Category Archives: UpstageProject

UpstageProject, workstyle, writing

Planama

Amina and I are at Gimme, working on more UpstageProject documents. Everyone in the world in Ithaca is coming through this coffeehouse – in their variations of dressing for thirty degree weather.

She’s writing on big sheets of newsprint and I’m typing, and we’re dividing up editorial responsibilities between the blog, articles/essays, and reviews/interviews departments.

I feel like a broken record continuing to say this, but I had always assumed that we would launch this site like a baby bird and just let it struggle and sink or swim – but, with Amina’s help and her planning brain, we’re giving it so many good resources. We’re being planned parents. Very responsible.

So we’ve divided up the site into three major sections – Blog, Reviews/Interviews, and Articles/Essays – and we’re listing frequency of posting, editorial responsibilities, writing responsibilities, and resources needed for each one.

I sometimes am intimidated by making planning documents. I would rather just start working and realize what planning we haven’t done later, when it stabs us in the back.

But it’s nice to try doing something the right way for once.

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UpstageProject

The Sky is Falling!

It was snowing when we woke up this morning – only the second time in my life I’ve ever seen falling snow, and the first was in Berlin, the night before we left to go back to the US. Light snow, soft and white.

Really good session last night on UpstageProject. Amina and I reviewed the various different kinds of things we want to go on the site, and decided that most of them can fit into the category of either blog posts or articles. I had divided articles up into a bunch of other things, but it’s a little unnecessary. So we’re working with a much simpler model now.

She is interested in streamlining our workflow, particularly the editorial review process. We want this website to be like a real magazine, where your work gets commented on by an editor and goes through multiple drafts – but it’s a lot of work for our small volunteer staff, and we want to make sure we’re not overwhelming anyone.

Amina has a lot of experience, from Telluride and other places, in how to create a workflow model that will last. I’m really relieved to have her helping with this.

To this end, we’re not going to NYC tomorrow, but are going to stay in Ithaca and continue working over the weekend. This also gives me more time to get the Convergence script the way I want it.

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interviews, UpstageProject, workstyle

Are you volunteering to do that?

I spent today revising the Bylaws and Practices pages for UpstageProject, in preparation for another collaboration session with Amina tonight. I was surprised in doing it to find myself more interested in being editor of the Reviews & Interviews section than of the Articles. Part of this is probably from having had such a good experience doing the Crossover Interviews earlier this year, but I realized that I just have way too many opinions about what constitutes good or self-indulgent reviewing and interviewing in theater.

I remember a woman who I had some meetings with at Stanford who said that her standard response to people who suggested doing new things was:

“Are you volunteering to do that?”

She took a lot of pleasure in saying it in a really nasty tone of voice, to shoot them down, but I think it is a good principle – sometimes when you care about it that much, you should do it yourself.

Or else stay as far away from it as possible. I sometimes think I get in my own way. Excessive passion for something can be the enemy of getting it done. I spent too much time before this retreat with Amina agonizing about HOW to make the bylaws perfect, and not enough on actual revision.

Amina has suggested that it might be better to have me floating as an editor-at-large, to fill in gaps and/or be able to take over for people if needed. She’s probably right. I will remain open to any permutation on this.

We are using GoogleGroups, for the moment, to maintain our documents in progress. I still find PBWiki easier to use, and it loads faster, but in their respective free versions, GoogleGroups is a more powerful tool.

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UpstageProject

The UpstateProject retreat

began officially last night, at the Cayuga Street location of Gimme! Coffee in Ithaca. Amina had copies of the bylaws and the responses of the rest of the Editorial Board to that first draft, and we revised them. We worked on paper (which is such a satisfying way to edit) and we wore name tags that said “Hello, my name is Dave Julavits” and “Hello, my name is Heidi Eggers,” in respectful homage to MIGHT, MCSWEENEY’S, and especially THE BELIEVER.

I have been dreading this task ever since I sent out the first draft of said bylaws, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. I couldn’t have done it without Amina. We got through it in less than an hour. Drafting a “Procedures” document will be more complicated.

UpstageProject.com, when launched, is something I’ve wanted to get going ever since seeing Bookslut on the Internet and wondering why there was nothing like that for theater We’re trying to put together an ambitious website for theater opinion and blogging, with a group of editors – with room for articles, longer reviews, commentary, and analysis.

It’s going to grow organically – we want to take time to set up a good structure for it, and we want to establish a group of people who feel collective responsibility. There’s no lead editor. Decisions are made unanimously.

How on earth have I gotten to this point in my life without starting a magazine? I hope I can learn from whatever mistakes I made in starting theater companies. I don’t want to start any more founder-driven organizations where responsibility falls to one person. I think one of the reasons that the Convergence retreat went so well last week, and that work on it continues to go well (Caitlin and Robert are having lots of meetings) is that it was collective work.

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F&F, UpstageProject

867-5309

I took an evening to catch up on phone calls. I talked to Amina and Sari at length today. Good for the soul. And Zack. We are making progress towards the UpstageProject website. Slow but real progress, like buying the domain name. It’s totally going to be the Bookslut of theater. If such a thing is possible. Blogs, news, articles, all that and a ball of chips. I mean a bag of chips. Or a barrel of wax. Or something.

Zack also helped me make daraweinberg.com redirect here. And Amina is really being careful about making sure we don’t make things too hard for ourselves.

We almost retitled the site “The Lazy Man’s Theater Weblog.” We want to have rotating subtitles – so the subtitle can change every day – like how Google has new images appear…

I am blessed in my friends who are wise in the ways of the Internet. And of journalism, and San Antonio. And the world. In fact, I think my friends are, in general, so wise that I can go on being as blissfully wrong about everything else as I always am.

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