Authors Electric

After not being in London since last time I was there (!) (to appear on the Indie Author Panel at London Book Fair 2012 with Joni Rodgers, Dan Holloway, and Linda Gillard, which was the launch event for the Alliance of Independent Authors)...I once more find myself in possession of Train tickets south to the Metropolis...(and this time even a Hotel Room booking, instead of sitting up all night on a 12-hour train journey like last time!)... From 4pm to 7.30pm on Friday 17th April...(i.e. this Friday coming)...the XPONorth-sponsored Indie Author Fair at Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road, London, will be open to the public FREE (including free drinks and even some free author swag from what I hear!)... You'll find myself and 6 other authors at the XPONorth table, and if acquaintances Auld or New would like to come over and say Hello, well, that is what we are travelling South for! This event has, at last, jolted me into producing paperback copies of The Survival of Thomas Fo...

The idea of this is that a writer puts up a post on his or her own blog answering ten questions about his/her work in progress, and then “tags” three – or five, depending on which version you see – other writers to do the same. Then, the writer posts a link to his/her “tagger” and to the people he/she is “tagging” so that readers who are interested can visit those pages and perhaps discover some new authors whose work they’d like to read. I was tagged by Dan Holloway: http://danholloway.wordpress.com/ I had the pleasure to meet Dan a year ago, when we appeared on an author panel together at London Book Fair, for the launch of the Alliance of Independent Authors. (He even gave me his own coffee when he saw I didn’t have any!) He has recently released “Evie and Guy: A novel with no words”, which is available for download at Dan’s site there. I’ve enjoyed exchanging notes with Dan now and then over the last year, regarding some lesser-known gems of European literature...

I hadn’t done a public reading in ten years, not since I was invited to read out my short story, Bringing Something Back, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2002. That had been fifteen minutes standing at a microphone in a tent called a Yurt. Including expenses, £155 for fifteen minutes “work”. Not bad, I had thought then. The wine had been free that day too, of course. Even a fish and chip supper paid for by Ron Turnbull, then-editor of Edinburgh Review. And here I was, ten years later, on Friday 28 th September 2012, due to attend a meeting of the Alliance of Independent Authors in Inverness, where I had been invited to do a wee reading from my novel, The Survival of Thomas Ford. 7.30pm at the Glen Mhor Hotel. I Googled it. Nice old building, slate roof, not bad stonework. I hadn’t been there for many years.                         ...