Rachel Joyce

Last night at the Guildford Book Festival I was on the roving mike for Rachel Joyce's session.  This means that I get to sit in the session and at the end when they have FAQs I have to get the mike to the person in the audience so they could ask a question.
I'd not heard of Rachel Joyce before so wasn't sure what the session would be like, but I'm really glad I got to see this one.  She was so nice and if her books - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Perfect are as good as she was speaking they will be very good indeed.
I just wish I'd been allowed to record it or had thought to make some notes.  I know that I can't remember all the brilliant things she said.  But the one thing that really stuck with me was when she said there was a chap she had seen who needed help, but there was nothing she could do, so she put him in her book so she could look after him there.  I just thought that was a beautiful thought.
You can tell how good she was as not only do I now want to read both her books but I left the session all fired up and wanting to write something.  A feeling I've been lacking for a bit.  Lets hope I can keep hold of it.

And thats the end of my time volunteering at the festival.  I've really enjoyed it, but I keep forgetting it is a book festival then being all surprised that everyone is as enthusiastic about books as I am.  I hope that I'll have time to help again next year.

Guildford Book Festival volunteering

This weekend I've been busy helping at the Guildford Book Festival.

I've handed out clipboards and paper to children, tidied the Green Room and guarded the books while the bookseller went to retrieve some from another venue.

I've enjoyed it so far with one more evening to go, although the festival continues until Sunday.  

My two favourite parts have been 1. watching Alex Scarrow talking to his young fans while signing books for them - it didn't seem to matter what age they were or how scarily keen they were, he took the time to really listen to what they had to say and have photos taken. And 2. being allowed to watch Chris Brookmyer and Mark Billingham for free - payment enough for volunteering.  Chris is one of my top 5 authors (Stephen King tops the bill) and as a budding writer it is always great to hear from 'real' authors.

I'm looking forward to helping out with the roving mikes tomorrow, but I'll also be glad of  some free time again.

Guildford Book Festival 2013

As I'm not studying any more and only have a wedding to organise, I thought I might fill some of my spare time by volunteering at the Guildford Book Festival this year - 17 -27 October.  First job, hand out festival programmes round where I live - something to keep me busy on Saturday. 
I'm quite looking forward to meeting everyone next week and finding out what we will be up to, although working full time is going to get in the way a bit.

That’s not writing

I would have gone to the Guildford book festival event – Dan Lepard with his short and sweet recipe book today, but not only was it at lunch time but it clashed with the writers group.

Although I’ve been working on my NaNoWrMo project, which is going quite well, I stopped long enough to work on a small idea what I had a good month ago for the writers group today.  It’s not a full story but another scene from a bigger story, but one that I don’t know yet.  I was surprised how well it turned out from the three sentences that I had as my initial idea.

The group seemed to like it, but thought that I’d put it too far in the future, apparently there are some schools in the USA who have stopped teaching handwriting already!

The girl arrives home a little earlier than she had expected.

She let herself in pressing her thumb against the scanning plate and walked though the house calling the lights on while she put her bag down, left her coat on the sofa and went into the kitchen to get some juice.  She finishes the juice and puts the empty carton in the recycling box before telling the fridge that yes this product had been finished and should be reordered from the shop.

The house sounds empty and she wonders what to do next.  Going up the stairs to her room she hears a noise from her brother’s room.  It is not the normal noise she would associate with him, the noise of loud music and gun battles.  This is a scratchy noise which makes her imagine small creatures, although she has been told that all rodents have been eradicated.

Pushing open his door she finds him sitting at his desk.  But the monitor of his computer is unlit and his keyboard is pushed to one side.  He is hunched over something on his desk, his face screwed up in concentration, his tongue between his lips and she wonders if he is hurt.

‘What you doing?’  He doesn’t look up.

‘Writing.’

‘That’s not writing – you’re not using your keyboard.’  He looks up now.

‘Shows what you know.’  And he shows her the page he has been working on.  This is what she could hear, the rustle of the paper as he marked it.  There are marks covering the page and when she looks closely she can see that some of them do look kind of like words but mostly it looks like a mess.

‘What’s wrong with typing?’

‘Nothing, but people didn’t used to always type you know.’

‘What did they do then?’

‘This, stupid.’ And he waves the paper at her again.

‘But look at it, it’s a mess.  How could anyone read that?’  He looks down at his piece of paper.

‘Well I imagine if you’d been doing it all your life you’d be a bit better than me.’  Now he picks up something from his desk.

‘Is that a book?  Where did you get that from?’

‘It’s fine, I’ll give it back when I’m done, but look,’ and he opened the pages to show her words she could actually read although they had not been typed.

‘But everyone knows that books were printed until they all went digital.’

‘Not this one.  It’s a journal.  People used to keep them in books like this instead of online.’

‘That’s ridiculous, you’d run out of space.’

‘I know, but they would just start another book.  There were loads where I got this one.’

‘And whose is that?’  He flicks to the front of the book and show her the name scribed in the front.

‘But that’s our name.  Who’s he?’

‘I think he was our great-great-great-grandfather, but I might be missing a great there.  He was born in 1967.’  They stand in silence contemplating this great fact.

‘So what does it say?’

‘I don’t know.  I haven’t read it. I’ve just been copying the shapes.’ 

Guildford Book Festival 2011

I hadn’t realised quite how far through the year we were until the Guildford Book Festival programme arrived on my door mat.  Held over the 13-22 October there is plenty to interest everyone whether a workshop on how to improve your writing or a talk by a favourite author.  I’m looking forward to having a proper look though the programme and deciding what to attend.

The Guildford Book Festival

The Guildford Book Festival starts today and goes on till 23rd October.
There is much going on as you can see from their website. But this year I think I will have to give it a miss as my OU course is already very full on, with a hell of a lot of reading needed and the first TMA deadline creeping closer. On top of this I start my new job on 25th and am franticly trying to get my current job ship shape for which ever poor soul takes it on. Time seems to be rushing past at a rate of knots.

Chris Brookmyre and some other guy

On Saturday evening I drove to Reading for the Reading Crime Writing Festival and Mark Billingham and Chris Brookmyre's talk.
I ending up sitting right at the back due to a very poor map and missed some of Marks jokes - he used to be a stand up comic, but I didn't miss any of Chris' taking, although the acoustics of the room and his strong Scottish accent didn't make listening easy.

It was a good session. They talked a bit about what they do and read a little from new books then answered questions about where they got their titles from and what they think of TV/film adaptations etc. What made this different from some of the other events that I've attended was that the people here were obviously readers not writers. The questions were about the guys on the stage not how can 'I' improve my writing. This was very refreshing, after all I came to see a favourite author so I want to hear from him.

Then to top it all off Chris signed my copy of The Sacred Art of Stealing, which is a fab book. What a nice man.

So all in all a good evening, even if getting there was hard work.

Reading Festival of Crime Writing

As I was reading this months Mslexia I came across a tiny advert for the Reading Festival of Crime Writing – 11th, 12th and 13th Sept. I didn’t even know Reading had a festival other than the big music one at the end of August. (Rock on!)
I’ve just had a look on their website and not only have they got a short story competition which sounds fun but they have one of my favourite authors – Christopher Brookmyre talking too. They have lots of other authors and workshops but it’s always great when you can see someone whose work really rocks your world. So for anyone who’s interested in crime writing Reading in September is the place to be.

Greg Mosse – Plot Overview

Last night I went to the last event of the Guildford book festival that I’ll be attending this year – a plot workshop.
I really enjoyed it, even if some of the attendees where taking it a bit seriously.
Greg Mosse obviously knew what he was talking about, and best of all took tiny parts of real books to show us how plot can work.

We started by agreeing that plot is a series of imagined events.

One of his exercises was to ask us for a location, which ended up being Hadrian’s Wall at about 125AD. We then came up with characters, in this case a Pagan Witch and a Roman Centurion, and the plot grew from this. Which confirms what the Open University taught me, that Character + Conflict = Plot.
I like this as I always find that just coming up with a plot by its self is extremely hard work and probably why my longer stories fizzle out.
Another exercise was to look at a painting, Utrillo’s Notre-Dame de Clignantcourt (above), and write 70 words of action. I liked this also. He reminded us to write the story, not about the story.

My attempt went;
The boy ran along the street kicking up snow as he went. Rushing he knew he was late; the bells had stopped ringing at the start of the street. As he cornered, so close he could now see the doors, he felt his feet slide from under him and reached out for anything that might stop his fall.
Nothing was there and he fell with a clatter to the frozen cobbles. With a tear in his eye and pink cheeks from the cold he pushed up from the snow and, slower now, ran for the dark wooden doors.
He could hear the organ playing. If he could just slip in without anyone seeing he might just get away with it.

I definitely came away with ideas that I could work with, hopefully to improve my own writing.

All in all a good festival and I look forward to next years.

How to Decide - Novel, Short Story or Poem

Last night I went to another book festival event at the Electric Theatre.

This one was a discussion between Gerard Woodward and Tessa Hadley chaired by Guy Pringle about the difference between novels, short stories and poems.
Tessa and Gerard both work together at Bath Spa University, and have attempted all 3 types, which I think added to the whole experience as they knew each other so could make comments about each others work.
It was a very intermit event as the audience wasn’t that big and we ended up joining them on the stage, which was really nice.
They were very interesting, and once again it was great to hear from real people about how they work, how they got published, how they juggle their time and what inspires them. Its defiantly tempted me to try some of their books.

Tea with Wendy Cope

I’ve just gotten back from seeing Wendy Cope at the Book festival.
I was most impressed and she is now my all time favorite poet. Of course I don’t really know many other poets except, for instance, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Wilfred Owen who were all met thought school or my Open University courses and are all very dead.
So it was really great to actually see a live poet reading out her own work. She could put the emphasis where it was meant to be and tell us a little about how the poems came to be. As someone who is trying to write, it is very nice to hear that other people get their ideas from odd places too.
And she has a lovely dry sense of humor which I think adds the life to her poems. I like that she gets right down to human emotion, without taking herself too seriously.
The fact that there was free tea and cake in the interval has nothing to do with me thinking this is the best session so far.

Ray Mears – Vanishing World

On Friday me and ‘im outdoors when to our first event for the Guildford book festival. Ray Mears in jeans and a familiar dark green shirt, sleeves rolled up, sat for an hour talking to Fred Marden (whoever he is) discussing his new book and life in the wilderness. I found it quite interesting, and it was nice to see that even in the flesh he is much as he is on TV. He comes across as very sincere and reminded us on several occasions that teaching bushcraft is his job and it just happens that he’s got a TV show too. He does at least seem very aware of the plight of the people he visits and made the very good point that we should sort our own country out before poking about with someone else’s.
The half hour or so of audience questions were made up of the normal sort of questions he’d obviously been asked a hundred times before and a few more inspired ones.
All in all I think it was a good couple of hours, even if ‘im outdoors thought he promoted his book too much. It is after all a book festival, and if he doesn’t promote his book why else would he be there?