A brief recap of the reading last night
From the perspective of me, nobody else’s perspective, not objective, sorry
Got to the reading place an hour early to spend time with Chelsea and Geoff and lauren cerand. Had never met Lauren or geoff before and got good feelings off them both right away. Hadn’t seen chelsea since like 2019 and it’s just weird how time flies by.
Got increasingly nervous feeling. Every reading I ever do follows this pattern: it sounds like a good idea, but then beginning 30-60 mins before the reading, I get an intense urge to flee and am like “oh fuck I hate readings.”After the reading is over I think “that was fun!”
Went up to where the reading is and the urge to flee got very intense. Had to try hard to not act weird.
Scott’s reading was sweet and funny and moving and I felt the feeling I always feel, pride that I get to be married to somebody I find so goddamn talented.
Joey read a couple lines of dialog from my story because I needed a NYC accent and did an excellent job.
Realized 3/4 way through my story that it was more “hardcore” than I remembered and became concerned I was alienating everybody but it seemed fine, everyone was nice and didn’t act like I alienated them.
Ran out of the room during the break because I was so hot. Felt immediate relief. Was also relieved to discover I was not dripping in sweat like I thought.
Talked to Penina Roth during the break, who was visiting family. Penina has a special place in my heart due to being just a sweet person and also for supporting me going back to ye olden days when I was just a wee grad student writing under my real name.
Gave blake my drink tickets and he returned with a fancy non-alcoholic drink for me. It had a sprig of Rosemary in it which I got increasingly angry about and felt trapped by. I couldn’t throw it on the floor because that’s rude and I couldn’t hold it because it was all wet and I hated it in my drink because it made it hard to drink. Plants in drinks are stupid.
Chelsea’s reading was so good. She read from her novel in progress and it seemed like an evolution from her other work. That’s my fav kind of writer: the ones where their later work feels very much like their older work, but is a slightly different version of the same person. It was also very funny.
Geoff’s reading was also excellent. Felt good to be doing a reading with such great people I admire.
Also felt proud of and happy for ashleigh and joey for making such a cool great thing. Using a lot of vague positive verbs here but that’s the problem with language.
Talked to people and enjoyed myself but also felt socially anxious. I’ve always struggled with social anxiety in situations that require mingling, and it’s been made worse because I’m so out of practice. I think I covered fine and acted normal? Maybe? Usually I’m pretty good at faking it.
People kept telling me 9/11 info (my story was about 9/11) and it made me only ever want to read 9/11 stories so people would tell me 9/11 info afterward. My favorite bit of info came from Emily, who is the manager of Greedy Reads and was selling our books. She said her stepsister has a tramp stamp of geographical coordinates and the geographical coordinates are to ground zero.
Enjoyed meeting Emily and other people I had heard about from ash joey et al. Lots of cute sweet people.
Went to a bar to eat cheeseburgers. I rode with Megan and Blake and we were talking about how money is stupid and Blake was like “oh no, crypto bro is going to burst out” and we made jokes about crypto bro the kool aid man bursting through the wall.
felt bad for the server due to our large group size and moving tables but she didn’t seem too annoyed at us, just a little annoyed at first.
My favorite part of the evening possibly: Geoff had mentioned he is way into perfumes on his otherppl episode so I emailed him about that and he said he would bring things for us to smell. He told us about them and where the scents came from, like from injured trees, and I feel like there should be smell bars where somebody lets you smell cool stuff and they tell you about them.
There’s more but Blake and Megan will be here soon so I will stop now.