Cold cabaret

I plough on through Em, chiselling away at Act Two, periodically returning to a number from Act One, just to double check that everything still sounds okay whilst sprinkling yet another little layer of detail into the scores. Nathan gave me a set of notes at lunchtime, so it's very much been a day of fine tuning. I worked from home. It was the new writers' cabaret this evening, and I'd foolishly decided to sing a song myself, so knew I'd need to have a little warble in the kitchen periodically. I get so nervous about the idea of performing. I'm incredibly, almost painfully shy. I appreciate that I mask it pretty well, but in social situations I always feel very self-conscious, utterly inept and highly clumsy. I'm sure there's a recognised term for it. Social anxiety syndrome or something. There's a term for everything these days. Everyone, it seems, needs to be able to claim to be some special form of vulnerable or picked-on. It's the disease of the 2000s and it leads to heaps of excuses and, more upsettingly, people feeling the need to be utterly outraged all the time.

The cabaret went fairly well tonight. There were very few people in the crowd whom I recognised, and there wasn't a great deal of warmth coming off anyone. They were polite and listened with interest, but there wasn't any of the normal whooping or friendly banter. I was hoping that some of my friends like Michelle would be there. She'd have known what a big deal it was for me to be getting up and singing, and would have given me a bit of crucial moral support. I think I sang okay, despite being crashingly nervous, the backing track taking forever to come on, and not being able to get my mic to a height that I could sing into. As I walked off stage, I tripped on a cable.

I have more of a sense now that the song is a good one. It feels atmospheric. It feels right.

I've nothing else to say, really!