"So, what's next?"

This is the question I've gotten more than I can count in the past two months. Most folks in COI's orbit have grown accustomed since last October to monthly -- if not weekly -- emails from us about The Next Show. It's been a couple months now since we were teasing any Next Show, and it's starting to get weird. And for our monthly subscribers, I'm sure it's a question that's starting to get a bit awkward (what exactly are they subscribing to, after all?).

Believe me, it's ten times weirder for us. I feel a niggling guilt when people ask what's next, and I don't have an answer. As an actor, it's not your fault when you don't have a project lined up ... but when you produce, it kind of is.

It's been a luxury to know what was next. But it wasn't planned: one show lead to the next, and then the next...and pretty soon we'd produced half a dozen projects in a row. Initially, we knew we wanted to do McReele in advance of the election -- we'd (unnecessarily, as it turned out) scrambled for the funds to secure the rights in December of 2007 .

I never planned to be doing project after project after project all through 2008 and up until July 2009. At the same time, it was such a high to look at a calendar and know what was next. Who was I to kill our momentum? (My checking account had other ideas.)

If you're a monthly donor, a well-wisher, an interloper -- rest assured, we are all working very hard to figure out what is coming next. Harder than we have any right to, since this is definitely not our day job. Keep asking, goading, cajoling -- one day soon, we'll have details.