Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 24

The Green Bird is coming to Chicago this June 3 – June 12

Here’s some exciting news I’ve been eager to share with you.The Cuckoo’s Theater Projectin Chicago will be presenting The Green Bird from June 3rd-June 19th, 2016. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to attend as I hoped and it’s absolutely killing me to miss it, but that’s all the more reason for you to go and see what’s looking to be a wonderful production of juggling, masks and more!

For more information about the production and for a great gallery of pictures and bios of the cast and...

Pausing my novel revision for a bit to go back to being a playwright

While I’m not exactly live tweeting my revision (though a bunch of people are on Twitter and it’s very useful to see other writers going through the process to know you’re not alone), I’ve been trying to post regular-ish updates here to give you an idea of how it’s going. Revising my MG novel, based on one of my plays, has been my main priority for a few monthsand the going is, well, going, but slowly.

But I’veput it aside from now. Not because I’m stuck or because I’m not making forward prog...

Three Padded Walls is now available for purchase & licensing at YouthPLAYS

My meta suspense drama, Three Padded Walls, is now available through YouthPLAYS. That means they’ve got printable eScripts and bound acting editions (with an extended Q & A session with yours truly I think you’ll enjoy) up for sale as well as a very generous preview that lets you read all but the last few lines of the play for free right now! YouthPLAYS isalso the only place where you can license productions for amature, school or professional use.

With a runtime of around 10 minutes, majori...

Quickie answering some reader questions on my Self-Publishing a Stage Play series

This is post 13 of 13 in the series “Self-Publishing a Stage Play”

Here’s a super quickie continuing mySelf-Publishing a Stage Play series. This is a question I got from a reader and I’m sharing what I replied. Remember, you can read all the other posts in this series by clicking on the series title box just above this line. It will expand into a Table of Contents of the whole series.

I am a playwright. I was considering Kindle for online publishing
(despite their 30% forever royalty – I fi...

A Playwriting Parent Reviews: Action! Writing Your Own Play by Nancy Loewen

As both a playwright and a parent, it delighted me when my daughter starting integrating playwriting into her games. She’s always telling me about the play she’s writing and every keyboard is an opportunity for her to work on “her script” (which sounds way better than any of mine BTW). While the pretending is adorable, I wondered if there was a way to both encourage it and turn into into a learning opportunity.

Action! Writing Your Own Play by Nancy Loewen

Then I discovered Action! Writing Yo...

Plot twist! I’m *not* closing my eBay store.

So, um, er… This is awkward but I, uh, completely messed up. Remember how I told you I was closing my eBay store because of the new price increase? Yeah… about that.

Photo by wolfgangfoto

I was pissed at eBay for raising the price of a Basic eBay store to $24.95 a month because I was paying $14.95 a month on the yearly rate and a $10 increase a month was too much for what they were offering. I’d been taking on less Selling Assistant clients and listing less items anyway so I decided it was t...

Can you give your play a wider retail footprint if it’s already traditionally published?

This is post 12 of 12 in the series “Self-Publishing a Stage Play”

Self-publishing a play can be a good idea and I covered a bunch of questions on that over in this big post. But I’ve since gotten some follow up questions to that big post and wanted to make a little series of the answers. One of the things I cover in that big post was the value of having your play listed on sites like Amazon and how that can increase its discoverability even without all the other factors. (Side note: I rece...

A quickie from the mailbag on self-publishing and imprint names

This is post 11 of 12 in the series “Self-Publishing a Stage Play”

Also, I noticed that your books have their own publishing moniker: Hilarity Ensues. How can I get my own imprint if I’m using CreateSpace? It seems like they don’t give you that option.

I have a registered LLC that I own and we also possess the Trading As name, Hilarity Ensues. In that capacity, our accounts are under the business name with both Bowker and CreateSpace. I don’t know if our account is any different from the o...

Selling… out! Transitioning from PowerSeller to casual seller.

It’s the end of an era! As I mentioned in this post, I’m closing my eBay Store. This doesn’t really mean muchasI’ll still be selling on eBay and other platforms. But it does represent a big shift that’s been going on behind the scenes.

I used to have thousands of items listed in my store at a time, now I have less than 100 items up for sale. I used to juggle two or three Trading Assistant clients at a time, signing new ones every time I finished a contract, and now I’ve only got one with no i...

April 2016: Camp NaNoWriMo & the revision that wouldn’t die

“I can’t believe it’s already May,” I said to my husband. “Everything is moving so fast! …Except for the election which is taking FOREVER!” I’m not one to talk politics much online but I will say this: Every election makes me feel like we just need to burn the whole thing down and start over and I think this year might be the very worst yet. Could the whole dang process BE more broken?… Read more

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