Just Wrought

Official Finisher! "Gateless" - Chapter 13 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

I got a compliment from a friend the other day that made me feel very proud in a modest sort of way.  He said, “Well, Paul, you do tend to finish things.” We were talking about a novel I have recently started. I have no idea if I will finish it. But with my friend’s kind approbations added to the analysis, I like my odds.

 

Better Dead, But Rich'll Do

I don't even have a dog in the fight that Brendan Kiley's pulled me into here, but I think I might have to rent one.
Me on Face Book yesterday 

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Before I retired from theatre nearly two years ago I liked to write essays about the art form’s problems (“On Institutional Arrogance”), and what made it great, (“How Can I Talk About the Borrowers?”), but I never did manage to write all the essays I wanted to. By the end, I had a whole file full of titles I would never flesh out.  I even wrote an essay about that (“Surplus Titles”). One of my favorite leftovers was “Better Dead”, under which I intended to provide an explanation to the uninitiated that despite the image they might hold in their minds of playwrights being central to the making of theatre in modern America, the fact is, our absence is the usual and preferred state of engagement, and if we can manage to be dead, preferably for a long enough time that our work is in the public domain, then we are even more popular among our non-playwriting theatre colleagues.