Random Kindness and Open Mic

This Kindness thing is contagious. No sooner have I joined The Kindness Project than I see The Bookshelf Muse is hosting a Random Acts of Kindness Blitz to celebrate the writing community.

They are giving away tons of really great stuff and celebrating kindess to other writers. How cool is that? You can win Scrivener software (pick me, please, please) and membership to Query Tracker, The Critique Circle, and more. Head over and take a look here.

One of the suggestions is to pass on gratitude to someone who has helped you or you'd like to honour or recognise. I want to give a massive shout-out to my writing group. We recently re-formed from The Writing Mamas to the Write On, Mamas! and they are the best group of people ever! So supportive and proactive and intelligent and funny and helpful. We are in the middle of sorting out a blog/website so I'll let you know when that's up. Then we are going to write and publish an Anthology, which has to be published by the end of September as we have a slot at San Francisco's Litcrawl. Yikes! No pressure then. 

This ties in nicely to my Open Mic reading last night. I wrote a 5 minute piece that will probably form the start of my Anthology submission. I had to keep changing it as a few people didn't understand my British references, such as "lashings of ginger beer". I keep forgetting that, although we all speak English, we are actually speaking a different language at times. If you would like to read it, I have uploaded it onto Scribd here. It was great fun - the whole evening was organised by the Tuesday Night Writers and it was their 2 year anniversary of these author readings and open mic evenings at Peri's Bar in Fairfax, CA. It was a blast. Fabulous, clever and very funny pieces and I felt honoured to get up there with them. There were 28 people signed up for the open mic bit, but they ran out of time and only the first 4 got to read - phew, I was number 3. It really makes you focus on your writing knowing you have to stand up in front of people and read it out loud. I even managed not to speak too quickly - yay!

So tell me - who else has done Open Mic readings? How did you get on? Which is the best place you've read?