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My husband and I are watching Fosse/Verdon.

I felt very old writing that sentence. This idea that (1) I’m married and (2) we stay in some nights watching a miniseries on FX about 1960s - 1980s Broadway — a miniseries that I’m sure only Lin-Manuel Miranda and my grandmother watch. And last I checked, my grandmother wasn’t all that motivated to find the show either. It’s a niche show, one that requires me to pause every five minutes and explain. “They’re in rehearsal for Pippin.” “Those are the opening notes of Sweet Charity.”

I started teaching Crafting Your Artistic Handbook last week and I’m so happy with the group of artists who’ve opted into this class. They’re all so incredibly talented, smart, and excited to put the work into their artwork. They even indulged me in a class photo last week. Look at all our smiling faces!

This week, we focused on different modes of accountability — a theme that could really take over the entire six week series if we let it. I brought in four different accountability structures that I’ve tried over the course of my career: two that I’ve abandoned and two that I still use to this day.

The photo above is deceiving.

It’s a stock photo, of course. I like the idea of it: throwing out the old to make literal room for what works. In my reality, my cuts are digital. I tuck old drafts away in a different file, a different folder, a hidden section of my playwriting software. When I cut something that’s in a notebook, I keep that page in tact. I revisit my notebooks once a decade, it seems, so there’s no danger that the cut idea will bury it’s way into my line of vision and go from being a bad idea to a bad idea that just doesn’t work.

I went home at the end of April and it coincided with Beyoncé’s greatest live performance of all time.

I’ve been trying to go home more. When I lived on the East Coast, I skipped Christmas visits because of the expense. I’d visit in February or March instead, hopeful that one day I’d get to fly home in a less extravagant way, hopeful that my midwinter visit would be welcome and not a total pain in the butt. Since moving to Seattle, I’ve kept those February/March visits up, adding Christmas (finally) to the mix too. It was a way to escape the rain, an assurance that there was sunshine somewhere. California, here I come.

I heard the voice of every single one of these authors as I read their books.

Okay, not literally. But I spend a significant amount of time listening to these four voices. Linda Holmes is the host of one of my favorite podcasts: Pop Culture Happy Hour, a podcast I listened to long before I decided I was “into podcasts.” Her debut novel Evvie Drake Starts Over is dreamy and wonderful and exactly what I want all my rom coms and romance novels to be like.

I live my life surrounded by so much paper. A pile of books sits in my windowsill — a combination of library books I’ll certainly never finish before their due date and books and plays I own, texts I dream of reading one day. Bookshelves tuck into every corner of my apartment — under the windowsill, inside an unused closet, below my growing collection of plants. The wall in front of my desk is papered with postcards from friends across the country, women who mean it every single time they say “Wish you were here!” Even my calendar is paper, much to the dismay of my super tech savvy bestie and my partner, a man who knows his schedule at a glance. Flipping through his calendar is a silent activity. Flipping through mine is percussive.

In January 2018, months before I actually started writing my own Artistic Handbook, I started a list of things that I wanted to work on. Creating a code of conduct — something I could reference whenever I’m feeling conflicted or eerie or just plain gross during an interaction with a fellow theatre professional — was pretty high up there. But right underneath that super corporate phrase “Code of Conduct,” I wrote “Code of Conduct Toward Myself.”

When I set out to write my own Artistic Handbook last April, I had no idea where to start. I knew what I wanted to include in my handbook — I had a list as long as my arm that featured everything from the phrase “standard operating hours” to “play ideas” to “working out of town.” I had a ton of rules for how I’d operate in the American theatre landscape, all of which I’d broken at some point or another. And I had an overwhelming task ahead of me: a 70+ page artistic handbook that was fully searchable, fully functional, and fully me.

On Friday, March 22, I started keeping a journal.

I think most people already picture me as someone who journals — a journaler? — but the reality is I used to check in with myself very little. I check in with my characters constantly. I check in with my sources all the time. (It’s probably annoying how much I check in with them.) And I check in with the people around me so much that I sometimes forget to share what’s going on in my life.

Last week, I spent a couple hours going through a decade of notebooks.

Okay, so I knew that there would be a decade of notebooks. I’ve been writing plays for ten years and I am pretty much the ultimate nerd. Of course I carry a notebook with me everywhere I go. Of course I got down lines of dialogue and scenes and notes on a script and pitches and outlines and and and. I can’t remember a single original thought until I’ve written it down. My brain’s just funny that way.