Musical Reaches Beta

The musical I’ve been writing has now reached “beta” stage. All the scenes are written, pretty much all the lines are written and it really just needs to be reviewed and cleaned up. Like developing software it’s hard to know exactly when to called it finished. I also have the feeling that I get at the end of most software projects: I know it’s not finished yet and I know things need to be improved, but I can’t quite put my finger on what to work on and how to improve it. Essentially, I don’t feel that the script is ready for prime time and while there are some things that I know still need work there’s a lot of stuff that I just feel that I want to improve but don’t know exactly how to go about it. Part of that feeling is actually not knowing exactly how to move from writing the script into actually starting production. Hopefully the same approach I take with software will work with musicals too: do everything that you can work out needs to be done, write done each new thing you find needs to be done as you find it and when you can’t think of anything left to be done, release it. In terms of starting production I think just arranging some auditions would be a good start – finding a venue is another task I know needs to be dealt with and will likely be difficult. I’m sure it will all fall into place.