Holidays: 1, Writing: 0

Great gluttonous gods, you guys. The holidays.

Between the many logistics and ever-changing variables of planning a holiday season with two families, plus a move to a new place and all the requisite unpacking that ensues, the writing has been not so much.

The ambition, though? STILL STRONG.

To wit: There's a two-year playwrighting fellowship I really want to do, and they need from me, by January 30th, a full-length play.

I don't have one of those.

(Well, okay, I do. But wrote it between 2003 and 2004, and it wouldn't at all be the best representation of how I write now. However it is I write now.)

So I need to write a full-length play, which is something I've been wanting to do for awhile anyway, but I'm only just getting comfortable with ten-minute plays. Full-length ones are a whole different beast.

They're much longer than ten minutes, for one. For another, the ten-minute plays people have been responding to lately feature characters who are kind of open to intrepretation, placed in a funny/tense situation that I know the director and actors will exploit to the fullest. If I've succeeded, there's a gut punch of earnestness and truth admidst all the bwah ha ha, and then it's over.

I could do that in a longer format, of course. But the pacing will be very different, and maybe the characters have to be more fleshed out, less open to interpretation. (For one, I'll probably have to give them names...)

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm just overthinking things, per usual. Maybe I should just do what I do and see what happens.

After the holidays. I swear.