Litquaked

I love San Francisco.

Yesterday was the last day of Litquake. This year's Litcrawl was awesome, including deadbeat venues that forgot we were coming and forced us onto the streets, and at least one near fist-fight by a couple of dudes so high on literature that they couldn't stop talking shit to one another. This was my first year on the Litquake committee, and I have to say, I've always been amazed at how well this thing comes together on how little money, and watching it happen from the inside out I'm just more impressed, not less.

I curated and emceed a reading during the third phase, at this little clothing store on 21st. The reading was called
Unfit to Print: Writers Read Lost Scenes from Unpublished Writing That Lived Fast, Died Young, & Left a Beautiful Corpse
and the readers did an awesome job.
Kent Zimmerman read from his un-published porn how-to manual that he helped Seymour Butts write.
Kaya Oakes read hilarious out-takes from her promotional materials for her book on Indie culture.
Holly Shumas shared her mis-begotten memoir proposal, and
Literary Deathmatch champion Sam Hurwitt exhumed some half-brilliant, half-awful pages from his novel-in-a-drawer from ten years ago.

If you didn't make it this year, be sure to get out to the Litcrawl next year. If you don't live in San Francisco, move here. There were so many great readings, including but definitely not limited to my friend Kara Platoni at her very first Litquake reading, reading a supremely comic excerpt from the pages of one of her seven nanowrimo novels.