I have a friend, Dorothy, who recently described my current shenanigans as sounding like; two best friends playing out together, one says “I’ll be a cowboy” and the other says “Yes, I’ll be a cowgirl” and they build the story together, playing it out as they go and having the best time doing it.
She’s right. I’m having a ball.
My Co-Conspirator-In-The-Dark-Arts has already, quite deftly, co-opted me into two rather good ideas. One leans fully into my love of Christmas. The other is more of a challenge, which I’m enjoying learning and researching.

So naturally, when he suggested a third show, besides the others and the manuscript already underway, I should have paused. But no, in my relatively usual gung-ho fashion I started working through ideas.
He rejected several literary and musical ideas with a level of disinterest,  and I quote “Zzzzzz”, and then immediately engaged when the tone shifted darker. This is, in hindsight, entirely consistent with some of his literary interests, musical instincts and the longer-form manuscript we are already building together. And so, Dracula: Nocturne appeared.

What this seems to involve, at least at this stage, is sitting with a nineteenth-century text and dismantling it. Not rewriting in the usual sense, it’s something more specific than that. I’m taking the words of a man, written in 1897 and filtering them through a woman’s voice. Recollective, not immediate. Adjusting tense and shifting perspective. Keeping the structure intact while altering the lens through which it is experienced. Which probably sounds straightforward until you try it. And the Curator-Of-Increasingly-Questionable-Ideas thinks it’s good.

Because the original text has a restraint, a way, at first, of building the taste of fear rather than naming it outright.  It’s not as simple as translation, but preservation. Curation perhaps. And we have to do all of that while making it work for a modern audience, performed live, potentially underscored and performed as music that didn’t exist when the text was written. It’s a new kind of puzzle, what might this sound like? How do we avoid parody? How can it keep the weight of the original text? What does Gothic sounds like now? And no The Cure isn’t it.
Thankfully The-Architect-Of-My-Current-Chaos is musically brilliant and he has ideas, which is great because I’m as musical as a fish. I can’t carry a tuna at all.

The project is either a very good idea or complete madness. At the moment, it feels like both and my Gothic-Accomplice is an outrageous enabler who immediately goes and registers a domain and builds a page, making those circling whimsical thoughts into reality. This one is somewhere between adaptation and creation and certainly between past and present.

I, meanwhile, appear to have wandered into this universe where the Bearer-Of-Increasingly-Complex -Ideas and I are having a jolly old time, and I made myself quite comfortable.
What madness is this? It is, apparently, the kind I have been cheerfully paddling in for a while now, not noticing as the water got deeper and now I’m all in. I can’t say I mind, I’m having the best time.