Writer’s Bloc

So this is neat. I’m going to be a speaker at a local event for writers.

I was at the Georgetown library today working on my taxes (using the library’s much faster Internet to use the cumbersome online TurboTax), when Jilian, the librarian, came to my little table in the back room and asked me if I would be willing to participate in an author program they are putting on a week from Saturday (February 23). Of course I said yes immediately. In all my years of public speaking, I’ve never done a speech or been on a panel specifically about being an author. If nothing else, it should be interesting to meet the other authors.

The El Dorado Library organization’s website (www.eldoradolibrary.org) doesn’t say a lot in promoting the event (after all, “Authors’ Panel” is a pretty straightforward subject title for a small town): “Come meet some of our local authors! Hear about their experiences with writing and getting published. Drop in any time during this three hour program.” For some reason, I keep thinking of it as a Writers Bloc, spinning in a little humor.

It’s a three-hour program with eleven local authors talking about their books and writing, their genre, where they get ideas, and how they were published and such. Eleven authors! And they’re all from the Georgetown Divide, though I guess I’m the only one from the area where my cabin is up in Volcanoville. I wonder how many of the authors are from Georgetown itself? There can’t be too many authors in a town of less than a thousand people, although this is good writing country for the most part, remote and serene. I also wonder if they’re including towns farther out, like Cool, Auburn and Placerville. If you go that far out geographically, I guess getting eleven authors may not be such a great challenge. There are seven libraries in their network in El Dorado County, which also includes South Lake Tahoe, but this event is being held in one of the smallest towns. Georgetown, with a population of 936, is the last actual town before you go out into El Dorado National Forest, where my place is. (I’m about 1,000 feet higher in elevation, though, so when it rained all day in Georgetown a couple days ago, I got ten inches of snow! Snow that melted completely away in the following two days of sixty degree weather. Gotta love it!)

Originally the authors’ event was planned for two hours, to be held in the back reading room of the library, but that was when they were planning on just a handful of authors. Now they’re working on a larger venue, and they’ve structured the program for the authors to speak for about ten minutes each. I think I’d like to begin with a short reading from My Tango, actually, rather than describing the book. It’s just such an effective beginning: “Shock. And not shock. This was the phone call I was expecting. ‘It looks like cancer.'” I’ll have to pick out bits that only add up to two or three minutes of time. Actually, just two minutes. Anything longer than two minutes and people’s minds lose focus and become more easily distracted, just like watching a dance in a competition. There’s more than one reason each dance in a show is limited to two minutes. 🙂

The way this thing came up, with me randomly deciding to go to the library that afternoon and then being invited on the spot to be a speaker, reminds me of something Erin Pavlina told me when we were talking about the Swan as my spirit totem. The Swan, with grace, beauty, and enormous strength, unintentionally but gently creates an invisible path through the water which others follow. The thing Erin said about me was, “All you have to do is show up, and the right things will happen.” Practically all of my speaking engagements come about from people just talking with me, people that turn out to be in charge of some group or another where they then invite me to be a speaker. Or, one degree removed, I am invited to speak to a group by someone who heard about me from a friend that heard me speak or knows me directly. I have no actual marketing strategy, these things just seem to come up on their own.

Oddly enough, the flute concert I played in December led to an invitation to give a motivational/inspirational speech to a national women’s organization. Internally, I tend to think of my music as something I have clung to in stubborn refusal to let pain force me to give up every single thing that constituted my pre-cancer life, not as a way of sharing myself with others. Then again, as an adult, my music has always been about giving, to show appreciation for whatever musical gift I have by giving it to others. When I play the flute (usually in a church), I’m hoping that it helps people feel more spiritual, lifted, comforted, embraced.

That’s all pretty different from anything I expect will happen at the authors’ panel thing in Georgetown, though I’m still happy to do it. You never know. And often, to allow the right things to happen, all you have to do is show up.