i'm trying to decide what to read. Unlikely that I'll read my piece from the book. It's too long and I can't think of any meaningful way to excerpt from it. More likely, I'll read Please Don't, which I published in Enterzone after Coffeehouse came out - it's my most recent finished story. It has three segments and discusses an acid trip that peaks in a sort of triple way, so I imagine that Suki and I can work out a cool sequence of percussion patterns to heighten the anxiety and mood shifts in the story. However, I'm tempted to use the occasion of the reading to tempt or even trick myself into writing something new - i pause to shake out my cramping left hand then point pen in air and scratch a spider bite or pimple on my scalp before stopping and wondering how a publicly itchy scalp reflects on me to the people sitting around me in this sushi restaurant's waiting area - in fact I have a stong feeling that i should write up the story of the naked oral hygienist I was musing about the other day, bosomy guilt, and trying to work in some riffing off alt.sex.fat and the way food pleasure and other bodily pleasures are intertwined.

i don't feel fluid enough to just extemporize that story into being although I am tempted to take the microphone and just blat! it out but that's a little too risky. i don't want to alienate even a friendly audience. but is it better or worse to reel out the particulars, the bones of the story? or better to keep them hidden (hold out for a more artful telling)?