My friend at Hooray for Anything is right. Sometimes writing in my blog is such a distraction, that it takes time away from my fiction writing. I'm telling myself it's okay, because out of my blog writing came my writeup about my 9/11 experience. And even though I think of myself as a poor personal essay writer, my 9/11 experience writeup was published on The SF Chronicle's website, SFGATE. What seemed like a terrible month long vacation from writing stories, turned into a publishing experience. So I guess the blog writing can't be that bad for me.

It's weird keeping a public blog, which is online diary for people to read, and also keeping my own private diary. Sometimes the entries are the same. Sometimes they are radically different. I say things in my private diary, that I would never say on my blog. I write things in my blog, that I wouldn't necessarily write in my journal.

In acting, teachers talked about the audience as "the fourth wall". As an actor, you have to on the one hand, ignore that the audience is there, but on the other hand, you have to be aware that your audience is there because if you're generating laughs, you might want to pause and wait just a little for the audience to stop laughing so you don't lose your lines in the laughter. In a storytelling performance I participated in, during my story the audience was reacting and laughing and I was feeding off of their energy and laughter. I found myself doing things in the performance that I didn't rehearse, but which seemed right to do because the audience was reacting the way they did.

In the beginning, hearing the audience laugh disturbed me. I couldn't help but think that I was really doing something really awful, and they were laughing at me and making fun of me. Any experience I'd had of being laughed at in my life, flashed before my eyes in what seemed like an excruciating slow few seconds. I could feel myself freaking out, and had to really think about what was going on with not only what I was saying, but with how the audience was reacting.

When I surmised that they weren't laughing at me, but reacting to my character's story with laughter, I relaxed. When I felt relaxed, I felt the audience's energy hitting me, and it felt like a drug high. There were only about 30 people who saw my performance. I wondered what it must be like for rock stars, who have a stadium full of people reacting to them. Afterwards, I realized why performance for some people is so addictive. There is nothing quite like having people pay that much attention to you. For me, it was exciting but at the same time scary somehow. There's a certain power in commanding that kind of audience attention, a power I didn't want and certainly didn't crave.