Odin's eye

Today was the second (and final) reading-and-crit session for The Death of Albatross. I suppose it's a reflection of the rather tough times I've been going through recently that it is now a much darker, and much more powerful, piece than it started out to be. The good news is, it's genuinely moving — even the actors were choking up at one point during the reading, and we didn't even have an audience to provide the energy for that. (That scene's going to have them weeping in the aisles if the play ever gets performed.)

The, I guess, bad news is that the process of writing that new material was intensely painful. I've gone to uncomfortable, painful places in my writing before, but this was the furthest I've gone; definitely the most difficult writing journey I've had up to now. The things I had those characters feeling and saying.... Well, you know all those myths and stories about people having to leave bits of themselves behind, like Odin plucking out his own eye, and Frodo losing his finger, and poor Prometheus and his cut-and-come-again liver? You have to do that sometimes, tear something from yourself and leave it there, to make the story be right. Not happy, not all-loose-ends-tied. Right. True.