Monday, March 2, 2020: I finished a draft of ‘Notes From an Exoplanet’, and need to get away

from it for awhile — so, I’m working on ‘The Person of No Consequence’, my musical
adaptation of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’- I added three female characters, including a possible, if
unlikely, love interest for the little clerk, Shoenik - and a chorus of spirits flitting around the
Great Square - all this at the suggestion of my director friend, Sylvia Baeza, who’s opinions of
my writing I trust - she liked the story, but thought it needed these additions, as it's based on a
short story featuring mostly male characters - I wrote another half dozen songs for it, on top of
the dozen I have already written - I’m still not feeling it, but I’ll try and get a draft out to Sylvia..

Another unfinished play I should work on - maybe as a break from ‘The Person of No
Consequence’ - is a little one-act called ‘The Removal’, about the assassination of President
James Garfield by a deluded Charles Guiteau in 1880 - currently it’s about ten pages of scenes
and is essentially a one-character play featuring Guiteau, although I have written a couple of
short scenes with other colorful characters of the historical period, including Garfield and
Roscoe Conklin - we’ll see how it plays out..

I suspended advertising my plays on Google Ads, and am now trying Facebook Ads - I got a
few hits these past two days after flatlining with no ads and no hits - but even then, I notice
that if people make multiple hits in a row, they usually only stay a few seconds - how could
they read anything on my website, unless these are trolling computer algorithms? - I need to
work on bettering my Facebook ad - on the upside, I have about 20 reads a day on scribd.com
of both ‘Notes From an Exoplanet’ and my last diary entry over the past several days - don’t
know how much they read, but it means some people are reading some of my work -
unfortunately, I haven’t figured out yet how to monetize it, which is the usual problem.. talk to
you next time! - Ed