Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Monday night we were sitting outside a restaurant in Clapham eating curry when a group of loud drunken australian girls took a table beside us.
They were brash, arrogant, very opinionated, very noisy, and they made me very anxious: I felt they would undoubtedly say something very offensive about me if they noticed who i was.
After they left, full of curry, much less obstreperous, a man sitting at the neighbouring table started to apologise for their behaviour. It turned out he was Australian too, and they embarrassed him.
He noticed i was trans, and made a point of celebrating me and offering me his support. "Go girl and be who you want to be", I think were his words.
He had a certain difficulty working out our relationships with each other.
The fact that i was sitting with my woman lover and my daughter's boyfriend seemed to throw him somewhat.
But it turned out he was a publisher, and worked for Pan McMillan.
My daughter, quite correctly, has been giving me a somewhat hard time for my incompetence with PR and my general reluctance to get involved in the business of promoting myself: and the weirdness of the coincidence in the fact that I am looking for a published (for JESUS the book) and and had unexpectedly bumped into one made me mention my plans.
He asked for an outline of the book.
In the business course I attended last year they kept insisting on the importance of having a "lift pitch" - a succinct and persuasive summary of your project that you could convince someone you met of the viability of your project.
Predictably i was taken by surprise; equally predictably, i could feel myself becoming less and less persuasive by the minute.
I don't think I managed to communicate anything of what the book might be about; because his advice was that "I tell my story straight" without embellishments or convoluted, "dramatic" ways of putting it.
And immediately i felt myself feeling the way i have felt so often before about my creative projects - that they were wrong, ridiculous, unworthy of serious consideration.
Which of course it really isn't.
But tonight, reflecting on all this, i find myself mentally preparing my pitch...
They were brash, arrogant, very opinionated, very noisy, and they made me very anxious: I felt they would undoubtedly say something very offensive about me if they noticed who i was.
After they left, full of curry, much less obstreperous, a man sitting at the neighbouring table started to apologise for their behaviour. It turned out he was Australian too, and they embarrassed him.
He noticed i was trans, and made a point of celebrating me and offering me his support. "Go girl and be who you want to be", I think were his words.
He had a certain difficulty working out our relationships with each other.
The fact that i was sitting with my woman lover and my daughter's boyfriend seemed to throw him somewhat.
But it turned out he was a publisher, and worked for Pan McMillan.
My daughter, quite correctly, has been giving me a somewhat hard time for my incompetence with PR and my general reluctance to get involved in the business of promoting myself: and the weirdness of the coincidence in the fact that I am looking for a published (for JESUS the book) and and had unexpectedly bumped into one made me mention my plans.
He asked for an outline of the book.
In the business course I attended last year they kept insisting on the importance of having a "lift pitch" - a succinct and persuasive summary of your project that you could convince someone you met of the viability of your project.
Predictably i was taken by surprise; equally predictably, i could feel myself becoming less and less persuasive by the minute.
I don't think I managed to communicate anything of what the book might be about; because his advice was that "I tell my story straight" without embellishments or convoluted, "dramatic" ways of putting it.
And immediately i felt myself feeling the way i have felt so often before about my creative projects - that they were wrong, ridiculous, unworthy of serious consideration.
Which of course it really isn't.
But tonight, reflecting on all this, i find myself mentally preparing my pitch...
Labels: trying to sell the idea of Jesus queen of heaven
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