News
I will attend the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference in Nassau, The Bahamas January 1 through 9.
Past Year's Accountability 2022
It has officially been a year since my first newsletter went out, and it’s time to recap 2022.
For those of you who are new, “Past Year’s Accountability” is a tradition that I began in 2008 wherein I make a list of goals or resolutions for the upcoming year, and then 12 months later, at the end of the year, I post them on my blog (or now, in my newsletter) with an explanation of which goals I accomplished and which I failed to accomplish.
The goal of PYA is manifold. The knowledge that I will have to publicly admit my failures provides motivation to avoid embarrassment and stay on task. PYA also provides a structure for thinking about the previous year.
So, without further ado, these were my goals for 2022:
1. Read 25 books
Ever since I deleted all my social media accounts and joined GoodReads, I’ve been reading more and also enjoying it more, as well as keeping better track of how much I read. My favorite books I read this year were The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (who also wrote my favorite book of 2021) and Boom Town by Sam Anderson.
Although I didn’t read as many books as 2021 (36), I still hit my goal of 25 for the year. It wasn’t as easy to read as much this year because last year I was barely employed and spent most of my days sitting in the park drinking coffee and the second half of this year I’ve been working seven days a week.
Full credit for this resolution.
2. Put on a show for Elsewhere
In the spring/summer of this year, Hilary, Katie, and I collaborated on Elsewhere’s first tour. We came up with the idea of doing a production of Twelfth Night that would perform three times. The three of us would play the same roles in each show, but we would cast the other parts locally at each stop of the tour. We started in Columbia SC (where Katie lives, and where she was in charge of producing the show, finding a venue and casting the rest of the parts), then a month later we performed in Richmond VA (where I lived and where I was in charge of producing), and a month after that, we performed in Northampton MA (where Hilary lives and was in charge of producing).
Elsewhere does some cool shit, but I think the Twelfth Night tour was the coolest thing we’ve ever done. I am super happy with how it turned out.
Full credit for this resolution.
3. Buy a house
At the end of 2021, I had been living in a renovated school bus for six months and had hated every second of it and was already thinking about my next step. I didn’t want to return to renting and so I was starting to Zillow window shop and dream of a house with a backyard where I could garden. In November of 2022 I closed on a house in North Adams, MA.
Full credit for this resolution.
4. Start Shakespeare education YouTube channel
I did some wonderful education work in 2021 and at the end of the year I gave some serious thought to starting a YouTube channel to help young people understand Shakespeare, but that idea only lasted until I actually started trying to film my first video and realized just how uncharismatic I truly am on camera.
No credit for this resolution.
5. Start Shakespeare podcast
Hilary, Katie, and I talked about starting a podcast together, and which might still happen, but definitely did not happen in 2022.
No credit for this resolution.
6. Write second draft of Why I Am So Sad
In 2020, I wrote the first draft of a novel, currently titled Why I Am So Sad, and try as I might, I cannot seem to find the time to work on a second draft of it. It was one of my failed resolutions for 2021 and now it is a failed resolution for 2022.
No credit for this resolution.
7. Learn to develop my own film
The more I grow to love shooting film, the more I want to learn to develop my own film. But this was a project I didn’t have time to take on this year.
No credit for this resolution.
8. Retire from hair
After doing hair for 11 years, I wanted to turn the page on that chapter in my life. I was burnt out and frustrated with every aspect of the job and wanted to try something else. I successfully quit doing hair in May of this year and immediately started missing it, of course.
Full credit for this resolution.
9. Get a remote writing job
Ideally, I wanted to replace my hair career with a writing career of some kind. Whether that be creative writing, or copywriting or content writing or even some kind of editing job, I wanted to be writing. Both because it is what I’ve always wanted to do and also because it would’ve been easier to keep working remotely while I traveled in the bus the first half of this year.
Getting a writing job ended up being much harder than I anticipated. I applied for dozens of jobs every week for months and never got a single interview. However, I did get a temporary contract job writing ad copy for a marketing firm in the late summer/early fall, which I mostly ended up hating anyway.
Full credit for this resolution.
10. Re-read five plays along with their respective chapters in Garber, Bloom, and Asimov (separate from resolution to read 25 books)
I realized this year how some of the plays I don’t work on as often have started to slip from my mind and I wanted to do a self-study deep dive into a few to refresh my understanding of them, but given that I barely hit my goal to read 25 books, I definitely didn’t have time to add five plays plus scholarship on them into the mix.
No credit for this resolution.
11. Write King Lear adaptation
Late last year I had the idea for a play that would be a kinda/sorta adaptation of King Lear, and I finally wrote the first draft of it in October. It’s a ~45min, 4-actor Brechtian telling of Cordelia’s life in France between when she is disowned by Lear and when she returns later with the French army to rescue him. I was super happy with it until I started letting other folks read it. Regardless, I wrote the damned thing.
Full credit for this resolution.
12. Create Odyssey site
Welch and I came up with this idea last year of creating a website that would tell the story of Homer’s Odyssey through ten different media by ten different artists. It was going to be a cool collaborative multimedia project but it never happened because most of the artists who initially agreed to participate in the project ghosted me and never worked on it, and after six months of chasing folks around and begging them to work on the project, I got super busy with other work and this fell by the wayside. I still think it’s a cool idea and hope to revive it next year.
No credit for this resolution.
13. Send out Substack newsletter every month
When I started this newsletter, I wanted to motivate myself to write consistently, the way I used to when my blog was at its peak. I had originally planned to only send it out monthly, until Stephen Welch suggested that I beef up my content by using my old blog posts as “flashback” newsletters, and go to a fortnightly schedule, and I have stuck to that schedule all year. Except for this post, which will go out a couple days after my usual two-week mark in order to go out on New Year’s Eve, I have sent out a newsletter every two weeks in 2022.
Full credit for this resolution.
So my overall success rate for 2022 was 7/13 or 53% which is actually pretty high.