Now what?

I'm never as interested in what I'm doing now, as I am in what I'm doing next.

Now that I have finished Les Voyages Fantastique, I'm on the lookout for my next creative project. I took out my notebooks and determined that I have 53 ideas I would like to pursue.
It might seem like a lot, but it's pretty easy to narrow these things down. In the years that I've been making lists of projects my tastes have changed, my style has refined, my interests at this time have a particular leaning and my current working conditions make some projects more do-able than others.
I've narrowed it down to about a half a dozen projects I'm really interested in, and one that particularly strikes my fancy is a project I started a couple of years ago - Flash Gordon.
When I performed King Kong as a storytelling show, I presented it as a ninety-minute story and as a three-part serial. After that I wanted to do a longer serial, and since I love of old-timey science fiction, I decided to start work on Flash Gordon.
I worked out the first episode, but then I got busy with other projects and just left poor Flash to languish until someone booked him.
Well, time's have changed: my POV is much more focused, my style is more mature and I have a my own monthly venue where I get to perform whatever my heart desires.

Flash Gordon comes with his own challenges, firstly is setting. Not the physical setting, that's the planet Mongo, but the temporal setting. And not just the temporal setting of the story, but the temporal style of the writing. You can only guess what the future is like based on the present.

Case in point, a different Buster Crabbe serial, Buck Rogers: Buck and his buddy Buddy wake up in the 25th century. Dr. Huer verifies their story by looking it up in a book. In 1939 when the serial was developed there was no such thing as a computer, let alone an interconnected network of computers containing every bit of data, so the writers could imagine things like teleportation and inter-planetary travel, but not something really far-fetched like the digitization of personal data.
Or, in the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, Leslie Nielson and his crew fly to Altair IV in a faster-than-light vessel, but when Nielsen addressed his crew, he did so by talking into a big microphone with a long cord. A radio that transmits to a ship flying faster than radio waves is imaginable, but a hand-held wireless microphone just simply didn't occur to the writers.

So, I want to portray the story as if it was told in a different time period. In the 1930s there were no man-carrying rockets, heck the only rockets didn't even look like rockets as we know them. The only flying machines anyone might have even a passing notion of was an aeroplane (not even an airplane, an aeroplane).
Things like this were just guessed at, and that is what makes it so gosh-darn charming.

In addition to the temporal style of the telling, there's an aesthetic quality that I need to take into consideration as well. I talked a bit about this when I covered the development of LVF, there's a "look and feel" that applies when a story is told.
Sometimes you can throw this to the wind for affect - when I tell the story Cobweb Christmas, it's obviously an old-world setting, but when Father Christmas sneaks into Tante's house late at night, I describe the TV as going "ssssshhhhhhhh" which is so out of place that it's jarring, but anyone who grew up in the world before 24 hour cable TV laughs out-loud.

For look and feel I'm toying with three different ideas, each one brings it's own temporal setting:

The classic 1930s serial - sparkler-spouting rockets, lots of fisticuffs, and every scientific device has a Jacob's ladder sticking out of the top.
1980s plastic toy setting - big, colorful spaceships, chunky ray guns, TV screens and big, clunky computers - think Buzz Lightyear.
19th century - Jules Verney, HG Wellsy. Imagine the original illustrations from War of the Worlds, and 20000 Leagues Under the Sea - big clanky machines with lots of rivets (remember, welding wasn't used on a wide scale at that time), rocket pistols and the mysterious power of electricity. Again, the attempt is to portray the story as written in the period, not in retrospect. In the book the Nautilus is plain and cigar-shaped, not at all like the cool Disney version.

With all that in mind, I must also remark that I'm honestly not interested in doing science fiction, I'm more interested in what they call "Sword and Planet" - not so much science as romantic high adventure - which is really what I'm all about.

It was a brilliant battle!

At Escondido, well at all of the libraries in San Diego, the average age of a daytime audience is usually pre-K, so I was a little concerned about performing Les Voyages Fantastique. It's a thirty-five minute story with lots of kookie things going on and a climactic battle of four men versus an army of ten thousand sabre-wielding infantry, five thousand musketeers, two-thousand mounted cavaliers, hundred of mahouts on the backs of great war elephants, generals in their silken tents, and the Sultan of Zalidan himself, standing atop a great white war elephant, his scimitar flashing in the air.
This is the kind of thing that can easily get out of hand. Telling the tale of a battle in graphic detail is fun, but it involves great quantities of violence, gore and death. I had many months ago decided that a bloody battle is not the sort of thing for this story, and perhaps something I should avoid in general. I wanted this to be a heroic escapade, told in lots of thrilling vignettes speeding at the audience like a machine gun, but my fear was that a pre-K audience would be overwhelmed.
Like the GI Joe cartoon from the eighties, wherein if a helicopter was blown up you always saw parachutes, so was my battle against the Sultan - sabres were shot from hands, elephants spun about by their trunks and thrown like bowling balls scattered men, unharmed, in all directions, and musket balls caught speeding through the air before any chance of an injury. It was a brilliant battle. I, of  course was armed with a sabre in each hand, and took on as many men as were willing to face me - because it was only sporting to give them the advantage of numbers.
All in all, it was a fantasy story, and the battle was a fantasy battle. I have a bad habit of wanting to explain everything. But, with this story I learned that, in a fantasy, you don't need to explain everything, things just are the way they are (Yes it's a pirate ship suspended from balloons. No, I don't know how many hot air balloons would actually be required to lift a pirate ship. But, I do know that the hot breath of a hundred elephants won't actually lift a hot-air balloon - it just paints a cool picture). And, it's more fun to narrate the clashing of sabres than to describe a man being hacked apart with a battle ax.
The audience turned out to be older than I expected, about 6 through 10, plus parents, and I gave them the best delivery of my life, keeping them on the edge of their seats the whole time. I was incredibly pleased with myself. And, although the battle was furiously delivered, it was fun, funny and exciting - it wasn't a real war in all it's bloody detail, it was a heroic escapade, the kind of adventure that stirs the soul of a young boy.

And the verdict is...

After nearly eight months in development, I performed Les Voyages Fantastique last week at my local library in Escondido.
Towards the end I was getting a little worried. I had only practiced it once or twice with my bucket. (For those of you who haven't seen me perform in person, I have a five-gallon bucket with a state of Texas License plate on the side, and a seat for a lid, that I use to transport my gear to shows) I was using my bucket as a prop - the cannonball upon which I rode, the place I set my head while awaiting execution, and the seat I could "pop up" from when I needed to appear bigger than life (more on that later).
Besides only getting one or two practices with my bucket, I was beginning to worry that the show might not appeal to the audience. This wasn't standard fair, there was no repetition, not a lot of obvious laughs, the entire story is first person and it grows more and more complex as the characters interact with each other. I was also worried in that I didn't get time to make an outfit for the show, and that I dropped the music.
In the end it worked - fantastically. The literary tie-in worked great for the library, the framing story of me, as a young boy, perfectly meshed with summer reading, and my delivery went great.
I started out talking about reading adventure stories, or as Jules Verne called them, Les Voyages Fantastique, in bed and then segued into the actual story (I thought it was a great segue too). As the story progressed, over the next thirty-five minutes, my "Charles Emerson Winchester" accent grew thicker and thicker until the climax, and then into the denouement I dropped it - indicating the return to the normal world.
I have never received a response like this from an audience that young, they literally exploded in applause.
I learned a great deal about project development and story writing with this program. But, most importantly, I learned a lot about delivering this type of action-adventure story to a gentler audience without the constant barrage of scary-violence.
A great time was had by all!

The true story

For the last couple of weeks I've been doing a lot of pacing over Les Voyages Fantastique.
When I first conceived the notion, I really had just the germ of an idea - a story, told in the style of Baron Munchausen, built from the bones of several other stories, strung together into a single 40-minute tale. But, except for a drawing of a flying ship, I really didn't have much when I set out to sell it to the libraries. I knew I would have a great show in the end, but it's difficult to explain an idea when you really don't know what it is yourself: "I don't know what it will be, other than good - trust me."
I knew the kind of thing I wanted to do, and I started throwing ideas onto my board. When I went into the studio to start writing I looked at my mood board and pulled stories from it one at a time and just started telling them to the couch. This one fit good here, that one fits good there. At that point I had a story about an anonymous European commander who rides a cannon ball, pilots a flying ship, commands an extraordinary crew, is swallowed by a whale and takes on an entire army of sword-wielding Turks. That's good, that's fun, but that's not really what the story is about.

"When I was a boy I dreamt of a life filled with adventure."

The story is not about Baron Munchausen, Commander McBragg, or whoever, and their amazing adventures, the story is about a little boy - me - who stays up late each night reading adventures by flash light, and dreaming those adventures, placing himself in the role of the hero - it's a true story.

It's the very reason I love my work so much, it's my "why" for being a storyteller. I tell stories because they make me feel the way I felt when I was a boy, dreaming of a life filled with adventure.

Writing Methodology

I've been working quite a bit on Les Voayages Fantastique lately. I noticed with this project that my writing methodology has changed quite a bit. Just a few years ago I would sit at the computer and write a draft of a story, or re-write an existing tale in my own words and then tweaking, re-writing and refining for hours. More recently, particularly with this project, I go into my studio with a hand-held recorder and a stop watch and I do all my "writing" while pacing. I find that the end result is less perfect but far more entertaining and is never the same twice.

Mood Board - what a great idea

Here's my mood board for Les Voyages Fantastique as of today:

 

(Please excuse the quality, I'm going on vacation tomorrow and I've already packed my camera)

As you can see I've been adding to it as I've developed the idea.

It's really a fantastic method of ideation when all you really have is a germ of an idea.

I wound up taking material from Rudolph Erich Raspe, Andrew Lang, Terry Gilliam, Rudyard Kipling and the Arabian nights. Here's my Roc:

Each element is a great story in it's own right, but when boiled down to just the conflict portion of the story, and strung together with conflicts from other stories, they form a singular long adventure tale that lends itself to great flowery adventure talk.

At first blush it might not seem to tie into the library's theme of Dream Big, but the very thing that guides all my telling is the pure pleasure of adventurous day dreaming:

And, although the caption says, "When I was a boy" it's just as true today as it was then - why just the other day I sat behind the fan and shot down fokkers over Prussia.

Learning a new instrument

Development of my summer reading program, Les Voyages Fantastique, is really starting to take shape.
I started out with a germ of an idea, based on a particular telling style, and some stories I'd like to tell. It really wasn't cohesive until I decided on a Kipling story to do - How the Whale got his Throat, and with that, the whole idea gelled into an order of stories that I can connect into one continuous telling:
Fool of the World/Six Men Who Travelled the World, How the Whale Got his Throat, and Baron Munchausen's ride on a Cannon Ball.
I have framed the whole thing very nicely, told in the first person, in my usual, physical style, but I've yet to figure out an ending.

I have also picked up a fife, to bring the music with a proper military-march style. It took me about two days just to get a sound out of the thing, I had no idea it would be so tough to play, but I finally got some music out of it. Here's one of my first attempts: