I love RuPaul's Drag Race. I think it's the smartest reality show since the first season of The Mole and far more entertaining than any of its contemporaries. It doesn't matter if you're gay, straight, old, or young (ok, maybe not appropriate for little children), if you want to see funny and talented people exhibiting their skills in pop culture relevant challenges, Drag Race will entertain you. I love doing recaps of the show. I really do. It's just a very time intensive process. If I finish a recap in under three hours, I worked surprisingly fast. That doesn't even include watching Drag Race and UnTucked! the night before. I have to figure out my angle, write the narrative, grab the supporting images, edit them for size/content/humor, edit them again so they actually come up right on the website, and obsess over whether or not a guest or contestant will come here to attack me for writing about them in a way they don't like.*
Thankfully, my recaps typically got positive responses. Willam even stopped by on occasion to throw out a quick joke or add some insight to the episode. I got a lot of traffic from the recaps, my images were shared on a bunch of message boards, and I felt good connecting with other fans.
I've mentioned it before and I'll say it again. Sketchy Details is not the end all be all of my writing. My work is all over the place and even extends into music direction, composition, and arranging.
For the past five years, I have been music directing for one local high school. They were the first group since I moved out of NYC to give me a chance and they have been very good to me ever since. Unfortunately, their shows run the second or third week of March every year.
If you've never worked on a musical, you might not realize how much work goes into the production. Even if you have worked on a show, you might not realize how much work the music director is doing outside of the theater. The only way anything gets done is if the music director takes their work home with them and works through the night to finish arrangements and fix major problems.
Two weeks out from a short run show, you go into tech. That means long, draining rehearsals that stop and start over and over until you're ready to commit yourself to the local asylum. Just when you think you might have five minutes to maybe do something with that huge folder of Drag Race screengrabs, the rehearsal picks up again and you have to focus on playing that one music cue for the twelfth time that hour.
What it comes down to is this. I've had the great fortune of picking up a lot of new writing jobs in the past few months. Some of them fell through, others are ghostwriting or editing gigs I don't get credit for and can't share with you. I also get to work in musical theater, a lifelong passion of mine, for actual pay. When choosing between the work that has to get done to keep the electricity running and the work that boosts my ego through positive reinforcement, I have to go with the cash jobs.
There was just not enough time to recap Drag Race each week and meet my standards. At best, I could have finished recaps a full week after the episode, which--in Internet time--is about five years later. I will be picking up with the recaps again next week when I should finally be caught up with all my back work.
*It happened with Drag U and the perpetrator's filthy diatribe filled with hate speech is why I have comment moderation on. No one should have to deal with that kind of language, especially in the context of a show on Logo.