The Victoria Literary Festismall!

Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to get myself organized either to pitch my workshop to the many wonderful literary festivals around Britain or to buy tickets and travel to them at the moment, I thought, “I know writers. Why don’t I bring the festival to me?”

The fact that all four of the people I invited were available and keen made the project feel destined for success. I hadn’t given myself a lot of lead time, but when your project is tiny, and you’re not a perfectionist, that’s okay! The only thing that took any real effort was getting the t-shirts printed correctly.

The date for the ‘festismall’ (my husband’s brilliant idea for a name) was yesterday - Sunday, January 12th. On Saturday I tidied and cleaned, baked cookies and sorted out the festival goody bags. I had four random cotton shopping bags hanging around (who doesn’t?), and into each went a t-shirt, a copy of my short story collection, an Ian Rankin paperback (for some reason we had four duplicate copies), an anthology that one of the invited writers and I both had a story in, and some ginger-molasses cookies tied up with a ribbon I’d had in my sewing box for years.

We would be sitting around the round table in the front room we use as a gallery for my husband Andrew Gurnett’s wonderful photography, and we’d be using the blanket chest in there for a merchandise table everyone could put their books for sale on.

We were seated around the table and ready to get sharing at 1:30pm. Kate Innes, author of poetry and medieval literary adventure, started us off, talking about choosing the right point of view when constructing a book, and what happens, both to the writer and then to the reader, when it works well, and when it doesn’t. She’s getting into the third book of her trilogy, and thinking about these issues.

We moved on from discussion of POV to discussion of structure and style. Sarah James, writer of poetry and short fiction and the main editor at V. Press, opened up to us about her struggles with her “difficult manuscript” (and don’t we all have those hanging around as well?). We talked again about how to balance what we seek to experience as a writer with what readers seek to experience.

Up next was Suz Korb, a prolific writer of a mix of romance, sci-fi and YA fiction, and indie publisher at Keystone Literary. Suz talked us through her writing process, which includes a lot of communication with her readers on social media, and also through her publishing process, which includes paperbacks, ebooks, and audio books. She made self-promotion sound encouragingly easy.

When it came to my turn to share, I talked about the three-stage feedback (or lack of feedback) process I went through with my most recent fiction manuscript. We talked about what sort of feedback is helpful, and how and when we need to make changes. I was the photographer for the day, so I don’t have a photo of me speaking, but here’s a nice one of Andy and me, with Andy wearing the festismall security hoodie we made for him for fun!

I met Chris Newson, our final speaker, when he was general manager at Marshall Cavendish in Singapore and they were publishing my book on presentation skills. Amazingly, we both relocated from Asia to the Worcester area of England within a year of each other. He’s got his fingers in many publishing pies, including commissioning for a non-fiction publisher and even acting as agent for people he knows with marketable projects. He talked to us about the changes technology has offered writers, and we peppered him with questions about what his contacts are looking for.

We conversed like this for over four hours, and the time flew. We put the kettle on for hot drinks only once. Otherwise it was talk talk talk, with a bit of nibbling on cucumber and salmon sandwiches, Twiglets, cookies, and chocolates that Suz had brought.

Andy took our group photo . . .

In the bottom right corner of this photo is the nose of our senile miniature schnauzer, Jasper, wondering why we are all in a row.

. . . then we did some book buying and swapping, hugged each other warmly, and dispersed.

I don’t think I could be happier about how the afternoon went. I’m so glad I brought the festival to me, and I will certainly do it again. Thank you Kate, Sarah, Suz and Chris for making the trip giving me so much food for thought!