Letters from the middle of the night

I asked the writers (the writers I managed to track down!) to email me during the night and let me know how it all went. Or how it was going.

10:00pm - Jerry Kraft emails from Edmonds to say that he thought about his two men and one woman on the drive up and "now I need to settle on exactly what the threat is, and to whom, and what has to be done to neutralize it."

1:00am - Celene Ramadan emails to say she is done. She says she started by asking herself some questions: "what is the threat? Are the two men in my play opponents or on the same team? What style and mood do I want?" (Ya gotta love it that the writers are actually EMBRACING and WRITING ABOUT the theme, don't you?) Celene "made decisions and decided to just commit 100% to them" and now she's wondering if she should write another one - just in case. 100% commitment to 100% doubt at 1:00am. Yup, absolutely.

2:00am - Jerry emails to say he's done. He's going to go to bed and get up early to look it over and see what he thinks. And then he speaks the familiar phrase - that mantra of the 14/48 writer - "I have no idea if it's any good." Amen, brother.

3:00am - Brian Neel emails that he and Paul Shipp walked the streets of downtown Seattle riffing on the theme until they came up with an idea and then went to Paul's place to bang it out. It "flowed smoothly until about three quarters of the way through when two prominent concepts didn't take hold." They struggled with it until they had to just scrap the concepts and finish without them. "Right now, as I fade away, I just miss that doll's head. (I know it could have worked.)" We'll ALL miss the doll's head, baby! They send the above photo - "taken upon completion of script, one shot of whiskey toast." Kind of makes you want to try that co-writer thing, doesn't it?

No other emails from the middle of the night. We'll have to assume the playwrights all survived and that the scripts are on their digital journeys to ACT to find their directors and actors and come to life tonight. Can't wait!

Becky Hellyer