Laura's blog

As an actor, you're given a script and a character and told to go from there. You have to figure out why that character does what they do, and then you have to commit to that and sell it to an audience who will (hopefully) be engaged. And if they do not care about the character, they likely will not be engaged. This even goes for the school of thought that says audiences shouldn't be totally immersed and sympathetic -- but if they don't care about what they are seeing onstage, then why should they care enough to critique or think about what they are seeing? So: you get a script and a character, someone who is not you, whose motives and actions may be totally incomprehensible. And you have to figure out why.  Writing and revising are a bit like that.  I'm currently rehauling That Novel I Wrote In High School* (yes, it is about as bad as it sounds) (and technically I wrote it in high school, finished it in college, and wrote the second book in college) and it's ...

Things took an unexpected turn for the worse last Friday when a trip to the health clinic ended up with me in the emergency room. For a little under a week, I had been feeling dizziness, weakness, nausea, blurred or randomly unfocusing vision, difficulty concentrating and putting words together, and a laundry list of other weird symptoms that added together to make "I feel like crap and I can't blame it on my usual spaciness." When I had what I thought was a fever on Friday, I decided enough was enough and went to the clinic at the local Wal-mart. That's my litmus test for sickness: have a fever, see a doctor.  They listened to my symptoms, got very confused and concerned, took my vitals, and did some tests. While I had teeth-chattering chills, I didn't have a fever -- but my blood pressure was low enough to make them alarmed and my symptoms were bad enough that I didn't feel safe driving. They called me a taxi and sent me to the ER.  This experience fuc...