Reshifted Weekend and other Monday Musings

Emily Beck, one of the many fine young thespians featured in the play we saw this weekend, Scary Tales of New Orleans.  This Flying Dragon production has two more performances this coming weekend, including a dinner theatre this Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon matinee.

After the events of my father's death, and with the conclusion of our weekend trip to the beach, we are settling into a new routine for our weekends, one that will last for me at least until the start of tax season on January.

I find myself spending a lot of time trying to memorize the lines for Scrooge, the part I am performing the first two weekends of December, in WACT's production of A Christmas Carol.  My son, Benjamin, is also in it, playing three parts including Young Scrooge.  This is the first time Benjamin and I will have performed together on the WACT stage. 

The cast is talented, with many young people.  The vast majority have never seen me in anything, even though I have been in over two dozen productions, at WACT and at Flying Dragon.  It is interesting how ephemeral community theater is, and how difficult it is to build a legacy of work,  It does not help that WACT has decided to not display on their walls photos of past productions, but only the posters.  Why they changed is a longer story for another post.

Work has slowed a bit, although I a sure projects will come up.  I am way behind on my CPE credits (hours needed in class or instruction to maintain CPA certificate.  So all that will be fun.  It is getting harder and harder for me to stay alert in seminars.  You see how long you can listen to some of these accounting topics.

Writing is still slow but steady.  I have to continue to reshift my focus to make it productive.  The blog's page view numbers are declining.  Besides quality of work, there are probably several factors.  I have changed the anti-virus programs on my computer, and IO think some of the sites that picked up my stories are no longer doing so.  My traffic is now smaller but more legitimate.  Facebook, where I post links to my stories, ebbs and flows, as people's level of activity varies.  I also have probably pissed a number of people off with more frequent political sharing recently.  I have found out that it is possible to be some one's friend on Facebook and eliminate or diminish seeing their posts.  I am sure some people are doing that now.  And I am diverting my own traffic by posting frequent links to Wattpad, where I have put up much of my fiction and poetry.

I have to take it to the next step, which is ebooks on places like Amazon.  Some of the Writer's Guild has  demonstrated to me that I don't have to wait for full length novels, that is possible to publish short stories and novelettes.  The fear of conversion to their formats, and cover creation keeps me petrified, but I have to fight that and take a chance.

Until next time,

T. M. Strait