Authors Electric

It’s spring and that means we’re entering the fabulous fun of festival season. It might be a Glastonbury-free summer but the literary world will be steaming full ahead through Hay and beyond. It’s the time when the public get to meet their heroes, and get to find new heroes. When they’re introduced to the whole smorgasbord of literary everythingness to take their pick for what to read in the year ahead. (the musician Jessie Grace at Not the Oxford Literary Festival) So as writers this is a doubly exciting time. It’s where we get to meet our public and to embrace the wonderful people who don’t yet know us and swaddle them in our fabulousness. Aren’t you bursting with anticipation? What’s that? You’re not going to a festival? You haven’t been asked? The sad fact is that if you’re a self-published writer or a spoken word poet festivals don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter what you’ve written, how brilliant it is, how many people love your work, what reviewers or anyone else think. If you...

It’s funny how changes creep up on you until one day you sit down and have a think and go “whoa there, steady on, lad”. July was one of those months for me. It was fantastic, but also a little scary, and a timely reminder that it’s good to sit down regularly and take stock. To take a look where you were last year, and what you said you wanted last year. And how far you’ve moved in respect to both. Writing is like music in many ways, and the writing business like the music business in many more. But one of the most pertinent similarities is the way you start out scratching and scraping to play first on at your local pub, and you keep scratching and keep scraping only one day you realise you’ve actually been approached by three bands in a row now who really wanted you to come and support them next time they have a pub gig. And (you hope) so on. Progress in writing, as in music, can be so imperceptibly slow that it’s only when you look back year on year – or further – you realise ...