Friday, August 20, 2010

Chapter 3: In which I speak on addiction

Doing readings is an addiction.

I just got back to San Francisco Bay area. Graduate school starts in a week, and I've had two days of TA orientation. I need to get started on finding college grants. I need to WRITE more. There are so many things on the plate right now. Also, I would really like to meet more writers out here, of any kind of genre. There are of course the good people at the Berkeley Writers Circle, but I'd like to meet more. Gaining that feeling of community in my new home is important. There are so many things to do, and yet I feel this urge to go out in public again and read, right after finishing a tour.

I could do open mics. Finding good ones is also time-consuming, and it takes awhile to get a good feel for an open mic. It might be cool one night, then lame from then on out. You need to stick with a mic, develop a rapport with the people there, especially if you'd like to maybe feature at some point in the future. That's how you build an audience. The hosts need to know what you're about. I honed my performance skills doing DC poetry open mics, and I'm eager to work on that some more. But trying to find a good open mic (which might help me meet other writers, too) takes time I don't have.

I also don't have any books right now. There's nothing to sell. I'm starting school. There's no practical reason to start booking performances. And all I can think about is this article I'm reading on L. Frank Baum, and how he did a Wizard of Oz magic lantern show that was a huge financial failure for him, but sounds cool as hell to me, and I want to do that for my stories right now. The life of an addict.

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