Brian T Shirley

Brian T Shirley
Jokers Wild, Atlantis Resort

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Turning a "Negative" into a "Positive"

 I recently got a some what negative review of my 3rd book "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the club". At first I'll admit I wanted to confront the person about his opinion, but the feeling was short lived. I thought about the review and reflected on a few things.

 1) This book was written and put together on the request of Libboo, the publisher. They believed in the book before I did.

2) The illustrator was put in place to design the cover, which he did. He read the stories and enjoyed them so much  he asked if he could illustrate them also.

3) You can't please everyone.

 I've also been telling the stories from the book onstage towards the end of my to to promote it. So far I have not done all the stories in front of a live audience, but the one's I have done have gotten a great response. As a result of the combination of all these factors I've come up with the idea of bringing to book itself to life on stage. I will not tell you the review that helped spark this, you can go to my Amazon page to see that. I will say it made me take a second look at some things, so much so that I'm staying off the road for the rest of the year barring a high paying gig. I'm hosting profession shows locally every week here in Chas.,SC and doing a different show each week by pulling stories out of the book and performing them live. I've also started to add more stories and anecdotes to this new show so that it will have more material than the book. Some stories are more visual and need to be seen and heard live, so they will be included. I'm really seeing why people say "things happen for a reason" and "the Lord works in mysterious ways". I'm also hoping this will help my book sales as, along with the rest of the country, I'm struggling in a mighty way. I feel like I'm trying to crawl out of a huge hole. The bottom line is that I have a new show I'm working on which will be called "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Club. LIVE!" This will be more of a storytelling type show with a lot of humor mixed in. I will use the stories to answer a lot of the questions people have about being a comedian. That will be the flow of the show.

 Keep your options open, pray often and dare to keep your dream alive!

2 comments:

  1. It's great to hear about the US standup scene. I'm an erstwhile Brit comic who now teaches comedy and writes. I'm following.
    If you want to check my humorous blog on ageing (& comedy), it's http://burntupbabyboomer.blogspot.co.uk/

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    1. Very cool Tony and Thanks! I will check out your blog! I would love to come across the pond sometime and see what the scene is like over there.

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