Public readings...

Last night I had the actual and not rehearse public reading.

There was this old saying we used to say, bad dress, good show.  Meaning a bad dress rehearsal, usually meant you went home and over prepared and so your first performance was usually much better.

The problem is, I had a great dress...

Need I continue?

It started the moment I left work, I forgot my edited pages on my desk.  So I tried to use a pen and scratch out some semblance of the editing work I had done.  I dropped lines and couldn't read my rewrites, for me it was a nightmare.

The audience had a different reaction. Several people came up to me and expressed interest in my story and complimented me for my reading.  One Asian lady named Cathy (With a "C") told me that my reading was excellent.  She said she could clearly hear every word and accentuated every emotion.  And she said that she typically found that writers tend to be lousy at reading their work and she thought it was a skill they should all develop.  One which I clearly had.

She was very sweet.

I told her that I was trained as an actor in college and all the bells went off in her head.

Another guy asked if I was really Donald Bear, incognito.  I had to laugh.

All in all, it was a good time.

The funniest thing happened when I sat down.

Now a bit of of backstory, when I wrote my first novel, The Junkyard Odyssey, my mother read it and said, "It's not really my cup of tea."  She's not very good at being the cheerleader kind of mom.  She is an avid reader of romance novels and murder mysteries.  I wrote a middle grade science fiction book.  My feelings were not hurt by her comments in the slightest.

But when I sat down after reading my Young Adult Dystopian chapter, she said, "I liked Junkyard Odyssey better."

I love my mom.