Stage Fright, Star Bright

October 19

Start spreading the news... I'm reading today... I'm going to be a part of it...

Whoo. It's early. Though not as early as I rose last Saturday. Lots to do today. I have to go up to Berkeley to see if the ring is finished, then go into the city to Cafe du Nord, where I'm reading first in tonight's round of Writers with Drinks! I did a read-through last night to check the time of my piece, and it went well, but it's a lot different reading in Heather's bedroom than it is reading on stage. It's been a long time -- like, years -- since I was on an actual stage in front of an actual audience composed mostly of actual strangers. But then, it went well the last times I did it; it's not like I have scary humiliating memories of on-stage embarrassment; more like memories of thunderous applause, actually. So, normal stage-fright jitters aside, I think I'll be okay. And I'll have good friends in the audience, and even though I'm going first (sigh, someone has to, I know), at least I have Charliegirl Anders introducing me and warming up the crowd.

Now to get bloggy: Thanks to the lovely Susan Marie for pointing me to Chris Barzak's journal and Alan De Niro's thing that looks superficially like a journal! If I'd been asked to name ten people who didn't have journals that I wanted to have journals, both these guys would've been on the list.

And it appears that brains aren't very good at telling the difference between free will and automatic actions, which suggests that maybe there's no such thing as free will anyway. But screw it -- I'm a strong believer in the old "I must assume I have free will, because the alternative sucks" argument.

I like the Andromeda Spaceways method of responding to submissions, though it'd get annoying if every magazine to which I submitted gave me such constant updates, I suppose. They sent me an autoresponse telling me they received the story, then a couple of days later I got one telling me the story had passed the first round, and this morning I got one saying I passed the second round, which means they're seriously considering it, and they'll make a final decision in the next couple of months -- in the meantime, I'm free to send more stories. It's a very writer-friendly set-up, and I appreciate it, though it does interfere with my usual method of sending off a story and not thinking about it anymore. They have one of my older stories, but I'm fond of it, and having read an issue of their magazine, I think it'd be a good fit, so we'll see, I guess.

Okay, that's it for bloggishness.

Mmm. I have today off work, tomorrow off work, I work Monday... and then I have the rest of the week off. I shiver with anticipation. I'm going to get so much work done on revising my novel!

(What, you don't revise your novel while you're on vacation? What do you do, then?)

Oh, and I didn't write last night. Y'know, I think this Dare's over for me... sigh. I managed to write a collab and, like, six beginnings, some of which will almost certainly still become stories. So it goes.

Hope to see you at the reading.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 175,900

Words written since last entry:
Um. Yeah. But I printed another 70 pages of Rangergirl to revise!

Send me the teeth of Tlaltecuhtli.

Tim Pratt
P.O. Box 13222
Berkeley, CA 94712-4222

Look into your heart, Tommy. Look into your heart!