Kathryn Ormsbee’s story is genuine and occasionally moving, but it shies away from fulling engaging with many of the issues it brings up, from Tash’s asexuality to the intricacies of managing a webseries. While she deals with how this affects her life and her aspirations, she has to navigate the upheavals in her family and friendships as a result of her sister going to college, her parents expecting another child, and her best friends going through their own traumas. Tash Hearts Tolstoy is a fun, quirky comedy about an eponymous protagonist (Tash, not Tolstoy) whose webseries goes viral overnight.
I wanted to capture that wild, niche experience on the page, so the web series aspect of Tash Hearts Tolstoy mirrors much of my own web series process - save for the whole going viral thing, of course.Back in my day, we didn’t have the YouTubes or the social medias, just good ol’ fashioned Angelfire and GeoCities…. It was an all-consuming and often anxiety-inducing experience, but it was also mind-blowingly fun to make and so rewarding to share a finished creation with our (very) few but loyal viewers.
I was involved in every aspect of production, from writing to filming to sound recording to directing to editing to social media. The second season was a storyline devoted entirely to the Weird Sisters from Macbeth. Our first season was a mash-up of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Much Ado About Nothing. Much like Tash’s Unhappy Families, Shakes was a literary adaptation filmed on a next-to-nothing budget with a bare bones crew and a cast of brilliant actors. I created two seasons of a web series along with friend and fellow YA author Destiny Soria, which was my initial inspiration for Tash Hearts Tolstoy.
What was some of the research you had to do in that field? You’re not only tackling asexuality - you’re also writing about web production.
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