Rehearsal Notes

Today I had the opportunity to be read to. That doesn't happen so often. Two of the scheduled participants in our program of "Scary Tales!" for the month of October read their stories for me. It was great fun, being the whole audience.

The above are my rehearsal notes, so to say. I don't expect anyone else to be able to decipher what I doodled while I listened. Everything on these pages is to do with the stories I heard today, but even if you knew the stories as well as today's readers, I don't know that you'd make head or tails of my notes. After each reader was done, I used these pages to make a few suggestions, mostly to do with editing, waiting for the laughs and the anticipated gasps and the like. Not that either reader really needs my help; a second set of ears was all I was. So when each story came to it's shuddering end, then we talked for awhile, or rather I merrily gabbed away another half of an hour, and they made their own notes. After that, we were done for the day, or rather I was. They still get to rehearse. Don't know that I actually contributed much. See for yourselves the organized, thoughtful, response I offered them! Anyway, I have every confidence in their success.

When I looked at these notes of mine later, I had to laugh. Here then, ladies and gentlemen, the evidence of my keen, critical sensibility at work. I thought I'd share.

The top page contains my thoughts on a story titled "Don't Tell Cissie", by Celia Fremlin. I knew neither the story nor the author before today. This, despite the fact that it was selected from an anthology, The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, that I loaned to my coworker. It's a delightful story; very arch and amusing, with a genuinely unexpected and chilling conclusion. Turns out, some of the very best supernatural things we've been finding to read for this series also happen to be quite funny. As the idea of these readings is primarily to entertain as much or more than to discomfort our audience, this will doubtless prove a considerable benefit to our listeners. Celia Fremlin, I've only just learned, was a crime novelist primarily, an Edgar Award winning one at that. She passed away just last year, after quite a long and distinguished career. (I shall have to look for something more by her soon.) Fremlin only rarely introduced a supernatural element into her fiction. On the evidence of just the story I heard today, she did this very well indeed. I suspect this story will be quite a crowd-pleaser.

The second page of my nonsense has all to do with one of the great English supernatural stories, a favorite of mine as well as our reader's, "The Ash Tree", by Montague Rhodes James, OM, MA, a mediaeval scholar and don, better and much more sensibly known simply as M. R. James. James brought this sort of thing to a rare perfection in the first two decades of the last century when he was eventually persuaded that the ghost stories he told at academic smokers really ought to have a wider audience. James eventually published half a dozen books of these stories and The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, first published in 1931, is widely considered among the greatest books in the genre. The story I heard today has to be one of his best. Certainly there are few I've ever heard or read that contain more expert chills. James had a way of making the most seemingly innocuous comparisons carry a very unique horror; weird and unearthly things described with quite common, and otherwise harmless language, which only makes the nastiness all the more plausible and frightening. As someone who himself regularly read his stories aloud, James understood just where to drop an unexpected corpse or bit of gruesome detail into his narrative. The result can still be truly shocking.

My notes, by the way, contain nothing so straightforwardly informative as what I've just written. Don't bother trying to puzzle any of it out. Mostly it's all to do with breathing and pauses and pace and all the other little tricks and troubles I've learned about myself reading stories in public. Hopelessly boring, if not incomprehensible to anyone not undertaking such a task. As I said, I only decided to reproduce my notes here because I thought someone else might find the seemingly random nature of the way I think, and the fact that I'm as likely to doodle an idea as write it down, as amusing as I do.

Now, having provided this slight preview of a couple of the Scary Tales! yet to come, I hope any who are able will join us at the bookstore to hear the real thing. As for the glimpse into the rather scattershot workings of my addled brain, that I give you gratis, and to play on your sympathy a bit, dear readers, so that the next time you find me rambling away here and making less than perfect sense, you may appreciate better the rather sorry tools with which I'm forced to work.

One does what one can with what one's got, sister. Remember that.