I have a ritual that dates back to the first one-act play I finished – on any substantial script, I always make sure to note a) the date on which I wrote the first real, non-outline-y pages, b) every city or between-city conveyance (plane, train, etc.) in which I added pages, and c) the completion date of every draft.

It would be too overwhelming to subdivide such a list into all the different cafes that have become writing haunts for me. But since a couple of months back when I made it a mission to finally finish this damned play, many of its pages have appeared over a latte at Rockin’ Crepes.

Because of this ritual, I know that I wrote the first pages of this play (the title, by the way: Public Speaking) were written here in Huntington Beach on September 27th, 2007. I had been carrying fragments of the idea around with me for longer than that – in fact, I think some of the inspirations involved date all the way back to college.

And I can now announce that last night, February 6th, 2012, after so many other projects and distractions and life events, I have finished the first draft. That waitress offered me a high-five on her way by the table as I packed up the laptop. She didn’t even know why. Must have been in the air.

It’s not a long script – 61 pages. That probably translates to about a 70-minute production. Even if I add to it, it’s never likely to run more than 75, which is fine; I don’t think this play is supposed to be longer. It makes it a strange fit for the stage, and I think pairing it with a one-act or even a 10-minute “appetizer” might be the way to justify asking people to get in their cars, drive out, and buy a ticket for the theater.

These are some of the most difficult pages I have ever had to dredge out of my brain. There’s something undeniably important about this story to me, and yet I worry that it could actually be morbidly dull. There are no deaths, no falling kingdoms, no one falls in love, there are no wacky situations or high histrionics, no magical or fantastical breaches of reality, and the very premise of the play hinges on something that is generally a no-no in the theater. I like to think there are a couple of epiphanies that mean a great deal, and a bit of theatricality, but for the most part this is a quiet piece about lonely people trying to connect and deal with their private sadnesses, and it’s not easy because it isn’t really, is it?

But as Adam wisely said to me the other night, you need a little faith. I have written enough scripts at this point to have good technique. As to whether this idea will resonate, well, if it mattered this much to me, that must mean there’s a very good chance it will matter to someone else, right? That’s why we do this thing at all, isn’t it?

It’s most interesting because the play is about teachers. You know how they say some owners and pets start to look like one another, and you don’t know who made the first move? I don’t think it’s so one-sided as writers putting themselves into a story. The story puts something back into the writer. Where did it come from? That’s the mystery.

I think it comes back to breaking out of that scrum of 350+ contenders. They culled about 90% out and I was still there when it was done. As with the “roomful of strangers” auditions of which I’m most proud over the past year, it gives me a lot of confidence that my work not only stood on its own but made a worthy noise. Even for the best work, that’s no guarantee with the inverted taste pyramid that mass contest reading can create, and the subjectivity of the small number of people who will read/evaluate your work.

Breaking through is a powerful affirmation of the work. It makes me think about what Stephen King said about why he published those books under the “Richard Bachman” alias – that restless, wondering itch as to whether he had made it due to talent or luck, whether he could DO IT without the strength of his name to backstop him.

I have no such name strength, but I am constantly wondering if I can DO IT. So that explains the balance of the satisfaction, I think. Whether I win or not, someone thought I was good enough that I might be worthy of winning, and the difference between that and zero response at all is amazing.

I know, proportionally-speaking, this is in a far different league than anything I’ve got happening, Hollywood-wise. Even if I was one of the 10 winners to be staged, I’d probably win about $30 and some pictures from the production. Going to SEE it would set me back hundreds since it’s halfway across the country.

But as I said not long ago, I’m at the very beginning of my efforts to let the world know I’m a playwright, too. And I am fueled by any opportunity for an audience to really see my work realized, which is so rare in screenwriting.

Plus, this was the first submission I made, and there are a couple others still floating out there right now. That’s a confidence booster. After all these years there is still a voice inside me suggesting that the moment I show work to anyone, I’ll be found out as a total fraud. So now the delusion can continue!

And somehow, all during the time I kept thinking that, feeling grumpy and sipping my grande hot chocolate w/ whipped, I still wrote three pages of screenplay to get me to 106.

And then I got home and wrote six pages of a script for a Serial Killers entry (episodic 10-minute play showcase at Sacred Fools – it’s been over three years since my last entry). I finished a half-hour before the midnight submission deadline. I hadn’t even planned on submitting for this cycle, since the idea I wanted to do was more demanding, production-wise, than I was prepared to commit to right now, and because it had a major role for Adam, who is out of town. But my friend The Hairy Russian was ancy to do a new one, and I am making it an active goal to become a company member. So I invested a small portion of my brain on Sunday (from the parts that don’t need to pay attention to football) to brainstorming an idea. I hit on one I liked, wrote the first two pages that night, and; as I said, finished the script last night. We’ll see if they take it.

My conscious brain had been so sure last night that I was just going to pack it in, watch Battlestar Galactica, and wallow in being lazy and unaccomplished. But apparently my subconscious had different ideas, and took charge of my hands.

I know that one of the reasons I am on this writing path is that, at certain moments in my development, people offered to take a gamble on my potential – and even if I wasn’t sure I could live up to it, I said yes and threw myself at the challenge. I believe that you need to watch for those moments in life, because there aren’t many of them, and they are the moments that can change everything.

There’s another piece of wisdom I’ve tried to follow in the last few years – screenwriter John August’s precept that the time you quit your day job is the moment when you absolutely, positively, cannot keep working at it and fulfill the creative obligations around you. Speculative work does not count – he’s talking about real, professional responsibilities in the arena where you want to be full-time.

Is it possible to follow both tenets simultaneously? I sure don’t know. I know I’ve gone without steady employment before in my writer’s life – sometimes it’s viable, sometimes it isn’t. The non-viable times have consequences.

The chance has arisen that I’m going to be offered a commission to write a play. A real, full-length play that would definitely be staged in a well-publicized (for the area) world premiere exactly one year from now. I would get paid to do it – not enough to live on between now and then, but certainly more than sandwich money.

This would not be a simple project. There would be travel, research, some very challenging performance elements to which the story would have to be tailored, and a branching structure that could as much as triple the length of the script. The concept is thoroughly, innately theatrical and I absolutely love that, even if the amount of labor that would go into just making the thing hang together is terrifying. If I had total freedom I would say that I needed, at absolute minimum, six months with nothing on my plate to come up with a solid first draft. As it is, they would need something they can start rehearsing and building something like 9 1/2 months from today; and I have a job to wake up for and a novel to finish and screenplays to get out to the marketplace. And, like I said – what they’re likely to offer is not enough to live on for that time, even as lean as I know how to live.

Now – there may be a way to stitch this together, and believe me I will be doing serious stitching, because I want to do this something fierce. A lot will depend on what commission they actually offer. My research into the matter has given me an expected range, and it could pay for a few months’ survival.

Financially speaking, the wisdom would be to hold the job absolutely as long as I can. My instinct as a writer tells me, though, with a hard deadline looming for something I’ve never done before, I should clean my desk of other obligations as soon as I can. The longer I hold the job, the bigger the gun I will be under to pull this off when I finally leave. And once the play’s over with – what? Will there still be a job for me? Will something else have opened up?

So much that is unknown – but I can’t let that frighten me. I know how rare a moment like this is.

That opportunity comes not through open competition, but because of a personal connection of mine. It’s not that they have nothing upon which to base their opinion that I can do the work, but I also didn’t exactly have to beat out the masses. The ultimate satisfaction for me has always been to have the work speak utterly for itself – no personal bias, no author’s note, just another clump of words pulled off the stack and studied only on its merits.

Early last month I was building an attack plan for America’s second- and third-tier literary journals with my short stories. I have no connections at all in that world, and the short stories I’ve written have not been exposed to anyone outside a few friends, so this is about as cold and naked as submissions get.

I set that goal aside when I got off on my recent writing streak; but before I did, there was one on-line quarterly that was accepting stories with a particular theme, with a deadline that was about two days away. The story that best suited it was the one I felt was the riskiest, the most esoteric, the most out of my comfort zone, so since it seemed so unlikely it would get published anyway, it would cost me nothing to just take that shot.

Last night, while at a birthday dinner with my family, my phone buzzed – they want the story for their upcoming issue; which is publishing next week. My first-ever submission of fiction, and it connected. I am still trying to fathom that. I gave myself a 5% chance at best after my plan of submitting four or five stories across forty or fifty publications. By that standard, this is simply not a sane result.

I admit I was in a grumpy mood most of the day. I didn’t sleep well, I’m pessimistic about my birthdays, and I was unusually out-of-sync at work. But during the family dinner expedition, my phone buzzed, I saw that e-mail, and suddenly everything was re-oriented in a positive way.

In one week, I will be a published author of fiction. And I did it without networking or nepotism or because I just happened to be around with a pen. Gifted as I am at kicking the pillars out from under my own accomplishments, it’s hard to wreck this one.

I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present. Although I did get some books and Blu-Rays and an iPod dock after that.

The last time I visited Bradley was almost seven years ago. The school has always wanted me to come back, and I’ve always wanted to go, but between money, time, and needing a good enough reason to commit the first two things, it never quite happened. Now, to get to see a few scripts of mine on their feet, and talk with this generation of theatre students, and reminisce, and hopefully even coax a few fellow alums down from Chicago for some ol’ times kinds of fun…that all adds up pretty nicely.

And if I happen to pop into a couple of classes to say a few words, and if they happen to cough up a small check, that would make it add up even better. Good luck to that in today’s economy, but I’ll hope.

The second was more difficult. Certainly that many years provides more than adequate emotional distance for re-writing; unfortunately it created more than a little inertia. As in – “the play has existed for this long like this, why should it not stay like that?” This also grows out of the undeniable truth that I was a far worse writer back then, and the script was weak and limp in more than one place. Too many places to salvage in one night? Very possible.

But I have become nothing if not deft. Once I identified the most egregious problem, there was no hesitation; I knew exactly what to scalpel out and replace, and didn’t miss the excised material in the slightest. It is not great now, no, it was not going to be that; but it is…presentable.

Tonight was all the time I had left to generate a third script for tomorrow’s deadline. I came home with an idea and a half-page of scrawled notes. Now after a couple of hours of work/procrastination, I have a half a script. It feels like good stuff – well, it feels consistent to the oddness of my idea. The beauty of the 10-minute play is, since you have far less time in which to wear out your welcome, you can pursue peculiar impulses in bite-sized form. Just throw it up there and see if it plays.

But I think this is all I’ve got for tonight, and I can go to bed satisfied. I think I can make this deliverable with enough time. I might just have to sneak in a few moments to finish tomorrow morning.