Claire’s News: Kabu, Hop, Spycraft, and - most of all - The Juggle
The great thing about being freelance is, no two days are the same.
The hard thing about being freelance is, well, no two days are the same. We have been juggling quite a few balls in our house. Here are updates on a few of them:
TV
Two announcements about TV shows I was on as a writer came out recently. First, I wrote on a new animated series called Kabu, based on the Build-A-Bear franchise. Premiere date is to come, but it was fun to see the announcement here nevertheless.
Deadline and Variety also covered the fast approaching April 4 premiere on MAX, May 27 on CBC, and May 31 on CBC Gem, for a new show called Hop, which I really enjoyed working on last year. Created by the team who brought Arthur to the airwaves, the show is about a frog and his friends, and is sweet, funny and really heartwarming. I had a delightful writing room experience on this one—so watch out for it in April.
Meanwhile, I continue my writing work in the rom com movie space. I have several screenplays placed with producers, who are out there pitching networks.
In the ‘opportunity finds you working’ department, one of my New Year’s goals was to write 5 romantic Christmas spec screenplays in 5 months. Bonkers, I know. I’m midway through the third script right now—one Kirk and I are co-writing—and it’s March, so apparently I’m on track (so far). This, by the way, is only happening because I spent the back half of last year pitching and outlining these movies—they could not be written in a month if the groundwork hadn’t been laid first. The math works out to writing a very fat outline in 2 weeks, and then writing the screenplay at a rate of 8-10 pages a day. If I stick to the schedule, poof, like magic, a first draft emerges in the last week of the month, and then that week is about rereading, polishing and sending it out for feedback and implementing notes.
Still, it feels a bit like the writing version of running the Boston Marathon, or the screenwriting version of NaNoWriMo—times five.
Theatre
Not too long ago, Kirk and I got the wonderful news that we were successful in a Canada Council grant for our next play, Spycraft. The show is about a Canadian female spy who goes undercover with Churchill’s Special Operations Executive during WWII to spy on the Nazis by knitting code into ordinary garments.
This play has been in development since 2020. We wrote an outline in Paula Wing’s playwriting class at the Tarragon Theatre, and then worked with the wonderful Beverley Cooper, who dramaturged our first draft. Since then we’ve been working with Richard Greenblatt as our dramaturge/director to hone the script. And applying to grants, of course. Our favourite thing. I swear that half the writing gig is about administration, including applying for grants and other opportunities like writing incubators and contests and such. I prefer a scenario where I write all day and the rest just falls into place. Sadly, that never seems to be the case.
The Canada Council grant, for which we are so grateful, means our inaugural tour in Ontario in November, 2025 is a go. Hooray! Kirk will be designing the coded knitting for the show. Knitting is never fast, though, so he’s starting in on that adventure any day.
In mid-April, we’ll be travelling to the Pacific Contact artist-presenter conference, taking place in Kelowna this year, to hopefully sell further tours of Spycraft.
Meanwhile, we’re ramping up to a few performance dates for The Knitting Pilgrim in April. We perform at The Sanderson Centre in Brantford at 7pm, Wednesday, April 17, and Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton on Saturday, April 20. If you haven’t seen the show and you live in the Golden Horseshoe area of Ontario, now’s your chance. And don’t forget your knitting.
Other exciting news about The Knitting Pilgrim: our French translation by the wonderful Quebec-based translator, Maryse Warda, is now complete. Since 1992, Maryse has translated or adapted more than 75 plays. Her translation of George F. Walker’s Suburban Motel series earned her an award in 2000 from the Académie québécoise du théâtre, and was shortlisted for the 2001 Governor General’s Literary Award. But it's her translation of Greg MacArthur's The Toxic Bus Incident which garnered the Governor General in 2011. We are beginning the outreach process of booking this bilingual show in Quebec soon. If you are Quebec-based and are interested in booking the show, please let me know via the contact form on my website.
There are other writing projects cooking, but I will save those for another installment.
The freelance artist’s life is really a fool’s game—hum along if you know this tune. It’s peaks and valleys. Feast or famine. One more up and down idiom I can’t think of right now. You either have too many projects or you don’t have enough projects and you’re freaked out. So you sow a lot more seeds, firm in the belief that you’ll never work again. And if you’re lucky, a few of them germinate and you’re off to the races again. If you’re especially lucky—or maybe you worked hard enough—or a combination of both—a bunch of them germinate and then you’re, to put it mildly, pooched. But you never complain, because that would be a fool’s game—and you’re right back where you started.
So yes, lots of balls being juggled around here. On the days I contemplate lying on the couch for a very long time and doing nothing but gaze out the window, I think about two things that writer and author coach Bryan Cohen said in a workshop I took with him in early January. Do all the creative things you want—just know that for every major thing you add to your plate for 2024, something has to come off your plate that you were doing before. And don’t cut your sleep, cut the crap.
True enough.
Yours in the writing juggle, and happily so,
Claire