Happy New Year!
I’ve always been a New Year’s Eve skeptic. Even when I was young, I couldn’t see the point of milling around drinking until a too-late moment arrived and everyone shouted three words…and that was the celebration. And the idea of starting a new year hung over never appealed. OK, so I’m not the Bacchanalian type!
However, I have always been attracted to the process of reflection about the year gone by, and the promise of a new slate for the coming year. So let’s do that!
Last Year
As far as Theater Ideas is concerned, in the seven months since I posted my first article, I’ve written 36 posts (a little more than one per week), and the number of subscribers now stands at 85. More importantly, y’all are very dedicated readers—my “open rate” (“The percentage of people who opened a post after receiving an email or Substack app notification about it”) is between 60% and 75%, which is simply amazing—a good open rate on Substack is generally considered 20%-40%! Thank you for your interest in reading my thoughts!
I also published online DIY Theater MFA: Growing Your Theater Skills When You Don’t Have the Time, Money, or Opportunity to Pursue a Graduate Degree and Building a Sustainable Theater: How to Remove Gatekeepers and Take Control of Your Artistic Career. I then released an ebook and paperback version of the latter. (Do you think there ought to be an audiobook version?)
Next Year
What caught my attention when I took the time to examine my “analytics” (oh, gosh, what have I become?) was that the most-read post by far last year was “A Preference for Complexity,” a fairly nuanced essay about what happens when realistic plays use a melodramatic character structure, and why audiences might find them insulting. I’m not really certain why this particular post took off. It’s possible that it’s because I used frequently-searched terms like “SEO” and “open rate” in the first part of the post and people accidentaly found it; it might be that ArtsJournal.com linked to it with a different title, which that drove some additional traffic. But I’d like to think it was more about the ideas than search terms or hyperlinks. And the ideas, while illustrated with theater references, were really about broad cultural issues. The fact that a lot of people were interested in reading it and, just as importantly (to me), that I really enjoyed writing it, got me thinking about the “now what?” of the coming year.
A lot of last year’s posts were about inside baseball issues: the nonprofit theater scene seemed to be in crisis, raising many issues that I felt connected to my interests and areas of expertise. Not only were most of my posts about those issues, but in many respects the books I released were both informed by the unfolding situation. (By the way, I’m planning to convert DIY Theater MFA to an ebook and paperback now that Building a Sustainable Theater is out. I’ll let you know when that happens.)
Anyway, I have some ideas about what I’d like to write about next, and many of them are more like “A Preference for Complexity” than, say, my back-and-forth posts with Abercrombie (which were great fun, and I offer a special thanks to Abercrombie for his willingness to publicly engage). I hope you’ll like them, because it is the type of writing I’ve always wanted to do more of.
I’ve got a new work space set up (pictured) in my study: the tall thing on the right is a CZUR scanner, which will allow me to convert print books to ebooks for easier reading and notetaking, and my laptop is being held by my Wishacc book stand. (I don’t get anything from CZUR or Amazon for those links—I just wanted to give the info to any fellow geeks reading this.) Suffice to say I’m really looking forward to spending time at my desk reading, thinking, and writing.
Happy New Year! And thanks so much for reading. I hope you have a fulfilling year!