The Sequinbeast: Things I Have Learned About Myself In the Past Few Days

I am up in Björklunden, my college's northern campus, for a Start-Up Theatre class.

The idea is that we are, in two weeks, starting a theatre company, writing plays, and putting on a 10-minute play festival. We got up here Monday for lunch and have been going pretty non-stop ever since. We have named ourselves Greyfell Theatre Company and have been working on getting ourselves out into the world. Throughout the last couple of days, I have learned quite a few things about myself.

1. I hate the word "thresholds." I have a terrible physical reaction to the word that I can't explain. When I hear it, my stomach starts churning and my whole body starts shaking. I really don't know why this happens. It weirds me out that I can't figure out why this happens. I just know that I need to avoid saying the word, which will be hard because we just named our night of 10-minute plays "Thresholds."

2. I like writing. I have known this for a while, but I have always had problems finishing things because I get nervous about my writing and decide that I can't share it with anyone. I then feel like my ideas are terrible and that other people have WAY better ideas and so I stop writing. I have so many partially written things lying around. And I haven't even really written much in the past couple of years because I am so afraid of failing. But, being here, we were forced to write a 10-minute play and we had less than 24 hours to get a first draft done.

Working through drafts.

I worked with Jessica (even though I wrote most of the play) and we had a great time. We fell in love with our play right away (because the characters were very similar to ourselves) but I was still nervous about putting it out there. Yesterday morning, we had a "power read" where we read all of the plays that everyone had written. (There were 18 total, including our own.) While that was exhausting, it made people read my play. I was forced to let over 20 people read what I had written. And people, including professors, kept telling me that the play was good! That night, we had to make slates of our favorite plays and ours could not be our own slates. We then had to advocate for shows we really liked to Jacque, our literary manager. One of the company members, Phillip, raised his hand right away and advocated for our play as the very first one. And other people agreed with his opinions! It felts amazing to hear people enjoying it. Sadly, when the slates were announced this morning, our play was not on it. It was disappointing but Jessica and I have talked and we are going to continue working on it to submit it to some 10-minute play festivals at other theatre companies.

3. I really enjoy doing blogs! We each had to take positions on different marketing teams and I am on the blog and YouTube teams. I know that I haven't written here in a while, but that will be changing. I WILL START TO BLOG HERE MORE! Anyway, for the Greyfell blog, we came up with a blog schedule that involves having different people involved in the program write blogs in the early afternoon and then the blog team (of which I am a part of) will write in the evening, following our last session, about what has happened throughout the day.

Abi, myself, Jessica, and Matt, AKA The Blog Group

Today, I got to do the student perspective and I have done a couple of the other blog group posts. It has been fun to get to tell people what is happening and the nice thing about the blog format is that, while it needs to be somewhat professional, it doesn't need to be completely, 100% professional. It is a fun way to spread information!