, going through the entire thing. It went from two to six pages, but by the end it was pretty damn good. And I was pretty damn good, too. I even moved up a Set. So even though she did a lot of the work for me, everything now I do under my own steam. Writing Starfox fanfics was great experience, and sending bits of those off to my first penpal was good too, as it gave me confidence with all the feedback I got. It was nice to know someone who also wrote stories about the same kind of things you did, too. Well... she kind of introduced me to fanfics, in a way. I'd never met anyone like her before, so I tried to do my best to impress her. The first scene I wrote her was a death scene (nice, eh?), and... by my standards now, it was very schmalzy, and incredibly cheesy. I'd never write like that again. Think Mills and Boon and you'd be close. I was always deathly afraid of reading other people's fanfics. With something like Starfox, which has no real background storyline to it outside the US (Where the bloody Nintendo Magazine never published the comics, the bastards), there were lods of alternate SF universes, and there still are today. I'd completely made my own set of characters, and then found out that there were some canon ones already set up, and everyone was using them in their stories. There was one writer in particular who'd always make me weak at the knees. not because of the characters she used, but because of her writing style. It seemed so much better than mine, heh. Sillabub. That was her name. I've no idea how it'd compare to me now, but she was certainly good then. And I'd get put off writing my own stories because other people's were so good. I've changed, though. Rather than wanting to give up when i read something good, I feel inspired to write something good as well, and I challenge myself to do as well, if not better. I'm always looking for ways to improve my style, which is why things like Dark Conflict have taken so long to produce. I'm still re-writing the first chapter even now, because I feel it's missing something. Every time I look something over, I change it. Enter the Net's an exception- that rolls off pretty spontaneously and only needs one real look-over. But the levels of creativity I have change from day to day. I might get a burst of inspiration that has me writing for days, but then I can go weeks without having it again. Lately I've written very little even in RPGs because I've had so little time to think about anything else. But when I listen to music, I start imagining scenes I could write about. Thare are certain scenarios I imagine with each piece of music, and some bits really make me want to write them down. But I can't imagine as vividly and type at exactly the same time, because I ususally listen to music with my arm over my face and the headphones on to cut out any kind of external distractions. I still get ideas, but they aren't as strong. But there are lots of different ways of doing things. As long as I eventually finish what I want to finish, I don't mind. And as long as I'm happy with the end result, it doesn't really matter how long it takes. It takes as long as it takes, and the best stories are never completely finished. There's always something you can add to them.

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