Tuesday, August 29, 2017: Heres where things are at: I am working on something - the middle

play, Pittsburgh Steal, in my trilogy about my grandfather, the first and third plays having
already been written - the first play is a one-act about my grandfather as a boy on the island in
the Caribbean where he was born - he was forced to go to sea as a cabin boy on the old
sailing ships, after the demise of his father - it was meant to be a full-length play, but just wrote
itself into a one-act - thats okay - later, I wrote the third play in the trilogy, about my
grandfather as an old retired sea captain in Florida, with all his retired friends, and his visiting
grandson, who he tries to get on to the sea - then his grandsons black girlfriend comes down
seeking him, and that presents a problem - anyway, I wrote it - the middle play is mostly about
my grandfathers daughter who was my mother, and the schizophrenia that plagued her adult
life - my grandfather, now recently retired, shows up to visit her her in the hospital - but most of
this play consists of the interaction between the characters based on my mother, my father and
myself - because it is so close and personal to me is why I delayed writing it - but it is now time
to write it, before the Muse only whispers to me - so far, I have about 50 pages in10 scenes - I
also have developed another main character - The Voice that Dee, the main character based
on my mother, hears in her mind as part of her schizophrenia - I decided to make it one voice
rather than several, and to make The Voice have a personality - rather an evil one - and have
The Voice function as both a confidant of Dee and a voice of conflict within Dee, a voice with
whom she argues - I am trying to stretch out my own writing voice, and break out of the writing
barriers my early study of Beckett and the East European playwrights self-imposed upon me -
so far, with limited success - all I can think to do is spontaneously write scenes for this play as
they occur to me - and I just finished a scene a minute ago which may be the final scene of
Pittsburgh Steal- well see - but, this is still not the eect I am looking for.. my other 3 plays
are stalled much like Hurricane Harvey over Houston - I worked on my barroom play, Push The
Lever, a little as far as character lists and I forget what else (its been two months since I
worked on it) - I worked on my Robert Frost/J.J. Lankes play, Print of a Poem, earlier in the
summer, basically extending the one scene I already had - I am looking for a plot for it, and
must order a book I found that catalogues all the correspondence between the two artists - my
fourth play, Mount Olympus (or Mount Ambrosia), which is the third play in my Gothic trilogy,
is stuck in my old I-book laptop, on which I wrote 5 new scenes for the play after my MacBook
laptop slowed down - but the I-Book stopped booting up, and I need it worked on to recover
those scenes - since then, I bought this new MacBook Air, upon which I am now composing
these lines.. talk to you later - Ed