How Hard Can It Be?

On June 20th, I have a reading in New York. It's part of the In The Flesh erotica reading series held at the Happy Ending Lounge.

This will be the first time I've outed myself as Jay in public. It's not
that I hide my boy smut persona, but that knowledge is pretty much
limited to the erotica world, which is small and protective of
identities.

Coming out as Jay isn't the hard part. Beyond the nearly paralyzing thought of
standing in front of an audience for any reason - the stuff of nightmares - I'm
worried about the time limit. It didn't sound so short when I was told
10 minutes, tops. It sounded like an eternity. Then I read through my
entire story aloud and timed myself. 25 minutes. Okay, something had to
go. It's an erotica reading, so the sex was a given. I cut everything
up to that point of the story. But it doesn't make a lot of sense
without the beginning, so I have to explain what happened up until that
point. Three sentences are enough to cover it, but it still eats into
my time. Even with half the story cut, I still ran over ten minutes, so
I had to edit it even more, and still more, until I get down to nine
minutes. (Eight was my target, just in case, but I'm to the point where
I can't see cutting any more.)

Okay, so I have nine minutes of story. Should be a breeze, right? Except that
I wrote a very emotional piece and I choke up when I read it. I talked to friend Trebor about my fear of getting emotional during the reading. He thought it
was cute. Good thing we were exchanging emails, because I might have
smacked him for that. Cute? Try humiliating.

I need for this to be over.