"Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

My life is going by pretty fast, too.  I mean, not hyperdrive fast, not TOO fast... more like Delorean fast.  Well, okay, I really just wanted to reference Back to the Future, I mean, since I was on a roll and all.  Right, moving on...

I've been doing loads of work on "Just So" and lots of work on the one-act play I'm writing... though at the moment I'm a bit stuck.  Ironically, so is my main character!  One thing I've been doing a lot of work on that I haven't mentioned to you is NCFCA speech competition, and I didn't mention that because I knew I'd have to do a lot of explaining.

Basically, in a nutshell I'm almost perfected, NCFCA speech is a league for homeschooled Christian students that allows them to hone their acting and public speaking skills in a competition environment.  There are three types of "speeches" or "pieces", the platform speech, where you speak on a topic for ten minutes, a limited prep event, where you have a few minutes to prepare to speak on a random topic for as long as possible, and my favorite, interpretives, where you take any selection of literature and perform it as a one-man play in ten minutes or less.  There are 11 individual events inside those categories, and a competitor can enter in multiple events and compete to go the regional, and then national, tournament.  I do mostly the interpretives, or "interps", as they're the most acting-oriented.  We're not allowed to use costumes or props, we have to do all the work ourselves, and we perform it in a very small room - in a suit.  Fun!  I've been doing it for 3 years, and qualified for Nationals twice, and it's really cool!  One of the few downsides to this great pastime is that almost no one outside of it knows what it is, so I always have to explain it!

There's a lot more on that topic, but for now I'll just direct you to www.ncfca.org.  I'm not motivated enough to explain it in anything more than a nutshell.  : P  If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer them.

So anyway, a friend of mine named Linda is my partner this year for the Duo Interp event, where we perform a piece together from a piece of literature.  This can be a drama, a comedy, or somewhere in between.  Ours is somwhere in between, as we're doing an abridged (very abridged, by us) version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Fifth:  The Austere Academy.  It should be fun!  Competition starts early next year.  I'll most likely have someone videotape it at a tournament, so maybe someday in the future I'll be able to direct you to a Youtube video!

Whew!  That took a lot out of me.  I think I'll wind down for tonight.  I talked about speech and quoted Ferris Bueller, I think that's a pretty good post, right?  ...Right?

-Andrew