Anthology Launch

Okay, reporting back as promised and thankfully it all went fine. There is hope for the festival main event yet. Last year, despite reading my piece out really well, I got the shakes very badly and had to stop short. I explored different ways to cope with this. A few people suggested dutch courage. After careful consideration I decided not to go with that. It would have worked, to be fair, but it would also have only treated the symptom rather than the cause. I decided the best way was to conquer the fear itself.

My solution is going to strike most people as rather strange, and I'm not saying it will work for everyone, but I beat my fear by watching documentaries on D-day before I left. It gives a person a certain sense of perspective and quite frankly the task of reading a short piece of writing in front of few dozen people pales in comparison and makes the whole fear feel quite foolish. I guess the aim of this usual activity was to get myself to uh man up and realize what is actually important in life and worth worrying about and that this situation really was not it. I'm hoping it will stick. Anyway, drama over and back to life, or Wildstar if the servers were up but they're not so I'm going to play The Binding of Issac.

To start

Well as this is my first post I'll start off by getting the boring introduction out of the way. I'm sure I can be forgiven for telling and not showing this piece back story. So, I'm an artist and writer. I write novels and short stories, mainly sci-fi, fantasy and steampunk. I have a number of short stories published in anthologies and one novel due for publication end of august. Link here if you're interested.

There are a lot of things going on at the moment. This afternoon, I'm due to attend the launch of the third volume of the Greenacre Wrtiers Anthology, which I have a story in. In all likelihood, I'll have to read a piece out, which I'm dreading because I'm really not a good public speaker. There's worse to come next week, though, as I'm due to read out a chapter of my novel at the Finchley Literary Festival main event, along with a number of other authors. I managed to wriggle out of last year's event on the understanding that I would practice my public reading and definitely do this year's. The practice didn't happen... I'm doomed. But lets try and keep this post on a positive track.Okay, I'm trying to think of something else to write... I'm doomed.

Oh well. If this were a novel then this is where I would put a chapter break. It's an excellent cliffhanger. Will our hero be tongue tied on the day and humiliate herself in public? Most likely. I'll check in later and update on how the anthology launch goes. Fingers crossed they'll forget to call me up. Or maybe I could pay someone to pretend to be me... But I think Rosie might notice. I'm doomed...