“I made a great decision this morning.”
Story time. The summer after high school graduation, my friends and I decided that we weren’t done with theater just yet, and wanted to go all-in one more time. We staged and filmed a production of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever in my parents’ house. It was an all-consuming project, we were gathering props, doing our own production design, cooking fake breakfast, raiding every thrift store in Oshkosh for anything that could be vaguely 1920s, I spent a solid week designing hair accessories, and it was a BLAST. We were filming at all hours, even up to days before some of us were leaving for college. Very much an unforgettable summer.
Look at me on that couch. So young. So able to walk in heels. So closeted.
I think this is a common thing for actors, but I certainly know that for me, there are some lines I’ve performed that are going to stay with me forever, the pattern of words and delivery locked in for eternity. One of those lines, for me, is “I made a great decision this morning.” (Heck yeah, I played Judith Bliss.)
Then Came the Fire came out just last week, and I’m still coming down from the AAAAHHHHHH feelings of launching a book. (Thank you so much if you’ve picked up a copy or wrote a review!!) Authoring is weird for a lot of reasons, but the one that gets me is that you spend so much time and emotion (and money, let’s be real) creating something that people can consume in hours. Or ignore completely. That’s just, art, really. In a nutshell. But those feelings, along with my own struggles with figuring out ads and promotion and how not to blow my budget and how not to check my KDP reports every time I’m at the desktop, and trying to stay excited and not forget that I love this…
It’s been a little stressful.
Turning back to creativity has also been hard, because, if you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’ve been having a difficult time settling on what I want to work on next. I’m not a multiple project person, I know that for sure. Every time I think I’ve picked a new idea, I end up waffling around and resisting the commitment and I’m now sitting here with 3 well-developed outlines that are all perfect contenders.
But. After some encouraging conversations with a close friend, and following the siren song of the shiny new idea, I think my tide is changing. For the first time in a long while, I’ve got characters in my head when I’m doing other things, unexplored places, scene ideas that make me excited to write them. I think this is the one. The next one.
And so.
I made a great decision this morning.
Equal parts eternal lines from Hay Fever and a recent rewatch of Whisper of the Heart, I’m making a plan. I’m giving myself 4 months. 4 months to rough draft Shiny New Idea before I start looking at Three Willows Book 3 (which I do still plan to release by the end of the year). One of the best parts about self-publishing is you make your own rules, but you do still have to actually make them, which I have been consciously avoiding because sometimes my liver is lily-colored. I need to do something big to prove that I can still do this. I need to quiet the promotional madness imposter syndrome fueling relentlessly ephemeral rush and race of social media and sales reports and HAVE some FUN with my own imagination. So, you heard it here first, folks. A deadline. Let’s see what I can do with it.
Other notable Judith lines:
“I’m stagnating, you see, and I won’t stagnate as long as there’s breath left in my body.”
“Don’t you say rubbish to me!”
“If you mean that because you happen to be a vigorous ingénue of nineteen that you have the complete monopoly of any amorous adventure there may be about, I feel it is my firm duty to disillusion you.”
