Reading At Pruneyard Bookstore

Barnes & Noble is community-minded enough to allow our club, South Bay Writers, to have a reading there every month. Five us read and listened when the others read. I read four short poems from my new collection, Fine Lines of Mine (see previous post) plus about eight minutes worth out of a short story I wrote three years ago. (I need to sit down and really polish that one to a fine sheen; cutting out 50% of the words might be a good place to start.)

I thought my story, Teen Trials #17, was pretty sensitive and realistic "first-date" dialog--that was my story's situation, so that's a good thing. But it did get a little too explicit with sex, at least it felt that way with this small audience (four people). The audience felt like it started to squirm and that made me feel squeemish about reading on more.

With the recent honest, sometimes harsh-feeling feedback I've received from editors working with me on my novel, I'm likely getting a better feeling for my ideal audience and what kind of explicitness is going too far. (I want to go further. However, the reality today is different. A lot of great short story publishers will put up with the implicit quick sexual innuendo, but not long dwellings on love-making, in detail, or explicit naming of body parts, etc.) If my story is not mainly a sex instruction book, it works against the meat of my story to get too detailed and dwell too long there. I felt that tonight, and there probably is no other way to get that kind of extremely useful information. I call it "listening through the ears of the others."

I need to rewrite Teen Trials #17--tonight, even!--to keep the good stuff and trim off the less than good. I'm not saying never to have sex in your short stories, but make sure it is appropriate to your ideal reader and the probable publisher and award committees that you wish to impress. In the 60s, it was different. We have a more conservative audience these days, so, a word to the wise...

At tonight's reading, the main trouble (ignoring that the microphone had a low frequency hum that would crescendo out of control if you breathed on it) was there were not enough listeners sitting in the chairs out there. Thus, there was less chemistry, less buzz, less feedback and less heart and warm bodies out there. At our readings, listeners are often the readers--that was the case tonight--so we also didn't have enough authors or prospective authors reading. Too bad.

Did you ever throw a party and no one came?  It was a little bit like that.

If you'd like to bolster our crowd or you write and need to get used to reading in front of people (in a interested, supportive atmosphere) you should come. It's usually 3rd Friday of each month, Pruneyard Barnes & Noble open microphone, 7:30PM, sponsor: California Writers Club, South Bay Branch.

See you there... I hope. Bring something newly written to test out on us.