Authors Electric

The night before last, I was privileged to take part in the launch of the XPO North Festival in Inverness, at the Phoenix Ale House.  This event was hosted by the Highland Literary Salon, and was also a celebration of their work over the past 5 years. Testimony to the reality of the earnest and energetic hard work that Peter Urpeth of XPO North, and Tony Ross, Helen Forbes, and the other stalwart members of the Highland Literary Salon have been doing over the past 5 years on behalf of local authors, was the sense of interest and energy in the room 2 nights ago.  Up until that night, the reading I'd done at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2002, which I'll always remember as a wonderful, special day, going on really from 12 noon in Edinburgh til around midnight, and containing myriad fascinating interactions, unpredictable "in-betweens" scattered throughout the day - up until 2 nights ago that reading in Edinburgh which had been organised b...

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.                         ...