Yesterday, Tina Connolly and Mary Crowell and I did our FIRST READ-THROUGH of our FIRST DRAFT of our FIRST EPISODE of The Devil and Lady Midnight.
The first thing Tina said was that I should play Lucy (Lucy Lumen of Lucid Theater, Theatre of the Underground…), and even though I tried to protest, I mean…
Who are we kidding? Of COURSE I wanted to play Lucy. And OF COURSE Tina knew that.
“It’s not like I’ve been anticipating this for weeks, casting it all in my head.”
She, of course, wanted to be the vampire Didier, and DIDN’T SHE ROCK IT!
We cast Mary as Mavis Day, Mr. Og, Az AND the stage directions. Of course, she’s also done recordings of all of her songs so far in that episode, which we played at the appropriate times.
One of our great discoveries was that, since this is going to be a radio play/podcast series, reading the stage directions out loud worked REALLY well, and we’re going to lean into that, transforming them into a Narrator’s voice, and by the sixth and final episode, we learn who this mysterious Narrator ACTUALLY is.
The first episode ran 38 minutes with all the songs. Yes, there are songs. Did I mention this is a MUSICAL THEATRE radio play/podcast series?
It was so magical to see the first episode as a whole, with its cold open monologue, its opening credits song, three scenes (with two songs), and outro.
It needs tightening and editing and maybe one more short song, but Horned Lords! It was SO COOL! And it really showed us that we need to be doing read-throughs regularly as we put this thing together!
We don’t really want to start editing the first episode until we have all six roughed out. Originally, we’d planned to do one really polished episode and then a very strong outline, but we’re having so much fun, and by the time we’re done with this project, we’ll have a shiny thing to present… somewhere.
To our agents? To podcast platforms? TO KICKSTARTER? To some kind of GRANT?
Who knows? But for now, our 90 minute collaboration every Wednesday has born SUCH FRUIT!
We always emerge from this virtual sessions so JAZZED. We live across the country from each other: East Coast, south Midwest, and Pacific Coast–and yet to be able to see each other regularly and work with each other like this? It’s SCRUMPTIOUS.
Our “little side project.”
So, if you don’t know Tina Connolly’s work, here are a few awesome things:
Her Seriously YA tetralogy
Her amazing adult fantasy trilogy Ironskin
Her collection On the Eyeball Floor and Other Stories
And if you don’t know Dr. Mary Crowell’s work, she just released her pandemic album I Have Missed You at My Table (click through to stream it on Bandcamp) (mostly RPG-inspired songs!!!). Plus, her album Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour is just MARVELOUS!
Also, she’s just written MY BOOK Saint Death’s Daughter a song on Patreon called “In the Bones of Her Cloak,” that I am in love with.
So that’s what we’re up to!
C.S.E. Cooney 
Reblogged this on .
Your energy and creativity are a delight to behold–sure, a whole wonderful radio/podcasty play as a side project, why not? Looking forward to it.
It’s true! We all have our own things going on, but this is sort of a delightful, consistent, exciting SIDE THING! We don’t know where it will go yet! We have some ideas and hopes! But just DOING it is delightful!