An update from last week, Constant Reader: despite the barrage of distractions (including the quite literal barrage of illegal fireworks outside my apartment), I made my deadlines. The made-for-Zoom one-act play I decided to write, henceforth to be called Trivial, was completed and submitted the day before the cut-off. I was able to complete the post-reading revisions to An Arctic Confederate Christmas on Friday, thus allowing me to enjoy the remainder of the Fourth of July weekend. (Which I mostly did holed up alone in my apartment – social distancing is still important dammit!) For the first time this summer, I’m able to actually do, y’know, summertime things.
Like a little light summer reading.
Of course, there is another deadline coming up for me; a November 15 submission deadline for the next round of the Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries competition. So if I want to have a new piece to submit this year, I’ll have to start preparing it as soon as possible – meaning that my light summer reading is all going to be research.
And of course, all these books I’ll be reading for research are books I’m going to have to buy, since public libraries still haven’t opened yet here in New York City. In some cases, the books I’m going to need to buy haven’t even been published yet; my pre-ordering game is on point.
Anyway, if you’d like to follow along with me, here’s the start of my summer reading list (alphabetical by author because that is how much of a nerd I am):
Barker, Juliet. Conquest: The English Kingdom of France
Castor, Helen. Joan of Arc
Gibson, D.W. 14 Miles: Building the Border Wall
Kurchak, Sarah. I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder
Shakespeare, William. Henry the Sixth, Part One
Simone, Rudy. Aspergirls
Thunberg, Greta. No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference
Is there any rhyme or reason to my selections? Well, I think there could be. There’s certainly a couple of recurring motifs in the list above – but how on earth do they all fit together? Sadly, I can’t give any sort of definitive answer to that yet, since the whole point of the research is to figure out exactly how to make them fit together.
In any event, I’d be liable to get funny looks from folks if I brought these to read at the beach. Thank heavens for the aforementioned social distancing, then.