Blog No. 286
I’ll have a more in depth post about last night’s ChiSeries Toronto reading next week, but as this is being posted, I’ll be on the road, guzzling coffee. That’s the weird thing that happens when you have an event the day before a blog post day. I could possibly stay up late and write the post for the morning, or I could push the post back. I could even just guess at how everything will go and write the thing as if that’s what went down, but I won’t. I’ll do this instead. I’m going to vaguely write some stuff about it and save the real post for when I can sit down and appropriately convey the essence of the event. I can tell you that I am super excited for another Toronto reading, especially with the ChiZine folks. As it stands, though, I am unsure of how the reading went.
Reading from a new book is an odd experience. When No Light Tomorrow came out, I had never done a reading, so the whole thing was strange and new. After almost two years of reading from that book, I got used to the sections I’d chosen (one for in front of a crowd, one for students, one for interviews, etc). I even cut my practicing down to a once over the day before the event. Then All These Crooked Streets came out and I had to find something in my story that I could read that would be interesting, not give too much away, introduce the character and world to the audience, and not have the brunt of the filthy language present in the novella. It was an interesting struggle, but I found the right section and have since read a couple times from that book. Now, The Thinking Machine is out and I ha
ve to do it all over again. I don’t have as much swearing as in Streets, but introducing the world takes more work as it’s not just the one we live in with made up names.
The worst part is when you find a section, time yourself reading it, stumble all over yourself remembering the odd sentence structure you used, and finding typos or outright mistakes. What a gut punch. I worked really hard to make sure it was clean, but with rushing, something was bound to me missed. Even the most through reviews can miss the extra space, missing tense, or bad auto-correct. It’s making me rethink my timeline for Neon Heart. Especially since I’ve been so caught up in other things that I haven’t written more in over a week (again, like I promised I wouldn’t do this year).
But, I can’t help it if I spent the majority of the weekend sick in bed. It was a real waste since I have so much to do and I haven’t figured out my shifting routine yet. (I’ve decided since work will keep shifting around my schedule and I have more than half my 
evenings booked on a given week, I have to find a new way to fit writing in or I will never get back to my ideal productivity. But that’s another post for another time).
The point is that I’ve been sick and since I have an episode of Flags and High Fives to edit, that pushes everything back. Arvin did so well with the complicated and work intensive first episode, that I wanted to do episode two to keep things balanced, but that didn’t work out this weekend. I managed to push that schedule back too, so everything is behind schedule at the moment. I do have some hard deadlines coming up at the end of the month, though, so I have no time left to wallow. I hope I kicked the cold in time for my reading. If not, I’m sure I toughed it out with a mix of tea and beer and starting today, I have to get it all back on track. I’ve done it before. I can do it again.
Ben Van Dongen 