We do our best to keep the blog hot as soon as we get back from a trip – but this last 48 hours has been just overwhelming. A roller-coaster of ups and downs like when we just started this whole thing going.
To start. A sort of a mini triumph. On Friday I gave my first “professional” reading. An hour, solo, on my poetry to a paying audience:
Even with my eyes closed
True, there were some empty seats in the house. The Winter Words Festival organisers had stuck their neck out having me – and had wisely stuck me on the first slot of the Friday morning before a weekend festival. But, hey – those people down the left are really paying attention. And my jacket doesn’t clash with my trousers (thanks to Sharon) so I reckon I’m doing pretty well for a poet. And I sold a few books. Four actually. And you may laugh. But don’t – especially if you are a budding poet – because that is doing OK. At £8.99 a copy – there is a whole load of crap out there you could buy for £8.99. And the feedback from those who were there was (to the lady at the bookshop, not to me) was that people had missed a trick. So next time maybe less empty seats. That’s poetry.
Sharon, of course , got the big hall with the aspidistra in the background:
The big Stage
The big seats were for ‘an evening with Brian Blessed’ against which we competed with our TRP books and a winning smile. Who knows who came off best – history will tell. Sharon had a fan-club over from Oban (I am being cheeky – there was a reader’s group who had obviously connected with
The Long Delirious Burning Blue – hello there if you are listening and we really loved seeing you!) and some very testing questions from an audience who clearly knew their novels.
The literary festival also included Jonathan Falla whose long and varied careers in literature, medicine and overseas aid blended with one of those intellects so widely read that you get dizzy with the connections it makes:
Jonathan Falla, on the right, fields a delicate question
Hosted by Jamie Jauncey, who has a wonderful way of getting the best out of an author without having to put his own best foot forward. Falla didn’t duck tricky questions about Food Aid and the upcoming ‘Homecoming’ festivities. And, as you can see … no empty seats at this one.
Then we got home, feeling a little bit like things were coming together.
Only to walk in to a real bunfight with distributors and every other part of the book machine - that had appeared to be purring along quite nicely but was running on dry bearings without us knowing it.
So, as I said, a roller-coaster of a weekend. Tomorrow we start again – selling good books with ‘nothing on the clock but the maker’s name.’ (Footnote: old Battle-of-Britain banter for flying at very low altitude).
David
