THE JUDGES' AUDITION ENTRIES: POST 'EM HERE!

mommie4a · Apr 4, 2005

So, now that you got to read what we wrote, how about letting us read what you would have entered? Saying "Well...I wouldn't have entered" is not allowed.

We know Richard, Three Seven and Saritams write and write well, so please, pretty please, give us something to make us realize how lucky we are that you three didn't enter, because it would surely have meant that three of the finalists and/or honorable mentions would've been booted out by your entries.

And Jenna, if you'd bless us with something, that would be so fun.

I'm sure we'll give you more feedback than you could possibly ever give each and every one of us! So just think of this as a critique thread - we promise not to be 1000 Simons (ok, maybe just 900).

Ready, set - GO!

Richard · Apr 4, 2005

Heh. Sorry - I don't have anything I could just post at the moment, and I'm just doing my ceremonial evening 2000xBIC. Probably try to take part directly next time we do something like this though.

JennaGlatzer · Apr 4, 2005

Cute!

Okay, I would probably have tweaked an excerpt from the novel-I-never-finished-because-I-realized-it-had-no-plot. This is the opening, but I warn you, I wrote it a long, long time ago...

(Changed mind. Maybe later. Didn't want people thinking that the excerpt I posted is the one I would actually have entered.)

three seven · Apr 4, 2005

Brilliantly, it doesn't matter whether it's any good or not because it contains 729 words and you'd therefore be automatically disqualified.

JennaGlatzer · Apr 4, 2005

I KNEW you were going to say that! I said I'd have tweaked it, ya bum.

three seven · Apr 4, 2005

Hey, I just tell it as I see it.

trumancoyote · Apr 4, 2005

Ahaha. I love the random aside w/ which it ends

People don't dally enough in asides these days!

Poppy · Apr 4, 2005

Hey Jenna, I think you have the potential to be a real writer someday. I bet you'll write and publish lots of books. Don't ask me how I know, I just have a feeling.

JennaGlatzer · Apr 4, 2005

LOL! Thanks, Poppy.

Truman: the problem is that the whole damn novel was one long aside/tangent.

Witness this, just a page or two later:[font=&quot]

Not many people can definitively pinpoint the climax of their life. I felt lucky to have mine on videotape. Tonight, as always, I would watch the television reincarnate the moment of my last Great Act.[/font]

The theatre had been my soulmate since I was waist-high. My father was an actor. He wasn’t famous or anything, but you don’t know the difference when you’re a kid. I was enchanted by the magic of watching a story unfold in three dimensions while I kneeled on the hideously tacky red velour chairs with the gold trim, peering over the head of whichever tall person was seated in front of me.

Some of those people-in-front are twitchy sorts. They shift weight every few minutes; therefore, I shifted weight every few minutes, always positioning my line of vision just two inches further in the opposite direction of the offending twitcher. I especially fostered a malcontent toward twitchy people with hats or fancy hairdos. I once stuck a Gummi Bear into the vortex of a woman’s high bun, but she was really asking for it, tilting her head back and forth with the regularity of a grandfather clock. There was no reasoning with my mother, though. She reprimanded me and made me apologize to the lady. She also never bought me Gummi Bears in a theatre again. She even threatened to never take me to one of my father’s shows again “until you learn to act appropriately, Violet.”

That’s my name, by the way. Violet. It’s an okay name, I guess. Violet’s not a classic color, but at least it isn’t as deviant as “ochre.” I would have grown up hating my parents if they had named me “Ochre.” I also would have held a grudge against the nurse who put on my nametag, and the secretary who typed my birth certificate for letting it through.

They should really have some kind of approval committee that authorizes names before the kid attached to the name has to face the real approval committee: elementary school students. My peers tormented me until I grew very impressive breasts, but I’d estimate that only about ten percent of the teasing stemmed from my name. The remainder probably resulted from my penchant for fluorescent lipstick, snazzy suspenders, and Rogers and Hammerstein, the latter of which was my father’s fault.

My father rushed me to the stage as soon as I could speak in complete sentences. Applause is a powerful drug, and I was addicted from the first curtsey. By age seven, I had learned to scan the weekend newspaper for casting calls, and I began making my own audition appointments. To my mother’s dismay, however, I had failed to learn how to read a map.

“Los Angeles?” she would exclaim, fingers extended skyward. “Do you have any idea where that is?”

I was a nose-wrinkler. This habit emerged every time I became aware that my mother was about to squash my plans. She would ritualistically break out the spinning globe and sweep her finger across it, attempting again to educate me on the matters of geography. Always erring on the side of ornery, I would rattle off the list until she waved the white flag, acquiescing to haul me to whichever audition came closest to the “40 mile radius rule” she’d established. I would snatch my “There’s No Business Like Show Business” sheet music and hand-written resume and dash out to the station wagon, pressing my mother to “hurry up!” On the ride, I would practice… a lot.

You might think that given this obvious drive and early start, I would have been quite comfortable performing. You’d be mistaken. “Stage fright” is such a tame term for what it really is: stage terror. Stage chilled-to-the-bone, running-for-your-life, shocked-dumb, dread-ridden hysteria. That’s the kind I had. Moments before every performance, I could be found crouched on the floor in the wings, desperately commanding my bladder to behave. I was almost a professional at reverse telekinesis (the art of willing something not to move.) I usually only invoked this power right before the curtain went up, so I wouldn’t tire out my psychic forces with overuse. This peculiar behavior continued straight through high school, where I feigned concentration to uphold my “expert actress” image.

The stage manager, noticing my vertical fetal position as the orchestra began the overture, would rush over and ask, “Hey, are you okay?”

“Sure,” I’d claim. “Meditating. I have to do that to get into character.”

The stage manager would nod in understanding and back off, undoubtedly mentally noting that great actresses need space. I would fear that I might have wet myself just a little, but I wouldn’t have the nerve to confirm it. That’s the nice thing about blaring stage lights-- they’re hotter than Mars at high noon in the summer. Five minutes of basking in the overheads would dry whatever mishap might have occurred while my telekinetic concentration was interrupted.

My jitters arose less out of a fear of being bad than a fear of not being the best. I needed to see every face in the audience glow with awe and the satisfaction of discovering something great as I took command of this character. This was my fix, and I would continue with the tremors until I could feel the audience coursing through my veins. On a lucky night, I would have 800 enablers. The following night, the sickness would return, gnawing just as hard against the walls of my innards. I never believed I was good enough, but I hoped hard.

vig · Apr 4, 2005

you're very dimplomatic moma. but i wll hammer home what you may have been alluding to, even if it where subconsciously, in that passive aggressive motherly instinct.

there is not doubt in my mind that the best ones where left out. enough said. i'm as good a judge of talent as anyone and the gems were left in the safe.

vig

three seven · Apr 4, 2005

Dear Jenna
This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write...

JennaGlatzer · Apr 4, 2005

Vig: there are actually three threads here where people are passive-agressively bitching about the judging. Jill's thread wasn't one of them.

trumancoyote · Apr 4, 2005

Jenna, that's just hilarious. The "ochre" paragraph in particular.

It may just be my fancy for chaos talking, but I enjoyed it. I say: **** whether or not something's pertinent, whether or not it's 'about something' -- it's so hard to create art that'll capture a mite bit of your average person's attention these days; but in spite of that, you did.

Tangents (especially parenthetical ones) rock my socks. I think that's why I love mah Nabokov so much; he was truly a master of the aside.

mommie4a · Apr 4, 2005

I love the chatty nature of it - you almost don't notice when we're reading the narrator's thoughts and when it's her talking to the instructor. I think that makes the narrator's emotions flow smoothly and naturally.

But if I were a judge, well, you know, I'd need to see the other 307 entries first before I would know what to do with this one.

three seven · Apr 6, 2005

Since Jenna was so forthcoming, I gave this some thought. I didn't come up with much of an answer, but it did spur me to tidy up my own WIP thread, stick a clickable contents page on it and link to it HERE so that anyone who hasn't read what I write (and is even remotely interested) can easily do so.

mommie4a · Apr 6, 2005

Three's WIP

I just read your entry, Three. Thanks for sharing.

I liked it - kind of cool. I ABSOLUTELY want to know what the hell she's going to do with those Lucky Strikes! (just kidding - what's she doing with that gun and who's it for).

I don't write fiction and haven't studied how to write it. So feel free to read and delete every blessed word here.

Here are my thoughts:

1. I've been through 30 and 40, and from the sound of the first three paragraphs, I was surprised that she was only turning 30. So, that means either that she's crammed more crap into her first 30 years than most and I kind of would want to see more evidence of her fast-living years, OR she should be made to be 40, or...I've been able to stretch out the first 42 years of my life as though I've only aged to 25, because trust me, I have deep crevices at the inner edge of my eyebrows and a deeper furrow between, several obvious lines on my forehead and a few feathers by my eyes. BUT...when I look at myself, I don't feel Ugh, I look so old. Again, maybe I'm just well-adjusted (love those high-priced psychotherapists), but maybe you want to get other women's input about what age they think you're describing. Just my humble opinion.

2. "nothing finding but cold metal" in the third paragraph. Are you trying to foreshadow the gun and believe that this describes something many women would find in their bags? Because I've got some deep bags I use for my stuff and nothing in it is cold metal - PalmPilot, cellphone, keyboard for Palm, wallet, tissues, pens and pencils, keys - maybe that's cold metal but I wouldn't describe it that. BUT...could be the cold metal fob of her keychain? I don't know - it's just that I don't have anything cold metal in my purse so I wasn't sure if you wanted it to stand out as a "hmm - what is it?" or just part of a collection of what she's fingering or what.

3. Second to last sentence, fourth para. It didn't escape her notice that it was eighty percent useless crap. "It" - hmm - the previous sentence refers to strewn belongings, that's plural and I think the it in this sentence I' typed here is also referring to strewn belonging, right? So maybe it should be "they were..."? I'm not great with grammar.
Thanks for your audition.

NEXT! (ooo - how mean - just trying it on!! :heart:

)

Sarita · Apr 6, 2005

Oh great. Three posts something I love, just to show me up! Ugh, now I have to rethink what I'm entering... stay tuned

Sarita · Apr 6, 2005

And I think all that was more than the 700 word limit, you'd be hacking off your own fingers by now, Three!

mommie4a · Apr 6, 2005

Oops! I'd make a lousy judge - I didn't check the word count. Ah - no matter, that's what the other judges are for.

Sarita · Apr 6, 2005

If you were working with Three, he'd have whipped you into shape Jill! :whip:

I'm so well trained, that I count everything: posts, brochures, translation docs, surveys, presentations... EVERYTHING UNDER 700 PEOPLE!!!

three seven · Apr 7, 2005

Ah yes, but since I neither specified that extract as my entry nor posted a direct link to it here, and indeed am fully aware that it contains a little under 800 words, you've got nothing on me. Nothing!

To answer a couple of Jill's concerns, though: that extract is the opening to a novel and not designed as a stand-alone piece, so naturally there'll be a few questions needing to be answered. I've never been one to reveal everything about a character right off the bat.

1. People obviously age differently so I wouldn't expect every reader to relate; I think that the more you learn about Emily, the more you'll understand her reaction. Obviously I understand it completely based on my own experience of turning 30 (which I was doing as I wrote it) and that of several female friends. From my own perspective, 30 was the first birthday that made me really look at myself and compare the age I looked to the age I felt! I'm sure that's not the way it is for everyone - a fact that she does explicitly acknowledge.

2. Cold hard metal? Wasn't thinking about it as carefully as you! Went through a few handbags, wrote what I felt. No conspiracy there.

3. A census taker questioned my grammar once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Tht tht tht tht tht.

NEXT!

mommie4a · Apr 7, 2005

Did you leave him his tongue?

Good work. I look forward to the novel!

three seven · Apr 7, 2005

mommie4a said:
Did you leave him his tongue?

LOL. Good one.

Sarita · Apr 7, 2005

Okay, I'm taking a page out of our esteemed judges book and breaking the rules. From Share Your Work, the early edition. About 1100 words. Tell me what you think!

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=108794&postcount=1

mommie4a · Apr 7, 2005

Three - you can give me rep points for the tongue line - I'm only five away from a third blob! (I know, I know - this isn't the Beg for Rep Points thread but...)

Sara - I can't wait to read yours - screw the length. I hope to look at it later today or this evening. Cheers (busy day!)

THE JUDGES' AUDITION ENTRIES: POST 'EM HERE!

Mother of All Addictions

13th Triskaidekaphobe

wishes you happiness

(Graeme Cameron)

wishes you happiness

(Graeme Cameron)

My Name is Sweet Thing

Me, myself and I don't know

wishes you happiness

(Graeme Cameron)

wishes you happiness

My Name is Sweet Thing

Mother of All Addictions

(Graeme Cameron)

Mother of All Addictions

carpe noctem

carpe noctem

Mother of All Addictions

carpe noctem

(Graeme Cameron)

Mother of All Addictions

(Graeme Cameron)

carpe noctem

Mother of All Addictions