So, as I mentioned last night at my Clamorous Sundays performance (and in my previous post), this website was recently deleted when my former hosting provider (Host Refugee, who suck) just up and disappeared on me after about 5 years of service, so this whole Bernie Madoff thing? Totally unacceptable! Anyway, because of this, most of the blogs I used to have on this page are gone. That sucks, but when I think about it, I’m not too broken up about it. I wasn’t hugely attached to most of the things I had written here, because a lot of them were just longer status updates, and that’s not terribly interesting.

In any case, I’m viewing this as a chance for a fresh start, one that I’ve been needing for a while now, and hopefully it’ll inspire me to write a lot more than I have been.

But to get back to the original point of this post, which was a bit of a review of the Clamorous Sundays event, I have to say that it was fun to get out of the house and read in front of an audience, even though the lighting (as Bryan Sentes dramatically pointed out during his own reading) was a bit off. I am terrible with microphones, too, so as I was trying to hold my head in such a way that my shadow wouldn’t stretch across the page I was trying to read, I also noticed that the mic was slowly sliding down, down, down and I was kind of hunching over it. I didn’t want to touch it, since it had been giving off a lot of horrible feedback and booming sounds earlier, so that was pretty awkward.

Aside from technical difficulties, I feel like my readings went over pretty well. Not so sure about the Margaret Atwood story (Margaret Atwood Gets It), since it’s hard to gauge whether or not people even know anything about her or her work—or care one way or another. Since the story pretty much just makes a caricature out of her, based on criticism of her work, it’s possible that this is only funny to people who have spent far too much time in a university, being forced to read Margaret Atwood books and criticism thereof. But I think Aries and An Open Letter to Henry Rollins were more popular, and those were “sexier,” so I should probably just eliminate Maggie from my line-up.

I had also invited some people who wanted to join the erotica writing group to meet me afterwards, but since the show went a bit long and I live in a part of town that ISN’T the Plateau, I had to take off while Nina was still playing her set. So, I must apologize both to Nina Nielsen for missing her music and to the various erotica lovers who may or may not have been waiting to talk to me: Sorry guys!

As far as this erotica writing group goes, it’s a bit frustrating to have lots of people email and say they’re interested, and then when you try to figure out a good time to meet up, everyone emails back to say, “Oh, sorry, I’m actually out of town all summer and can’t participate right now.” This has been happening to me rather frequently lately, with respect to several different projects I’ve been trying to pull together, and it’s starting to annoy me. Not because people shouldn’t go away for the summer, because I certainly don’t begrudge people their vacations, but because it seems to imply that they didn’t really intend to participate to begin with. I mean, why would you contact someone to say you want to join a local group when you’re not in the area—and won’t be for the next two or three months? It’s like those people who would email me from Vancouver whenever I had an apartment here in Montréal for rent, starting July 1, asking if I could hold it for them until they arrived in September for the new school year. Hello? I put up the ad NOW because I need someone NOW, not in three months!

Anyway, I’m not trying to single anybody out for criticism with this post, but I just honestly don’t understand why people seem so eager to commit to things they will never follow through on. Personally, I would much rather have only one person who is totally committed agree to participate than have 20 people express interest and never show up. Email is cheap, after all. It’s what happens in the real world that counts, right?