My NYRSF reading last night went fabulously well. Thirty-five or forty people showed up to ART New York on a bitterly cold night, of which at least half were friends of mine.
I was supposed to go first and Jack Womack second, but the evening's curator, Constance Ash, got a little confused and announced Jack first. He read a chapter from his upcoming novel Going, Going, Gone, but to my mind stopped right at the point where I got very interested. At least I'll be eager to see the book now.
I hyperventilated all through the intermission and tried without success to keep up my end of conversations. The applause when Constance introduced me was tumultuous. (Speaking frankly, it was probably better that Jack went first, because I wouldn't have wanted to follow applause like that. It's good to have friends.)
I read two rather short stories that I was quite nervous about. Hanukkah had just ended, and my first story, "Mrs. Janokowski Hits One out of the Park," is about an old woman, a Holocaust survivor, who gets thrown out the window of her seventh-floor apartment by the building's other tenants. But it still seemed to go over well. (This story will appear in Electric Velocipede in April or so.)
The second story, "Sparkler," is a far-future retelling of an attempted terrorist suicide attack on a center of government and recreation on a planet far from Earth, told mostly from the points of view of the terrorists. Because it's obviously a story about 9/11, I was very nervous about the crowd's reaction, but the applause after this one was bigger than after the first. God bless friends once again.
So I'd have to call the evening a success, even though the Irish pub we planned to hit afterward had gone out of business, and we had to go to the world's worst TGI Friday's instead—and they're not starting from a very high baseline. Our poor waitress had just gotten stiffed by the guys at the next table, there were seven or eight items we were told we couldn't order, and then the kitchen reported they couldn't make what I did order, but by the time I was told, the kitchen was closed.
Oh, well. I still ruled. (It's a feeling I don't have very often, and I'm going to enjoy it as long as I can.)
