It started with a kiss. Forty years ago today: July 30. Sometimes I think my life really started with that kiss. The kiss wasn’t planned. It just happened. It was the night before we opened our show: Nails. A bunch of us had gone out drinking to celebrate Deb’s birthday. And her friend dropped me…
Yesterday, I made a thing. A reel, actually. A short video. And it wasn’t for a play I’m in. Or for a concert I’m promoting. It was just a message about creativity. You can check it out here. I’ll confess. It was an exercise for video bootcamp that I’m taking. But I did it. I…
There’s a time in the writing process, at the beginning, where it’s just hard. It’s a lot of effort to write when the story isn’t quite there. Every day, you struggle to get things moving until you get a rhythm going. At some point, if you’re lucky, you get the snowball effect where the idea starts…
I’ve been working on my new play idea since March. I keep calling it draft zero, because I really don’t know what it is about yet. I have a vague big picture idea. I can sort of see the forest. But I don’t know the story. I don’t know what happens. I can’t see the…
I started May writing a post about creativity. Here we are into the final week of the month and that’s the only post that I’ve written so far. But it has been a very creative month! I’ve spent my creativity in other areas than blog post writing. It’s been a great month for my playwriting.…
This week, I was at a play reading committee for a community theatre group. We were discussing twelve plays that we had all read over the last few weeks. The group is trying to determine the playbill for an upcoming season. We come from different walks of life and have different tastes. It wasn’t easy…
I remember when the book The Creative Act by Rick Rubin came out a few years ago. I didn’t read it then, but I was aware of it. I considered buying the book because I’m fascinated with creativity. I decided to take it out of the library instead of buying it. It wasn’t available at…
Sometimes I get mad at myself because I don’t write as much as I think I should. I don’t reach out to the people I want to touch base with. I don’t read the books I buy or take out from the library. I don’t exercise when I know I should. So many things I…
My year, the Groon Year, ends in late February. But it’s hard not to reflect on the calendar year as December comes to an end. And I realized that I haven’t posted about a milestone that I reached in the late summer. I became an International Playwright! Yes, one of my plays had a staged…
I found out last night that I won’t be playing Vanya in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. At least not any time soon. Not only did I not get the part — I didn’t even get a callback. Talk about adding insult to injury. Oh well. I’ll be honest. It stung. It always…
peter gruner 