30 Days of Birthday: Day 6 -- An Intensive Summer Workshop

I started that workshop this week, which is kind of fantastic because I'm forced to write and rewrite all of these ideas out of my head.  And yep, that's exactly why it's not fantastic at all.  Thankfully, inspiration is there more often than not. There are plenty of places for me to hide and disappear all day. So far, so good.

The flow of my day feels a little surreal. I'm grateful that I've got enough time to write and develop new ideas.  Here's what's keeping me up late at night:

1.  My musical The Billie Holiday Project -- it went so well at at The Apollo last spring that I'm absoutely determined to develop it.
   
2. A dance piece with Francesca Harper called Billie Holiday Deconstructed
3. A treatment for an as of yet unnamed TV show
4. A short 10 minute film
5. A one act play that's all over the place

Next week, I'll hand over 15 pages of dialogue from a theater piece I'm working on about modern black girls.  It's kind of like a black feminist version of The Colored Museum.

writing and writing and writing

i was working with ken on some rewrites at the workspace in chelsea tonight and he starts improvising around this one idea, just verbalizing intent and ideas and bits of things that we'd been discussing about entitlement and white people. i don't know why but something took off in me, running. hard and fast. i almost literally exploded in another direction. i stood there in the middle of the rehearsal space scribbling, while he went off. i couldn't write fast enough. it was astonishing, how effortless all of it was, how the words swung out of the pit of me, how what ken said had me bouncing in a thousand different directions, all of it oozing out of the tip of my pen.

it was almost as though i were in some sort of trance. not thinking, not feeling. instinctively shifting something inside me again and again and letting more and more out.

there was a time when i couldn't remember when i had moments like those as a playwright. now they're coming hard and fast, all the time. for this, i am truly grateful.

now back to my rewrites.