The next incarnation of "The Dancing Mice and the Giants of Flanders"

My story "The Dancing Mice and the Giants of Flanders", which was (quite thrillingly) included in the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild's anthology Masques, is having another adventure. My husband, the stunningly talented composer Houston Dunleavy, and I are adapting it as an opera. Yes!

Everything is just at the very beginning stages. This involves translating the story, scene by scene, into something that can work on the stage, making the dialogue singable, finding ways to incorporate information and mood that had been in narrative in the original story into dialogue or monologue or the music itself. Houston is composing some gorgeous stuff, very evocative. I look forward to hearing how he approaches each scene. We're also at the very beginning of assembling the creative team (no speculation: when everything is confirmed, I will definitely post details here, but I can't really do that before that point).

It's an incredibly complex process, involving plans for workshopping, grant writing, international collaboration, regional cultures, managing languge issues, research, promotion — and that's all before we've written anything more than one scene! And I'm entirely, completely new to it all. I've helped produce concerts, and I've helped produce plays (and written them, of course; even directed a very short play, once). But this is both like and completely unlike all of these. It looks like I'm in for another learning experience.... <ulp>

I'll post updates as things go; I may even have to finally start using the tag/label feature, tagging the opera-related posts for easy aggregation and reading later, should any other budding opera-writers be interested in our experiences. (I wish we had a cool logo I could put in each opera post — I'm sure that will happen down the road.) Meanwhile, if you have any encouraging thoughts to think our way, please feel free to think them!