Storyteller Line Up

This blog follows the highs and lows of a week of writing and is a companion to the video blogs 6 and 7 (currently being edited) which appear on YouTube.  Blog 6 is a general round up, blog 7 is a series of clips from the re-writing process of the opening of the new story - Encounters with Trolls of the Northern Line.

Tuesday - late at night...
Right - got it - this is the line up!  Know what the show looks like now.  I've been rehearsing and timing material and I know what the show is.
First Half: Encounters with Trolls of the Northern Line - a fifty / sixty minute monologue which covers lots of themes and ideas, a little sad, a little sweet, a little bit naughty.
Second Half: After the Fall of the Gods of Commerce - a forty minute collection of seven / eight short pieces, all set sometime in a number of possible futures.  They'll all be loosely linked, all set in what becomes of the United Kingdom, and all essentially fantastic in tone.  They're mostly funny, as I want to draw the show towards a light conclusion, even if we pass some darker places.  There's only one of these now to write - though I might jettison one of them, as it's written in the third person, and all the other second half stories are written from one persons point of view.
I now know precisely how I want the show to move - but not only that - I know how I want to stage it.  The second half I'll act as the link between stories, but I want to involve other storytellers and actors in the show.  Hopefully I'll be able to pull together a team of people to do all those stories - though I will have to rehearse them all myself just in case that cannot happen.
This only came to me Monday, recovering from a pretty heavy days drinking at a lovely wedding.  I've spent all of Tuesday pushing the pre-written material into shape, and adding in new stuff where needed.  Now I'll be looking for actors to help me test the material - especially as the deadline for Storyteller has moved ahead by many months.  I was planning to have it done by September, for the main dates.  It is now looking more like July - for reasons which I will explain later.
More follows...

Thursday - lateish...
Spent all day marking up edit points on the audio book recording of Teaching Gods.  Want to get on with other stuff now - like recording the next one.

Saturday Night - similarly late...
Okay - so I wrote that on Tuesday / Wednesday.  It's now Saturday and I've suddenly become unsure.
For why?  Because I've been working on the idea - and then a new idea came up.  An organic idea, so maybe the winning idea.
To explain I must tell you more about Trolls.  It's got a back story to the main action, which I can't tell you about.  But there are two people whose lives effect the story greatly, but who we never meet.  And now, I really want to fit their story into the story of Mr Griffin and his bizarre encounter with a group of Trolls he meets underground.  BUT - to do this I would have to jetterson the second half - "After the Fall of the Gods of Commerce" - which I don't want to do. 
I've been cutting Trolls down, rewritten the opening and removed some of the weirder bits.  It's becoming a bittersweet, sad - hopefully funny - story.  If I were to add another element, the back story, it will become a love story.  So that is now getting there - and I'll keep working on that. 
That doesn't mean I will give up on the Gods of Commerce - I will continue working on those stories and finding a way to do them.  I want to do them because they're a way to share lots of stories at once with lots of other storytellers.  So I'm really torn now and I hate my brain.
I've also been recording some of the word runs I've been doing - so hopefully I'll post the opening on the video blog, in the various stages it has reached this week.  It has changed quite a bit.
Right I'm off now.

Monday Night - reassuringly early...
Having spent a lot of time on Trolls I'm confident that it will reduce well into a fifty - sixty minute piece, including any new material.  That means I'm still on track to create the second half, as noted above.  So this coming week I'll really get stuck into that material, and probably do the same kind of video / comparitive run blog as this week.