The Firestation Book Swap

Roll up roll up! Exciting new event ahoy.

In August, I will be co-hosting The Firestation Book Swap with Scott Pack, once grand fromage of Waterstones, now grand fromage of The Friday Project. He writes a great intro to it over here, much of which I will now repeat.

Basically, it's going to be a book event for people who love book events but are also slightly bored of them (for example: all authors.) We're going to invite two or three writers who are also good talkers onto the sofa and chat about all kinds of things. I don't know what kinds of things yet, because part of the evening will involve pulling questions written by the audience out of a jar, and we're going to have a no-questions-about-writing rule for those. There will be no reading out loud and guests will be chosen for being interesting rather than having a new book to promote. We're going to have an audience-manned Twitter feed for the event, and hopefully a podcast, so it's very up to the hip moment, yeah. I have a strong suspicion there will be tea and cake, because I have never done anything with Scott which has not involved tea and cake.

The reason it's called the Firestation Book Swap is that it's taking place in a converted firestation, and all audience members and guests will be asked to bring a book they don't want any more to swap, and afterwards we'll all go to the bar and chat and swap our books.

As for the Firestation, it's a very cool new arts centre in Windsor. I can only speak as a Londoner, but Windsor is a piece of piss to get to from London, as it's only half an hour by train from Paddington and a bit longer from Waterloo. It is even easier to get to from Windsor.

More news as it breaks. Meanwhile, if you are an author thinking: hey, I want to take part in that book event because I can chat and I like cake and I don't like reading out loud, or a publisher / agent etc thinking: how do we get our authors into that cooler than cool Firestation, it sounds so very cool, then get in touch with me - strugglingauthor [at] tiscali [dot] co [dot] uk.

Meanwhile, while we're talking events, just a reminder that I will be giving a talk on How To Write A Novel at the London Writers' Club in Clerkenwell on Tuesday July 7th. Tickets now on sale for a tenner, they are £15 on the door.