For many years, I’ve been attending various Litquake events, including the infamous Lit Crawl on the festival’s final night. Each year, I would meet up with friends from the San Francisco Writers Workshop – either as presenters or, more usually, as fellow-carousers. I was thrilled that we had a critical mass of hardworking writers and avid readers to support such a citywide event, and as a member of both groups, I had high hopes that one day I would shift my status from onlooker to presenter. This year, my novel and stories were published, and this was the year it was finally going to happen.

My short fiction, “Playing with the Rules,” about a homeless jazz fan who escapes the system and makes it to the Fillmore St. Jazz Festival, was among those to be read at the Lit Crawl with others from the anthology, Fault Zone: Stepping Up to the Edge. I was proud to stand among my talented colleagues from the SF/Peninsula California Writers Club, and pleased especially, after all my appearances in conjunction with my novel, to be able to show my range with short fiction in a current setting (not late 1960s!).

And then, I missed it. A nasty viral infection, high fever and a hacking cough kept me away. Thanks to my friend and colleague, Carole Bumpus, for reading so adeptly from my work. And thanks to my husband Jay Miller for attending and taking materials for my novel, A Time to Cast Away Stones.

Ego. When I am writing, I am as far from ego as I can get. I am not even inhabiting the “I,” but rather, other people, each with their own voice and set of problems. But once the work is published, ego takes over, despite my best intentions. Right from the launch party for Stones, I have thoroughly enjoyed speaking to groups about the book and – to be honest – myself. I enjoyed the faces, the book covers spied in their laps, the rapt attention, and especially, telling my story as if every one in front of me were an old friend. People listen and then ask great questions. Many of them require me to seek my own story in the crazy quilt of fact and fiction. And there has been at least one or two brand new questions with each appearance, delivered emotionally, inquisitively or belligerently. I feel at home with them all. I’ve asked them of myself.

Ego plays its part. I am not only pinching myself but patting myself on the back. But since failing to make it to the Lit Crawl, I have been searching for something else I know is at stake. And here is what I have come up with. After so many years “being” other people, and being alone during the creative process, being a published author still does not feel real. I have to remind myself that the ideas and beings that were in my head are no longer private, but public, very very public. If I had been able to read at Lit Crawl, I would have witnessed uptight Sandra and darling, feisty Trina creeping out of my head and into the minds of others. The looks on the faces of an audience – the public – would feel like a new birth for Sandra and Trina, and a kind of new freedom for me.