The Radio-Play experience

Black Bottle Man has had two lives.
First, it was a novel. During a vacation at Clear Lake, Manitoba it struck me that by attributing specific lines to the various characters it could make an interesting a radio play.
Lisa Vasconcelos, producer of Mecca Productions gave me the green light. After a few weeks of rehearsal, the eighteen actors who participated in the staged reading of ‘Rembrandt’ (as it was then called) gave us three excellent performances.
The opportunity to hear the interplay between actors and to watch and listen to the audience response was invaluable. Hearing it performed as a radio-play it helped me cut anything superfluous.
My excellent editor at Great Plains Publications, Anita Daher has remarked on how clean the manuscript was, and I would credit the radio-play process with paring away any narrative fat.
After the Brandon performances, ‘Rembrandt’ was briefly considered by the Manitoba Theatre Center. But (and I think quite rightly) they felt it was too long for a stage production, and was still very much grounded in the novel format.
One should really try to listen to that kind of advice, so I said, “Right, it is a novel.”, applied the same cuts to the book and sent it out to publishers, tighter and stronger from the experience.