Progress Report: It's Vampire Time!

 I found this cover awhile back and it always makes me smile!

This is a study I did for my just finished play. More below!

     I was at a retreat last weekend. It was a gathering of my witchy and pagan friends over near Wimberley, Tx. Four and a half days at a lovely and private country place with no cats to feed, etc. Can you say awesome Halloween night? My lovely lady was being Kitchen Goddess and I of course volunteered to help. In the midst of visiting with a bunch of my closest friends old and new I turned it into my very own writing retreat! It was easy. The scheduling was pretty free-form except for meals. There were voluntary workshops or classes offered around Samhain/Halloween sorts of things. Since I was already hanging around the dining area a lot, and it was often pretty quiet except for conversations, I pulled out my laptop and finished off a play I've been working on.
      I used to write more plays when I was more active in theater. I've posted a couple in this blog. I still have a few ideas back-burnered. Some have been worked into current novel or short story projects. I do enjoy writing plays, but I've been trying to focus more on novels and short stories the last few years. "The Vampire's Quiche" is one that never let go of me, and it just feels like it wants to be a play. I can so "see" it playing out in my head! I think of it as a Halloween play, although it isn't, necessarily. It's been on back burner for several years and I pull it out and dust it off and play with it around this time of year. I finally decided to just finish it and let people see it.
      The story is about the Pettus family. An extended family living in one suburban house. Father works, mom likes to bake, the kids are nearly grown. Uncle is unemployed, Aunt reads Tarot and Grandpa thinks he's a vampire.
      Think "The Munsters" meets "You Can't Take It With You".
      This play is a lot of fun, and it feels wonderful to finally get the first draft finished. I hoping a few of my writing/theater friends will offer to give it a read and offer some feedback.

Writing Tools: Redux. And Vampires, Oh My!

  A while back I wrote here about my writing tools, including some software I use. I just found another free software program that seems promising. I haven't tried it yet, since I don't want to divert myself too much from ongoing projects. Perhaps I will start a new one on it soon and give it a try. However, if you want to check it out for yourself, it is called Storybook. As I said, it is free, open source, software, but it has a lot of great points to recommend it. Here's a quote from the site: "Storybook is a free (open source) novel-writing tool for creative writers, novelists and authors which will help you to keep an overview of multiple plot-lines while writing books, novels or other written works." Your computer needs to have a recent version of Java on it as well, but you can get it from the same site as well if you don't have it. If you try it out before I do, let me know how it works. 
   My current tools are still working pretty well. My mystery novel, code named "Bluebottle", is going pretty good, I had a slight breakthrough on the plotting today. I've done a little recently on my dotty vampire play as well. 
   Speaking of vampires. My friend Silas just gave me an early birthday present. He brought in a deck of tarot cards called "The Vampire Tarot", by Robert M. Place. The deck draws heavily from the basic Bram Stoker "Dracula" novel, but there is a touch of other things in there as well. Nosferatu makes an appearance, as does Edgar Allen Poe. It's really pretty nice. I'll keep it handy as I work on the play. (Working title: "Quiche of the Vampire".)