That third one is a little specific, isn’t it.

Yesterday we had a live reading of Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change here in New York City. And by “we,” I mean everybody, with the exception of RJ, who wrote to us from New Zealand. Before about 4pm, the day is a blur. Literally a blur. I remember the gist of what I did: mostly sleep, since the night before was a rush of adrenaline and preparation and as with all these things, there never seems to be enough time. (Note “seems” – this is significant.)

A little after 4, Eric and Erin showed up at my apartment. As I barked things like, “DON’T JUDGE ME, MY APARTMENT IS A MESS,” (they assured me they did not) and “SHOULD I BRING MAKEUP FOR THE GIRLS COMING STRAIGHT FROM THE TRAIN” (deemed considerate, but ultimately unnecessary) and “WHICH PAIR OF BOOTS SHOULD I WEAR?” (sooner or later there will be pics on the internet, I’m pretty sure) – peppered with weightier issues like, “WILL THE VENUE HAVE A WAY TO PLAY OUR MUSIC?” (shout-out to Emerald, who is amazeballs, and actually phoned the venue while I slept to find out because I’d sent her an email asking her to remind me about it) –  they sipped water and answered my questions with patience. Updates from Sare Liz and Miranda came fairly regularly, via text, with one stuck on a bus (not that we ever expect Megabus to be on time) and the other stuck in a line 200 people deep at the taxi rank at Penn Station. I didn’t take my blood pressure (ONE MORE THING TO FUCKING DO?) but I’m guessing it would not have been at an all-time low.

The great thing about having a long-time co-writer around in the minutes before a live production is that they kind of get where the freakouts are coming from. As I tore back and forth in my shoebox apartment, as often as not forgetting what it was I was trying to make sure didn’t get left behind, I got reminders of issues that were popping back up that we’d already solved (music is gravy), had someone to check in with when “Wait, this issue is already resolved, isn’t it?” became an issue, and so on. Lots of patience. Plus when it came time to actually head to the venue, I didn’t have to carry everything myself.

The venue. The venue was awesome. The venue was the Cornelia St. Cafe, a West Village institution when it comes to live performance. They’re a cafe/restaurant at street level, then downstairs is a sort of cabaret/performance space. Here is what it looks like before it’s filled up with people.

Looking at the photo, I realize we probably should have had a live piano player, too. BALLS!

So me, Eric and Erin got to the cafe a little after five. Setup was quick, thanks to the staff at the cafe (I admitted having nerves, at this point; they told me everything would be fine and got us all giant glasses of water, and we started setting up.

Setting up for a live reading when you’ve never seen a space and don’t really know how many people are coming is weird. Super, super weird. Super weird. I’m so grateful to have had E&E around for this part of the process. Because two of our writers were still missing in transit, a fact which I think I was still in complete denial over until about 5:40, when something (I honestly don’t remember what) clicked and rolled over.

Sare turned up halfway through this part of the preparation, and I can only imagine what she walked into: at this point I was having a very intense discussion with Eric about the order of stories and what the f*ck will we do if Miranda’s bus is so late she misses the reading.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for having Eric for a co-writer in my life. (I say that a lot. The dude’s a fucking rockstar when it comes to keeping a cool head in a tense situation when the person freaking out needs to know WHAT THE HELL DO I DO WITH THIS FUCKING SCRIPT. Which is basically what one wants in a co-writer. And talent. Talent doesn’t hurt. (He’s got that in droves, too.)

So I’m sitting on the edge of the stage in my carefully-styled reading outfit, and I have about four pages of “intro/outro” material for the bits where I have to stand on stage and read and tell a room full of people what’s going on. Except that now we might have to move one of the stories. We ran through a few different options. Ultimately we decided that the only way to accomodate a late arrival was going to be being an egotistical egomaniac and reading from both of my stories (the plan, till this point, had been just to read “Haute Mess”). I was not cool with this. I don’t like reading in public. And I don’t looking like an egotistical egomaniac when it comes to collaborative performances. (She says, using more “I”‘s in a sentence than she can actually count.)

And then the rewriting began. Furious, intense, shit-fuck-what-goes-here-what-gets-said-next rewriting that spanned four pages and I think six individual segments, maybe seven, all of which were going to move, comments that weren’t going to make sense, and so on.

Creatively, I do a lot of thinking out loud. I don’t know if that’s always been the case or if it’s something that’s grown out of playwriting, but having somebody whose creative judgement I trust almost implicitly (and I only say “almost” because, you know, I’m the editor and I’m always right) give me in-a-snap responses to different possibilities is something that seriously shortcuts the frankly awful process of rewriting something for the fifth time, five minutes before you’re going to read it on stage.

And then Miranda’s bus got in, and somehow this woman, who has never been to the city before, dealt with what I later learned was the following series of events:

- late bus (over an hour late)

- flagged her first ever NYC cab, which had a driver who was apparently such an asshole he told her his meter was broken and “how much was she willing to pay” for her trip, and by the way, he’d only take cash, because his meter was broken. (Dear cabbie who did this: FUCK YOU, BUDDY. That’s not me saying that. That’s karma saying that. What goes around comes around and what you did was a shitty thing.)

- Via cab, getting through traffic in NYC on a Thursday in rush hour to the venue.

- Turned up at the venue looking calm, collected, and cool as a cucumber.

(She rocked her reading, by the way. Everybody rocked it, but she deserves a particular shout-out, because I’ve had experience, Sare’s got ten years of public speaking in her pocket, and Eric had a gin and tonic – and none of us had the same high-pressure trip in, and to rock it the way she did under those circumstances is the effing bomb.)

The thing is, that made all the rewriting irrelevant. I didn’t have to read both my stories, the order didn’t have to be jumbled up, and the script-as-written, with the minor edits I’d made earlier when I realized, standing on stage staring out at the empty room (which is sometimes the only place you can realize these things, I’ve learned over the year), could stand.

Except I’d marked up the holy hell out of it.

This is why you always bring MULTIPLE COPIES OF YOUR SCRIPT TO A READING.

The thing was, at this point people were starting to come in. I was sitting at one of the back tables as the room slowly filled up, scribbling and trying to sort out pages and re-edit the unfunny parts back out and be polite and say hello as people walked in, but at one point I distinctly remember flipping out. “I CAN’T FIGURE THIS OUT,” I said.  (“I can’t do this!”?)

Eric stepped up AGAIN. Yes, he said, I could. What did I need.

I swear to fucking god, a calm, genuine, capable “What do you need” is the best question any producer can hear when she’s on the verge of absolutelyfuckinglosingit. It’s quick. It focuses you. It reminds you, in that moment of insanity, that everybody in the room is there to help make this work, and that while you have forty thousand things flying through your head, if you can’t get them out of your head, they’re not going to happen. I needed page two. Whether from nerves, adreneline, or what, at this point I was literally shuffling through pages and unable to figure out which ones correlated. I needed the next page. He passed me that page, I made my fixes.

People were still coming in, saying hello, being wonderful and supportive, and bitchface producer lady (wait, that’s me, isn’t it) suddenly snapped across the table, “WHY IS EVERYONE TALKING TO ME, I CANNOT REWRITE THIS WHEN EVERYONE IS TALKING TO ME.” Bitchface producer lady is not fun to be around. I think she mostly talks in my head, so maybe most people don’t realize she’s there, but she’s awful. She’s good at what she does, partly because she’s awful, but she’s awful. And on this occasion, the bitch got past the mouth-censor, which in turn somehow resulted in two minutes of absolute silence and me actually finishing the re-edits.

All of this going on, remember, while people are coming in and I’m trying to let the other writers know who’s who. This is a fun game when you’re in creative industries, because the connections (particularly with my little collection of talented amazeballs people) are so diverse, and I recognize all my friends’ voices. “Is that a petite brunette with kind of a 1940s air about her?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the page. Got an affirmative reply. “That’s E____,” I said. “She’s the one who helped put us in touch with (super secret fall venue redacted). Another voice. “And that’s a very polished blonde?” Affirmative. “That’s S___, we’re going to her house party on Saturday.”

Sarah, who designed the book cover and poster for yesterday’s reading, who stepped in at a last-minute request to read RJ’s short because (did I say this earlier in the post?) RJ lives in New Zealand), was doing her vocal warmups in the background. Vocal warmups are awesome. And, I discovered yesterday, both relaxing and focusing.

I am probably screwing up some of the chronology of all this, by the way. Hope you’re all okay with that. It’s a blog, not a news article.

The performance is a blur. A blur that ran like fucking clockwork. A blur where every single writer read the fucking shit out of their piece, a blur where I had to keep reminding myself to watch the audience, because watching the audience tells you whether you’re doing it right or not. And they were. You get up on stage and can’t see a damn thing with those lights, but when you’re sitting out in the back you can see every single audience member, and every one of them was listening and engaged in the work being read.

And then it was time to transition into the post-reading discussion, and I had to be a little off-the-cuff here, and felt like I was stammering my way through the whole thing, although apparently I wasn’t. And then the discussion was awesome, because people talked and asked questions and Eric joked about wine and Sare joked about the church, and Miranda joked about forgetting a Jeff Goldblum quote from Jurassic Park, and an audience member knew the exact one we were talking about, and people asked questions, and my dad said the “S” word and I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT, and my mom let everybody in the room know that NONE of her children had gone into biology, and I love them both for it far more than I can put in a blog post. My parents and their support of my career and dreams as a writer deserves its own blog post. It deserves a fucking book. My parents are awesome. No, seriously.

And then the discussion was over and we’d talked about the Whole Earth catalog, and the motivational properties of guilt and fear when it comes to changing how human being live in the world, and the egoism of thinking we, unlike almost any other complex organism, might be able to help make the world a better place. We talked about our motivations in writing the story, and were invited to talk about our future projects. We did.

I told the story of my co-worker, who came in the day after she read RJ’s story and said, “It’s that line about how it’s nobody’s fault or it’s everybody’s fault. I feel so guilty about my Keurig coffee machine now. All that plastic! I’m part of the problem!” (Apologies if I’ve mis-quoted her, hopefully she’ll forgive me.) And she went and bought a re-usable Keurig coffee cup, and her own coffee. Because of this book.

Sometimes, talking about things turns into its own action. One of the things I love about the Occupy movement is that there is a lot of sharing and communication embedded in their technique of General Assembly. Talking – and writing, and art, in my opinion – has the power to introduce new thoughts, help us make new connections, and in turn leads to evolving attitudes and changes in behavior. As I said at the close of the reading last night, I think all the writers involved in this project would be thrilled if people talked about the book and the ideas in it. Even if that’s just to one person.

Because while it’s just a small thing we can do, it’s something everybody can do.

And the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one in the first place.

Amazeballs. Awesome, awesome amazeballs.  Thanks to Eric, Erin, Sare Liz, Miranda, Sarah, the Cornelia St. Cafe, my parents, my  friends who came, my amazingly amazeballs stylist friend who you’ll all have heard of as “@mycoolroommate” (now defunct, sadly), my current roommate, her friend, my downstairs neighbor, colleagues from old workplaces, friends of friends, @CLImagiste, my two cousins-twice-removed from my grandparents’ generation, and the bartenders, who were amazing and whose names I forgot to ask. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This post is now over 2500 words long, so I will save tales of the  wild evening debauchery until another time. Not like you people like to read about wild debauchery, anyways.

But HOT MESS on Amazon, Smashwords, Print, Barnes & Noble and more. Links in the sidebar/bio.

Come listen to authors from HOT MESS read their works, then participate in a discussion about climate change and its potential effects on human society.

Limited print copies will be on sale at the event, which should run from 6pm-7:30pm.

We hope to see you there.

When I first ordered the leather skirt, I knew I was taking a chance. Getting it off the internet, no clear size guides giving waist measurements. But it fit. Not only did it fit, but the price-per-wear is already, like, a dollar. Because I have not stopped wearing it since it got here.

This has brought a new aspect to the Leather Skirt Diet: whereas the initial plan was, “run was hard as I can on the elliptical every day until the event,” all of a sudden I got scared. Because if there’s one thing that’s worse than a black miniskirt that’s too small, it’s a miniskirt that’s too big. This goes double when the fabric is leather.

A loose leather miniskirt is, how shall I put this, pointless.

So a few days ago, the leather skirt diet changed a bit. Now it was about maintaining. I mean, yeah, there are a few pounds that can go (and in case anyone’s worried, I put back on the weight I lost while sick and then some) and that’s safe, but at least I don’t have to be worried about the skirt not fitting. This was good timing, because it was around the same time the skirt showed up that I got a package of goodies from my mom.

In other words: MILLIONS OF COOKIES.

So far I’m enjoying the whoopie pies, and will bring the other cookies to work tomorrow. Because love them though I might, as we get into the home stretch before the event Thursday night, they may have to fall off the list of “Leather Skirt Diet” food options.

We shall see.

While out with my friend yesterday we joked about writing different kinds of novelty diet books. I’d write “The Leather Skirt Diet,” then she’d write the “Artichoke Dip Diet” (or whatever it was – if she sees this, maybe she’ll correct me in the comments), and then sooner or later (as many of our conversations do) we had devolved to a level of ridiculousness the likes of which I shall not inflict upon my dear readers. Suffice to say by the end of it we were laughing hysterically and a fully-fleshed-out idea for a series of e-books where we would pick goals and write diet books about them, but the diet books would be actual reflections of what we were eating, rather than aspirational “plans” that might or might not work.

Other than that, my weekend involved glorious weather in Manhattan, chilling on the Hudson, and getting a seriously amazing foot massage for like twenty bucks from a place where they thought I had fallen asleep *so they let me keep lying in the chair* till I opened my eyes. My feet feel so relaxed now.

What’s everybody else been up to this weekend?

As an independent writer/artist, too, public appearances are practically a requirement. They help access new audiences and – equally important – get writers out of our garrets and into the real world.

All of which is my long way of announcing that the Cornelia Street Cafe, in New York City’s West Village, will be hosting a reading, discussion and signing for Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change on May 17th at 6pm.

Not only is this exciting for me because of – well, the obvious reasons, I suppose – but also because as a venue, the Cornelia Street Cafe has a long and illustrious history of supporting new writing.

We’ll have four of the five HOT MESS authors on hand, each giving a short reading from their work. After a short discussion with the audience about ways in which climate change is affecting us today, we’ll move onto a book signing.

Doors open at 5:45pm and reservations are encouraged – all the info is on the Cornelia Street Cafe website. If you’re available, please try to come – and make sure to say hi afterwards!

1 pineapple
1 package of chicken (I think I used a little over a pound), cut into chunks
1/2 red onion, chopped
curry powder (spice to taste)
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1/2 bag frozen mango chunks
Ginger (to taste)
1 can chickpeas (optional – these tend to have a high sodium content)

Dump everything in the crock pot and leave it for a while.

Come back when the chicken is done cooking and it will be this amazing stew type thing. You will not be disappointed. And it’s super healthy because the pineapple makes it sweet, so no added sugar, and it doesn’t need any salt at all because that’s not the point of it. I like to eat it just plain like that.

It’s very tasty. I had planned to have it for the whole week, but then my roommate tried some and my downstairs neighbor tried some, and let’s just say I’m going to have to buy another pineapple later this week.

The show starts at 2pm, and features some interesting guests who’ll be discussing the condition of the post-oil-spill Gulf of Mexico. We’ll also talk about how fiction can inspire conversations about real-world issues.

This is my first podcast appearance – so as you can imagine, nerves are high and your support is appreciated!

In February, I took part in an anthology titled Sassy Singularity, about the strength of singledom. Most of the writers came from the romance genre; most of the stories reflect the conventions of that genre. All of the stories were written by women, and they cover multiple points of view and approaches to story.

My contribution to the anthology was a little…shall we say…quirky. Titled Sweetheart, and told from the perspective of a former Service Bot (I’ll let you read between the lines as far as what type of service), it’s about a future where a rogue hacker disrupts an artificial offshoot of the world’s oldest profession.

On Wednesday, 4/18,  Sassy Singularity will be on an Amazon Kindle Select promo for one day. If you’re interested in reading Sweetheart, it’s not currently available anywhere else, and you’ll get a handful of other romance stories along with it.

So if you have a Kindle and you feel like taking advantage of one of SASSY SINGULARITY‘s free promo days by downloading a copy of the book…do it.

FOR SCIENCE.

(And if you enjoy Sassy, check out my other Kindle work, including recent release Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change, too!)

I was meeting a friend at an upscale social club – the kind filled with leather chairs and shelves of old books, not the kind with pulsing music – oohing and aahing at relics from a different age – when I glanced down at Twitter and saw an update from Reuters: North Korea had launched a missile. As my friend walked up to me, I wondered, should I say something? There wasn’t much either of us could do, given the situation. And maybe a stately townhouse on NYC’s Upper East Side wasn’t the worst place in the world to sit out the last few hours before nuclear armageddon. Not that I have an overactive imagination, or anything.

So I put my phone away and we wandered around the club and she showed me some of the artifacts, including things like narwhal tusks and king penguins; old presidents’ hunting trophies and double elephant tusks. Macabre signals of an imperialist age, mementos of the geographic and naturalistic explorations of the club’s members over the decades.

But not just mementos: also memento mori. Reminders of our ever-present mortality.

A strange juxtaposition of moments and impressions. We left, and as I glanced at my phone again to check for updates, I saw that North Korea’s missile had not launched successfully. Nor, from what I can tell via googling, was it nuclear. Small comforts.

Memento mori.

So you’ve been dying to read Hot Mess:speculative fiction about climate change since it came out, but you don’t own an e-reader. Well, here’s some good news for you: the book is finally available in print.

You can now purchase print editions of  Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change via our CreateSpace E-Store. Within a week or so, this will populate out to Amazon, but in the meantime you can pick up a copy from CreateSpace.

Next up? I’ll be calling in to Earth Day edition of  The 99 Report’s podcast to discuss Hot

Mess with host and fellow indie author Allie, after a fortuitous Twitter introduction from @Uncucumbered. The show will also feature a discussion of how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has affected the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding waters – so hopefully I’ll be learning something while I’m there. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Deepwater Horizon from today’s xkcd.

I’m also putting together a guest blog for The Masquerade Crew as part of the A-Z challenge. My letter? S. My topic? Self-publishing. (Because really, why limit myself?) That should be going up some time around Earth Day, too. Is there anything about this process that readers and other indie authors want to know? Any questions I should try to bear in mind? Feel free to leave ‘em in the comments.

PS – you can still buy Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change for Kindle, Nook and on Smashwords. Our Goodreads page is here. 

PPS – Both print and e-readers have an environmental impact; by making the work available in both formats we hope our readers will be able to make a conscientious choice that fits their lifestyle.

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That said, I’m pleased and lucky to be able to say that this new work, To Kill a Kelpie, offers an hour of drama both light and dark, and is a strong piece of theatrical art with a message. Co-produced by Poorboy Theater company Stop the Silence: Stop Child Sexual Abuse (where McVarish is also involved), and executive produced by Pamela Pine, the show is directed by Sandy Thomson.

The evening unfolds in two parts: first, McVarish’s hourlong drama about two brothers who finally break their own silence as regards something that was done to them both many years ago, then a guided discussion including representatives from various organizations that try to deal with ending sexual abuse.

As one might expect, there is heaviness to this drama. How could their not be, given the topic at hand? And yet McVarish’s script makes a conscious decision to take place in its own moment, as two brothers try to find a way of communicating through the silence that has plagued their adult relationship. As they try to understand what was done to them, the different coping mechanisms they ask themselves and the ways in which they parse the events that took place while they were children reveal two men who have each, in their own way, carried the scars of their abuse for years. Additionally, the quickness with which the two brothers reconnect lends itself well to lighter moments: this is not a play where the audience should be afraid to laugh from time to time.

The play asks uncomfortable questions: one brother reveals that he’s struggled to even recognize his own sexuality over the years, because he had tangled up the acts perpetrated upon him and his own desire to love other men. The other denies any feeling of having been affected, although it slowly becomes more obvious that, in fact, he has. Both brothers have found their relationships to others, particularly children, impossibly strained as they constantly try to sort through their own baggage.

Performers McVarish (as Fionnghall, the brother who seems, on the surface, to b e more of a loose canon) and Allan Lindsay (Dubhghal, who has returned from doing aid work among tsunami-afflicted natives somewhere quite far away) navigate the questions their characters ask themselves with honesty and frankness. Some parts of their conversation are uncomfortable: one admits he is afraid his sister doesn’t want him around her children, the other terrified he may have the potential to cause the same damage enacted upon him onto another. Forgiveness, revenge, therapy and repression are all tried as the characters range for coping mechanisms; in the end, it is conversation – speaking about their trauma, and about how each has begun the journey of unpacking that trauma – that offers the best hope for healing.

As the play draws to an ambiguous ending, the audience is invited to take a few moments to stretch before heading into a follow-up discussion. Led by Pamela Pine, the discussion first invites comments and questions from audience members before asking audience members if there’s anything they think they might do differently in their lives going forward. Aside from stressing the importance of parental and community involvement to determine when children might be at risk, the discussion also creates a space where audience members are invited to share their own stories of surviving abuse.

What was remarkable about this portion of the evening, to me, was the clarity with which one could see how To Kill a Kelpie had created a space where audience members, whose ages covered a large range, felt they could speak openly about experiences taking place around them. On opening night in New York City, audience members spoke – some at length – about how positive they found the play, and about how well it communicated emotions that echoed reactions they’d had to their own experiences.

For more information about Stop the Silence: Stop Child Sexual Abuse, you can visit their website at www.stopcsa.org. To Kill a Kelpie will run in NYC through April 15^th, first in the East Village before heading uptown. More details are available on the production’s website.