Last night at Lloyd and Harry's I busted out my Halloween material. It's been a while since I've performed those jokes, but I ran through them in my head most of yesterday and am pretty happy with the results. Since I was in the Holiday spirit, I did my Christmas ([air hockey] and [pokémon]) and Easter jokes. Since I'm still tweaking it, I also talked about Dominoes brownies. The crowd was slightly apatehtic, so I was really just on stage for myself, but I think if I work on the Holiday stuff for the next month or so, I might be able to bring that material to the level I feel my newer stuff is at.
I was talking to Janine yesterday and it's as if my older material doesn't reflect my abilities now, but I need to keep it around for my over-all total. I don't want to have "filler" as an open mic-er and would prefer to have as little as possible when I start featuring, but the writing process is so hard, and it takes so long to generate quality bits that I almost feel like I have to keep some of my older material around. The most discouraging thing is when I hear professionals talk about how much they think I should write. One guy said three to five hours a day. And that would be possible if I didn't have to eat, clean my house, goto a day job 5 days a week, hit all the open mics and sleep. I do try to write an hour a day (ok, an hour each weekday), so hopefully when I do quit my day job, I can keep that habit and expand to more writing each day. I think what I need are writing exercises. One friend of mine said he has a check-list that he runs through on a daily basis; on exercise on the list is an hour of free-writing (wow). I usually can go for about a page, which is like 5 minutes-worth. An hour is probably a bit out of my league. For now.