Girls Write Now: ANTHOLOGY

Can't tell what I'm holding up? I'm so excited, I just had to post this anyway, even if I can't figure out how to do a reverse mirror image. I am holding up my copy of the Girls Write Now Anthology: Where We Live. It was for sale yesterday at the last GWN event of the 2009-2010 year, the final CHAPTERS reading.

We had a packed house last night. Meg and I got to the Center for Fiction on East 47th Street early, impressed with the oncoming slew of people. We were very happy to be there as audience members, having read our own piece at the May event. We could sit back and enjoy. Meg was effervescent and glowing - finished with her high school classes, her prom, voted as salutatorian at her graduation next week, and soon-to-be college-bound.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie read from her new collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck. Her West African accent was as musical and captivating as her prose. I could have listened to her all night, but I had to settle for buying her book. The mentee/mentor pieces were beautiful and thought-provoking. Inspiring.

I snuck downstairs to buy my books (whose proceeds will support GWN) and am still marveling at how well the Anthology is put together. I have a short memoir piece that apears near the beginning of the book, and Meg wrote A History of Widges, the pre-story to the piece we wrote for our reading in May. The only faux pas is in my bio, which I had written last summer, with the wrong pub date and the wrong title for EDGES!

Tomorrow is my birthday and father's day. I would like to have time to reflect on both, so hope to see you then!

CHAPTERS (preview)

It's time for me to make the first of many Lit.Life announcements: Girls Write Now's reading series, CHAPTERS, starts this Friday night at the Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street. Meg and I, and some other fabulous mentee/mentor pairs will be reading our four minute pieces. Our guest speaker/writer is Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of the new novel Wench. I am so excited! Come and join us from 6PM until 8PM for a truly inspiring evening! (It was going to last years event that triggered me to volunteer with Girls Write Now - maybe it will for you too!)

Today is Monday and Mondays are centered around writing. I know, every day is supposed to be like that, but Mondays are particularly sacred. If I focus myself, it sets the tone for the whole week. AND I meet with Meg, my mentee from Girls Write Now.

I usually write from the comfort of my bedroom, laptop perched on my tummy, but with the constant lure of the internet, and my new found social networking skills, I am getting less and less work done. It used to be that Starbucks was my downfall - I am the introverts extrovert - I love chatting with people and am distracted by my neighbors. So I can't seem to win - cyber-social networking AND real human interaction keep me from being in the flow with my novel.

But today I went to a Starbucks a little farther downtown than usual, and I must say I had some success. My only friendly banter was with the barista. I wrote 1500 words before I needed to stretch my legs and move on. Then I went back to the Starbucks in my neighborhood to meet with Meg and it was GAME OVER. In the hour before she came, I couldn't resist talking to the people next to me, chair dancing, and connecting to the internet to check out what was going on in that world, over there. Oh well.

Meg and I practiced reading our piece out loud. We wrote it together during a game of "hot notebook" - I gave her a prompt, and then we passed the notebook back and forth every five minutes. Meg tends to turn everything she writes into fantasy, and while I love fantasy, my artistic sensibilities lean toward realistic fiction. So we came up with a really fun, quirky piece - we tried to cross genres but then completely went fantastical, and had so much fun in the process! We had to edit A LOT to get it down to a mere four minutes, and we took turns reading two or three sentences, finding a great rhythm together.

But Meg - we didn't talk about what we are going to wear! Should we go Goth?