Wednesday 2 September 2015

Festival of Writing 2015

     Having decided to believe in myself a bit more and take action- something I tell my therapy clients all the time! I've signed up for the Festival of Writing 2015 (#FoW15). It's this weekend in York and I just made registration before the cut off.

     It's 3 days away from home, which isn't too popular with my husband, but it's thanks to him that I can afford to go at all, or rather, not feel too guilty about the cost. He's into sports betting and despite knowing nothing at all about football, I managed to win £900 on a £3 8-fold bet in April, largely due to believing in Swansea. So, I'm spending some of that money on this/

     For the Festival, you could enter 500 words for a scary Friday Night Live Competition, where 7 finalists have to read out their entry, get critiqued by an agent and an author on stage and then everyone votes with a show of hands for a winner (who last year walked off with 7 agents seeking to represent her). Sadly, I wasn't short-listed, although I comfort myself with the fact that I worked out the odds were about 50-1.

     There are a couple of terrifying workshops, their version of Slushpile Live, where you read out your first paragraph or synopsis and 2 or 3 agents tell you what they think. As far as I can gather from the helpful Word Cloud for the Festival, it's a really useful session, because it shows you how agents think and manage to decide so quickly on a submission. Apparently, it also shows you how individual their responses are, eg one agent praised a sentence last year, another agent didn't understand.

     So I'm hoping to go from this:
    


 A (not so delicate) flower in a thick glass prison, to this:
A flowering (not so prickly) cactus!

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