Bars and their settings

I really haven't been a good blogger this week.  I mean, there are excuses galore, including a very significant event at work Friday evening that I spent most of the week preparing for.  I even had stress dreams, in fact, which are quite rare for me.  One of them was really entertaining to the friends at work whom I chose to tell about it...I actually woke up from a dream in which the graduation speaker was break-dancing down the aisle.  Sheesh.  But I've been working and working and then working more, and on my really minimal non-work time I've been trying to keep revising Part I of the story.  *sigh*  'K, 'nuff excuses. 

I'm done.  Done with graduation for this year, and done with the revision.  Both give me a significant feeling of accomplishment.  The book...Part I of The Ascent of the Goddess...is now ready for professional editing prior to being used as a query for agents.  That's a huge sigh of completion from me.  Graduation is the same. Back when I just showed up for graduation, I really had no idea what went into planning and putting on the event.  Now I do, though, and I keep questioning why I agree to do this every year.  It's tough...very detail oriented.  It, like my book, would be much easier to do if it were all I had to do. 

The funny thing about this graduation--and trust me, it wasn't really unusual--was the different feelings people walked away from it with.  I had a great many people telling me what a wonderful job we had done.  It was the best graduation they had ever attended, some said.  Yay!  From my standpoint, it stank.  The people I'd counted on to take tickets and hand out programs decided they'd rather be at the front table.  The first speaker missed his cue to have everybody sit down.  The commencement speaker went far longer and far less secular in his comments than we'd discussed.  The folks reading the names, with one exception, forgot everything I'd said about intentionally slowing it down; it became a race to get the grads across the stage.  *sigh*  Production-wise, it was a disaster. 

Nobody really cared but me.

It's funny how that works.  The performer always knows what he or she misses in the performance; the audience rarely does.  When I sang on stage in front of lots of people, they'd always tell me what a wonderful thing it had been while I'd heard every missed note.  I thought they were just making me feel better till I realized that no, they really had no idea.  It's not that they were stupid or didn't understand music...they came for entertainment, and entertainment they received.  Their bar was set different from mine.  Same with graduation on Friday, really...everybody else's bar was set different from mine. 

What will be interesting is how everyone else reacts to the book.  Will the audience's bar be set different in this case?  Only time will tell.