How can I describe my relationship to Delta Phi right now? It feels like the heaviest and lightest project I’ve done at once.

On the one hand, I’m a novelist, used to spending a year or far longer on a single story. Used to living with the same characters for decades. Long enough to have conclusive concepts behind the work. Long enough to make a story that is unified and feels resolved, like a conclusion about something that also brings up more questions.

Delta Phi feels a bit different. Although I developed the premise for years, the script was written in a few short months. It felt like a collection of ideas; it was chronological and teleological, but played host to many concepts. The script needed the production to pull the concepts together. The production itself was a litmus test to determine the strongest and weakest aspects of the script. Delta Phi, from the beginning, was in every sense an experiment. I want to learn as much from it as possible, and I wanted room for mistakes.

It was meant to be that way for the team, too. I wanted them to get as much from the project as possible. If I instead shot some adaptation of an older work, it would be too resolved. It would be more about my vision than about learning, particularly since the resources and team were mostly familiar to each other. It was working with a method, a setting, and people that have all worked together before, so the growth had to be in the story.

It some sense, Delta Phi is also a litmus test for my future in metafiction. I’m trying to see what I can make of this; trying to find out whether I can make this work for others as well as it works for me in my own mind.

I’m putting on the final touches of the edit this week, and after that I’ll finally have the opportunity to show the finished product to some family and friends. It makes me terribly nervous. Writing a novel doesn’t garner nearly as much attention. I suppose it is easier to write a bad book than to make a bad film. Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.

So yeah, I’m nervous. Sharing takes just as much practice as making.