Things are a little quiet on the writing front at the moment for me, now that my novel sitting in the virtual slush-piles of various agents patiently awaiting their attention. In the meantime, however, I have been engaging in a fair bit of writing-adjacent activity, so I thought I would share a little about that today.

In particular, I have been getting to grips with recording myself doing readings. Now, I have to admit that reading my work out loud to other people isn’t exactly my favourite part of the being-a-writer gig, because standing in front of a crowd and having all eyes on me is as far from my comfort zone as, say, Australia is from England. But, in the spirit of being courageous in the pursuit of my dreams (which I wrote about in a previous post here) I’m doing my best to embrace it.

So far, my experience of ‘embracing readings’ has gone a little like this: I say a quick just-go-for-it ‘yes’ when asked by someone to do a reading for their event, then immediately push it out of my mind because my anxiety starts rising and the words what-the-hell-was-I-thinking? start playing repeatedly in my head. Then, when the event organiser follows up with me a short while later to ask how I’m getting on with my preparations, I panic all over again, think about ways to get out of the reading, and then tell myself well-you-have-to-do-it-now-because-you-already-said-yes.

At that point, I accept that there is no going back, submit to the process and get my act together. I decide on which piece/extract I’m reading, start practicing, suppress further bouts of panic as they arise, and push push push myself towards the reading and through it and out of the other side. And when it’s all over, I think about how the readings aren’t ever as terrible as I think they’re going to be and admit to myself that I’m-on-a-bit-of-a-high-now-actually and start thinking gosh-it-would-be-fun-to-do-that-again….

With events taking place online for the last 16 months or so due to the pandemic, it has been a very long time since I last had to do an in-person public reading (phew!) but I have done a few for live online events and more recently I have begun working on readings for pre-recorded events. I thought that these would be easier because there wouldn’t be the usual the-audience’s-eyes-are-on-me anxiety, but they’re proving to be trickier. I guess because when you’re live, you’re committed from the moment you start reading and you have to keep going no matter how many mistakes you’re making along the way, whereas when you’re doing something pre-recorded there is an increased expectation that it has to be perfect.

Where that expectation came from, I don’t know, but I didn’t question it and I ended up spending a ridiculous amount of time recording and re-recording and re-re-recording my reading for my first event. Many, many bloopers later, I remembered that perfection is the enemy of creativity and growth, so I told the perfection-expectation to ‘<insert expletive> off’, did the best job I could with my reading, and sent the recording to the event organiser before I could get caught in the picking-faults-in-my-performance loop again. And then I repeated the process for the next reading.

So, that’s a little bit about the learning curve that I have been travelling lately. Would you like to see how the readings actually turned out?  Great! I thought you would never ask… 😉

The first reading is of my story The lady would have preferred Milk Tray, but black magic it is, which I recorded for ‘An Evening of Women’s Flash Fiction Readings’, part of South Asian Heritage Month. The video is available on YouTube and features twelve writers with wonderful tales to tell, so do put your feet up and take your time to check out all of the readings.

The second reading is for ‘The Travelling Notebook: a conversation about connection with Koyal Writers’, also a South Asian Heritage Month event. Koyal Writers is my lovely virtual writing group and this is the first event we are putting together as a group, so we are very excited about it. The recording will go live on YouTube at 12:30pm on Friday 6th August 2021, and I will post a link as soon as it is made available by the organisers.

I would happily share one of my many bloopers with you in the meantime, of course, but I haven’t quite learned how to embed video into these posts just yet. Oh well. One new skill at a time, hey? #AmBloopering #AmLearning #AmShrinkingThatDiscomfortZone

Peace and blessings,

Nazira