Tag: Geoff Micks

A Play: Performance Evaluation

This piece was originally featured on my personal blog, Face In The Blue.

I remember writing this in a single enthusiastic sitting. It came very easily to me. At the time I was working at a Call Centre for Sprint Canada, so the cubicled workplace was more than a theoretical setting for me. I had also just seen Office Space, so I tried to incorporate what I liked about that into my scene. One of my favourite television shows at the time was the old Brit-Com Yes, Minister, so I adapted a line from that too.

It hasn’t aged as well as my other short play, The Artists’ Farce: The passage of time has left Bill Gates and floppy disks behind, but I guess if you keep in mind it was written in the late 90s it works as well now as it did then. A couple of friends and I acted it out in a drama class later that year, and I remember one of my classmates really threw himself into the gag of falling off his stool… We had a lot of fun with it. Anyway, here it is:

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A Play: The Artists’ Farce

This work was originally featured on my personal blog, Face In The Blue.

I took OAC Writer’s Craft in my last year of high school, and I loved it. A lot of students took the course looking to boost their grade point average, but most of them ran into difficulty producing a coherent and entertaining plot under a tight deadline. I had been writing short stories and a couple of aborted novels for a number of years at that point, so I was pretty good at thinking up something quick and getting it all down in one long rush of pen and paper. Looking back through my notebooks now, most of my work hasn’t aged very well, but there are a couple of things I did then that I still rather enjoy.

The following one-scene play (I guess it could be called a skit…) is something I remember being quite proud of at the time, so I dug it out of a box the last time I visited my parents, and I’ve given it a quick coat of polish to make it blog worthy. It’s a farce between two pretentious artists orbiting around a very fragile, very valuable sculpture. My teacher loved it: In addition to writing, he also taught music, drama, and directed the school musical every year, so big egos from not-so-big talents were familiar territory for him. This play took his fancy to such an extent that we acted it out for the class the next day. Maybe it was the fact that this saved everyone five or ten minutes of actual school work, but it seemed to be well received. Anyway, here’s the play:

Continue reading “A Play: The Artists’ Farce”

Faceintheblue is giving it a try this year

Hello everyone,

My name’s Geoff Micks. I’ll be trying my hand at NaNoWriMo for the first time this year. My profile on NaNoWriMo is called Faceintheblue. My personal blog is faceintheblue.wordpress.com. You can also follow me on Twitter.

I’ve written a couple of manuscripts so far, and one of them is under review by a literary agency at the moment. I write historical fiction, but for the shorter and more spontaneous medium of NaNoWriMo I think I’d like to try something closer to Kurt Vonnegut’s style. I have an idea for a plot, and my hope is that it will prove to be an organic, stream-of-conscious narrative that will lend itself well to three or four thousand words a day. I’ll be sure to post updates here and on my own blog.

I look forward to sweating my way through November hunched over a keyboard. Cheers!