I can't check, because I apparently cleverly moved the email with the details into a separate folder on my home computer, and thus can't check it via webmail.

I've got a couple of things.

First thing, slow down. You'll be nervous, and when you're nervous you tend to speed up, and your pitch goes up. Chipmunks on speed. Okay, maybe not that bad. But reminding yourself to slow down, even if you think you sound like a stretched audiotape? Is good.

Second thing, try to remember to hit your consonants. Again, when you're nervous you tend to swallow your consonants, particularly ones at the ends of words. In fact, the syllable at the end of sentences is in severe jeopardy. So slow down, and make sure you have enough breath behind your last syllable to actually get it out, and be aware of your consonants.

Other than that? You're all vibrant, articulate people. Go, talk, be brilliant!

Rehearsing is good -- especially if you can find a way to record it for review. Slow down -- you will almost certainly be reading faster than you think you are. Remember to breathe.

See, dcp said it so much more eloquently than I--listen to him.

X-post! Hah! That's what I get for trying to post from my dinky little phone. Too slow.

And enunciate. Makes me crazy when I'm listening to something and they don't speak clearly.

hee! When I happened to glance ahead and saw that paperdol's was the first post behind this post of Jilli's...

does anyone have any advice about reading one's work out loud?

I had assumed paperdol would have excellent advice so

We're reading our work out loud? oh crap.

made my laugh like a very silly person.

Putting rejections in perspective: [link]

Nothing embarrasses a publisher more than the public knowledge that a literary classic or a mega best seller has somehow slipped away. One of them turned down Pearl Buck’s novel “The Good Earth” on the grounds that Americans were “not interested in anything on China.” Another passed on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” explaining it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” (It’s not only publishers: Tony Hillerman was dumped by an agent who urged him to “get rid of all that Indian stuff.”)

The rejection files [from Knopf], which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Anaïs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”).

Liese, Sarameg, nice. I love the different perspectives.

Joe, day off? I like it. It's a nice window on a moment, with clear movement before and after. The character has a real personality, hard to do in such a short piece.

I can't think of a day off drabble. Maybe it will come to me.