08-05-2015, 04:53 AM
Good day. I go by the pen name Arlo Kilpatrick (after my first love, sadly now deceased). My experiences as far as writing goes are limited creatively: until a couple years ago, I pretty much only wrote code and technical stuff, and had no real experience in the humanities. My horizons have since broadened such that I think writing zoo stuff may be helpful, both for myself emotionally and for attempting to convey how I feel and think to the world at large.
Much of my writing thus far has been either slightly embellished nonfiction accounts of my experiences or essays of rational argument. These have not been published anywhere, only shown to interested friends, though I might be willing to rework them and put them up. As an author, my main influences are probably Edgar Allan Poe in his pomposity and flowery prose and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the Sherlock Holmes canon) in the way that a plot works and how it can be revealed slowly over the course of the work.
I should also mention that most of my creative experience has been theatrical, particularly in the past few years. I have performed improvisational comedy, complex musicals, and silly satires with a couple local theaters and been complimented on my comedic timing and wit, as well as my tenor voice. This has also informed the way I view zoo fiction, as there are a few famous plays relating to it directly, while the only mainstream zoo references I know of in prose are Balzac's "Passion in the Desert" and some snickering at a photo of a woman with a Shetland pony in the works of Kurt Vonnegut.
Bringing this together, my goal is to write a zoo comedy play (it would likely be a farce, but that's not clear yet) suitable for general audiences. All of the zoo plays I've read are tragedies or tragicomedies, and I'd like to see at least one with a happy ending. With some luck and hard work, I might even get it performed somewhere locally, albeit for an avant garde and artsy crowd. I have the skeletal plot of the play written out, as well as a decent idea of who the characters are and how they'll behave, but as it's the first comedy I've written, I'm sure it will be a challenge. But I think there's plenty of material in the arguments between zoos and those who misunderstand them to make an unaware audience laugh if treated well.
