My dear friend

I hope this email finds you in the company of (or at least in close proximity to) someone who loves you.

My primary personal task at the moment is finishing the script of my new show, Who Killed Gough Whitlam? I’m pleased with the opening:

In 2025 a woman in Adelaide, South Australia parked at the back of IKEA and crossed the road to the airport. At the ticketing counter she cashed in her points from Officeworks and Foodland, boarded a plane for Paris via Dubai, then quietly disappeared. I’m Tracy Crisp and this is the story of a woman, her dog, and the friends who would reunite them.

Actually, looking at that opening isolated from the short introduction and the following paragraph, it sounds a little dark. It is kind of dark I guess, but the intention is for it to be light-hearted. Who Killed Gough Whitlam is the first in a cosy mystery series centred around a group of friends in a stitching group. (Currently called the Thread Zeppelins—suggestions for names welcome, I’m terrible at titles).

I’m calling this the pilot episode. The show that seeds a new world and characters who will inhabit my performance and novels over the coming few years. I’ll do this show, and then a series of smaller readings through the year; and I’m about half-finished the manuscript of a novel that tells this same story but in much more depth.

I have always loved soap operas and series. From Dallas to A Country Practice to Days of Our Lives, to EastEnders, I love every subspecies of soap. I love the finite worlds with the infinite tangents; the characters who wind themselves in and out of each other’s lives; the bending of time and the twisting of ages. To watch a soap is to visit a world that is always unchanged but never the same.

For a long time, I’ve been trying to work out how to create a fictional world that is a little bit soapy but a little bit not. Something that works across formats; and something that I could sustain across a series. And I am LOVING that I think I’ve found it.

Something strange has happened: I’m enjoying writing. I’m enjoying writing a lot. I wake up each morning and I am looking forward to getting to my desk; to uncovering more of my characters’ richness; to seeing their world grow. I’ve still got the constant low-level humming of underlying stress that I always have this time of year when I’m getting something ready for performance; but knowing that this is part of a series and that there’s more to come is unexpectedly freeing.

I have been asking myself this question: Why would that be? Why does that feel so freeing? is it the switch from memoir to fiction with no need to excavate more of my own life’s meaning? Is it because I’ve mapped out my writing life for a little while to come and don’t have to generate workable stories from a standing start? Is there psychological value in an open-ended project?

Perhaps one of the reasons I’m feeling like this is because I have left the hussle behind. Putting on a show at the Adelaide Fringe is, in many ways, a bit of a blood sport, with all of us waving and calling, Come and see my show! Come and see my show! The program this year includes around 1,500 shows. All trying to attract not just an audience, but reviewers, judges, producers, media. It’s a lot, and if you let it, this can take a real toll on your sense of…well, as I tried to find the right word, I realised there’s a lot of words you could insert here. Well-being is definitely over-used, but I will say this aspect of the fringe experience can really get you down and take a toll on your well-being. When you look around, it feels as if everyone is always selling more tickets, getting more (and better) reviews, winning more prizes, getting more future bookings. And it feels that way because mostly it is true.

I have learned over the years to put on blinkers, to focus on my own work, to not get distracted by comparison. And I do have a lovely loyal group of friends, family and other people who will come along and make sure I’m not feeling too alone. But this year, there is also something about this being the first in a series that has allowed me to take a rest from the hussle. I can’t quite put my finger on what, but I am going to keep trying to work it out, because it will be useful to remember in future years.

I think one element might be that I’m at peace with the limits of what I can realistically do to attract an audience in the context of fringe. I’m not going to give Meta any money for paid advertising. And the opportunities for organic reach have slowed. I sat in a workshop about Instagram a few weeks ago and they were explaining the changes that AI is making to the algorithm and to searching and to being found on Insta. I realised that the gap between people and organisations who create insta content and the rest of us is now so enormous that I can’t possibly bridge it. Freeing! (It has not quite reached the stage where we are divided between those of us who use it as a digital marketing tool and those of us who use it as social media to keep up with friends and so on, but I think it’s almost there).

And one last thing. I think setting myself up to fail has been a game changer. This year, I have moved into a theatre that I cannot possibly fill. In the venue that I have made my performance home, there are three theatre spaces with capacity of 25, 50 and 200 seats. For the last three years I have been in the 50-seat theatre and sold out every season. I’ve been really careful in planning the season with the right number of nights that would let me grow, but also sell out. Since my first season of Pearls (eight years ago), I’ve been trying to optimise the right nights and the number of matinees and checking whether the moon was waxing or waning. Okay, no I never did an astrological analysis, but I tried to not leave much to chance.

Obviously, selling out a season is fantastic fun and extremely rewarding. But for a bunch of creative, financial and practical reasons it was time to make a change. So I’ve gone from 50 seats to 200. If there had been an option for something in the middle—say 90 or 120—I would have gone with that. But the option wasn’t there so I couldn’t take it. Again obviously, there is absolutely no way I will be selling out. While I do have a target (+10% on last year’s sales), this knowledge that I have no chance of selling out has given me a sense of lightness that was completely unexpected. After years of meticulously planning the number of seats and nights and which days and how many matinees, this year I’ve pretty much set myself up to fail. And it feels like exactly the right thing to do. Weird.

I suppose in a way I have built in a bit of a safety net, because I’ve booked the small space for the follow up readings during the year. They will be the first Sunday night of each month. I’m really looking forward to creating work across the year rather than in just one or two intense bursts. (I’m also looking forward to getting stuck back into the novel manuscript in a couple of weeks once I’ve got this show bedded down).

Of course the underlying truth of all this is that in the context of everything (I won’t even start trying to list it all) a little show in a little town doesn’t matter all that much. I hope that the people who come and share this time with me enjoy it. I hope it gives them a laugh, a sense of community, a moment of surprise. But on a micro-level if my personal problem is that I only sell +0% on last year’s sales, or that my favourite joke doesn’t land then that’s okay. Because there really is a lot going on, isn’t there? (And that’s why I do hope that this email finds you in the company of (or at least in close proximity to) someone who loves you.)

An incident I found strange, but lovely. Last week (or possibly the week before, time etc what does it mean), my local buy nothing facebook group featured a bottle of milk. The person posting it had bought the wrong milk by accident (skim instead of full cream or full cream instead of skim I can’t remember which), and they wondered if anyone would like it. It had been opened by their child, a small amount was drunk, but apart from that there was nothing wrong with the milk. Can you believe that opened, but still almost-full bottle of milk found a new home within a matter of minutes?

The whole thing was utterly surprising. It would never occur to me either list an opened bottle of milk or to take a bottle of milk that had been opened from a stranger on the internet. But one person thought one of those things and another person thought the other and two litres of milk were saved.

I will write again next week (or possibly the week after). Until then I will think of you often and with love,

You friend,

Tracy x