It looks like I’ll be getting into T. C. Boyle’s graduate fiction workshop for the fall semester. Yay! To celebrate I’ll be buying this.
Steve Eley, editor of Escape Pod, has posted a list of authors who’ll be appearing soon on Escape Pod. Authors who’ll be making their first appearance on the podcast include Peter S. Beagle, David Brin, Neil Asher, Jay Lake, and Carrie Vaughn.
Ever since coming to USC, I’ve had this problem that there’s no place quiet and secluded where I can read. No matter where I go, from my apartment to the deepest recesses of the library, I’m distracted by the noise of chatter (particularly cell phone chatter), street traffic, or, in the case of my apartment, loud music and people continuously shouting, “Woooooo!” (In my bedroom, I have a loud fan facing the wall that I leave running 24 hours a day. That helps a lot.) I’ve tried music or earplugs to block out the noise, but I don’t find either strategy particularly relaxing or effective. Well, I finally hit on a solution I like better. From now on I’m reading everything out loud. That way, the sound of my own voice drowns out all the other ambient noise. This is obviously a lot slower than reading silently, but it’s better than not reading at all, and I think it helps me pay closer attention. It will also hopefully make me more practiced at reading aloud, which is a handy skill for an author to have. In fact, when I get a chance I’ve been popping over to one of the empty lecture halls to practice reading in front of an imaginary crowd.
I’ve also been hitting a lot of author events recently. I used to go to a few every week when I lived in New York, but when I moved out to L.A. I didn’t know where any of them were and I sort of fell out of the habit. I finally found a website that lists them all, and in the past few weeks I’ve been to see readings by Daniel Alarcon, Chad Kultgen, Lisa Lutz, Dana Sachs, and MFA students from CalArts and UC Riverside. Tonight I’ll be going to see Etgar Keret, whom I mentioned in my last entry.
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