Yesterday's Writer Adventure™ and other miscellany

Last night the Illawarra Performance Writers' Group was kind enough to do a reading of the entire text of The Death of Albatross. The timing on the script is just about perfect (about an hour and a half of straight reading, no staging, no intermission), which is one of my worries about it resolved. Some of the jokes worked, some of them didn't. Everyone had a different idea on the best way to "fix" the script, which was a bit maddening, but at least I had my Clarion experience to teach me how to stand firm against the chaotic buffets of opinion, take my notes, and choose among the suggestions later. And I did get some extremely useful feedback (including some effusive praise as well, which is always nice). All this information will inform, as they say, the script-development process (now scheduled for the beginning of 2009).

In other arts-related news, you can read here about a poetry project that makes me feel decidedly ambivalent. They've got these pigeons, see, racing pigeons, and they tie pieces of paper with poems on them — specially commissioned poems — to the pigeons' legs, and they set them loose, and people can "bet" (no money is involved) on which pigeon arrives back at the loft first. This, says the web site, is intended "to create quality Australian poems and broaden the public’s definition of and engagement with the form." Is this an endeavor with genuine artistic merit? Or is it, perhaps, a bit of a wank designed to nab a nice chunk of grant money? That is ultimately a subjective judgment, but my subjective gut says "Gah!"

And finally, a small triumph. When I first set up this blog, I fiddled with the html in the template to give it a bit of a distinctive look (changing the colors, mainly, but still, it's just that little bit different from other blogs using this template). Somehow, during that process, I seem to have broken the code that let you click on the title of a blog post to get to the permalink. I've borne it, as it's not the most important thing in my life (or even, for that matter, in my blog), but this morning I had a little bit of spare time, so I spent it fiddling with the html some more. And I managed to fix whatever it was I'd done before, and even fine-tune the heading colors and stuff. So I'm very proud of my personal geekdom, modest though it is by world standards. (Of course, that having been said, if you test it and find out I was too sanguine, please don't hesitate to let me know, and I'll try and fix the fix.)