Book Swaps a Go Go

There is a veritable embarrassment of book swaps going on this month, all for your entertainment. Are you embarrassed? I know I am.

First up is on Thursday 3rd Feb (ie THIS THURSDAY) at the London Review Bookshop, Bury Place, 7pm. My co-host for the occasion will be Robbie Hudson, as Scott is otherwise engaged, and our guests are Will Fiennes, author of 'The Snow Geese' and 'The Music Room' - books of beauty and elegance - and Nikesh Shukla, author of Coconut Unlimited - a book of laughter and rap music - which is not to say it isn't beautiful and elegant too. Please book your ticket here as it will almost certainly sell out. £6 or free if you bring a home baked cake.

Thursday 10th Feb, at the LSE, 4th Floor Cafe, 6pm. Scott Pack will be back on co-hosting duties, and our guests are Sarah Salway, who as well as being a fantastic author (of 'Something Beginning With' amongst other books) is the LSE's writer in residence, and Matt Beaumont, whose book 'e' is reputed to be excellent, as I would know if the publisher had sent it to me yet - fear not, there is still time. Details here, tickets are FREE, don't bring cake - it's a licensing issue, but not to worry, cake will be available from the cafe - and unswapped books will be collected for Read International, a charity which provides books to schools in Uganda and Tanzania.

Thursday 17th Feb, at the Fire Station in Windsor, 7.45pm. Back on home turf. You will be rewarded by co-host Scott and guests Sara Manning, author of the funny and poignant 'You Don't Have To Say You Love Me', Jess Ruston, our very first guest making a triumphant return to promote her new novel 'To Touch The Stars'. Usual Windsor rules - £5 to get in, or free with a home-baked cake.

And indeed I didn't need to tell you ANY of this, as I could have just directed you to our fabulous new website which has been made for us by Michael Harpur, our right-hand and probably left-hand man in Windsor, who does EVERYTHING for us bar sitting on the stage swapping the books himself. He is brilliant. So is the website, which aside from details of all the events has podcasts which you can listen to if you can't make it (if you are lazy, or live in Canada, or trapped under heavy furniture.)

Hope to see you at one of the book swaps this month.

November Book Swap

Last Book Swap of the year tomorrow! Except for the one that Scott is doing as part of the Peckham Literary Festival on the 25th, and the kids' one that Scott is doing, um, at some point (I'm sure he'll big both of them up over at his blog). I have no idea where Scott gets the energy. He has a job and everything. But it's *my* last Book Swap of the year and I hope you will join me as we have most excellent guests -

Maggie Gee, whose My Cleanerand My DriverI adored, and my aunt in Botswana will be getting for Christmas (it's OK, I have already told her) (it's also OK because it's the books my aunt is getting, not Maggie Gee)

- and -

Milton Crawford, whose The Hungover Cookbookis a Boxing Day and New Year's Day essential, for reasons I am certain are obvious, although I will be quizzing him closely on the veracity of his claims, as when I'm hungover all I can face is half a banana and a weak cup of mint tea, which inexplicably are not listed in his recipes.

Yes. It will be good. Details as ever par ici. Also as ever, I will point out that Windsor is much closer to other places, like London and Oxford, than you might think. (Though it remians quite a long way from Canada.)

Events!

It's that time of the month again. No, not THAT time. The time where I notice that Robbie and Scott have been blogging about events that involve me, and then I remember that I'm supposed to blog about the events that I do too, and then I post a really long and intimidating list of all the things I've got coming up, none of which is relevant to any of you because you all live in Canada.

Hurrah! I LIKE this time of the month.

17th October, the Book Swap on tour: Guildford festival. 3pm at the Electric Theatre. We've got Anne Berry, whose debut novel The Hungry Ghosts is a dark tale of a haunted girl set in Hong Kong as it approaches reunification with China; and Niven Govinden, whose fantastic coming of age story Graffiti My Soul I accidentally left on holiday and haven't finished, much to my genuine distress, and whose We Are The New Romantics is apparently utterly (and enjoyably) filthy, according to Scott.

21st October, the Book Swap at its ancestral home the Firestation in Windsor: the usual deal, starts at 7.45, £5 or cake to enter, and Warren Fitzgerald and Tim Relf on the sofa. I'm getting my mitts on their books tomorrow, but in the meantime, regular swappers will like to know that Tim is the man who always comes up with the best questions: the cat worming question, the Legoland wasp question, and so on. As he won't be able to ask any questions this week I am putting out the call for particularly strange questions to welcome him to the business end of the auditorium.

22nd October, the 14 x 4 charity dinner, again in Windsor. All the details are here, but in essence: it's called 14 x 4 because there are 14 tables at the dinner, you get a 4 course meal, and for every course of the meal you get to share your table with one of 14 authors - ie you eat with 4 authors in all. There will be speeches between courses, of which I am making one, and the authors who are participating but aren't me are Robbie Hudson, Kate Williams, Warwick Cairnes, Tamsyn Murray, Charlie Williams, Tom Reynolds, Patrick Woodrow, Jess Ruston, Aliya Whiteley, Helen Rappaport, Cathy Rogers, Lisa Gee and Josa Young. I think three of those haven't done the book swap (why?? must be rectified) and I can vouch for each and every one of the others as a delightful person to have dinner with. And in fact I've had a sandwich with Lisa Gee too so really there are only two dark horses. Tickets are £45 for four courses plus champagne, and the proceeds all go to the Rainbow Trust charity for sick children.
UPDATE: Having looked at my list of commitments I panicked and passed on speech-making duties to PATRICK WOODROW who is lovely, and a bit of a dish - you will not be missing out.

24th October: another Book Swap, this one for kids. 2pm at the Windsor Firestation. The legendary author of the Mr Gum books, Andy Stanton, will be joining Scott on stage (I will be in the audience - we decided the hosts shouldn't outnumber the guests) and all usual book swap rules apply - except that this one is FREE. It will sell out, though - did I mention that Andy Stanton is the genius who wrote the MR GUM books - so please do book here.

1st November: I'll be telling a story about me at the Let Me Tell You About Me night at the Book Club, 100 Leonard St, London, 7.30pm. The Book Club is some sort of fashionable Shoreditch bar, I believe. I don't know what story I'll be telling yet, but it will be about me. It will almost certainly be about me. Probably. Other guests include Molly Parkin and presumably anyone else they can find with initials MP.

And while we're here, there will be a Portsmouth Book Swap on Friday November 12th, a Windsor Book Swap on Thursday November 18th, and a Kilburn Tall Tales featuring a story from me (if I write it) and definitely more War Horses of Letters on Thursday November 25th. But I'll remind you of all of those nearer the time.

And my editors still think they're getting a manuscript out of me in January! Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha. It's sweet, really.

Events, Dear Girl, Events

Harold Macmillan: would be attending if he hadn't died in 1986.

It is ALL GO in the heady world of events performed at by me. You'd almost think I had a new book out! But I don't.

But let's not allow that to interfere with our excitement!

On MONDAY SEPTEMBER 13TH I will be appearing at the soon-to-be-renamed TO HELL WITH THE LIGHTHOUSE night, featuring a special launch of the new FAT QUARTER magazine (hmm, really not sure where I'm going with all these caps - but hey, I've started so I'll finish) and you can find all the details HERE. Other readers are ANJALI JOSEPH and JEAN HANNAH EDELSTEIN and the thing that I should have saved the caps for is that IN A FIT OF INSANITY I HAVE AGREED TO READ FROM MY NEW NOVEL, YOU KNOW, THE ONE I HAVEN'T FINISHED YET OR EVEN GIVEN A NAME TO. It's a pretty major exclusive seeing as the only people to have seen a word of this are my agent, my UK and Canadian publishers, and one friend, and if you all hate it, well, I could have a total meltdown as I watch two years' work goes down the tubes. So no pressure there, then. All this will be taking place at PETER PARKER'S ROCK'N'ROLL CLUB, Denmark Street WC2H 8LP at 7.30pm. Do I know anything about Peter Parker's Rock'n'Roll Club? No. Does it sound cool? HELL TO THE YEAH.

THEN, on THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 16TH is the FIRESTATION BOOKSWAP at the Windsor Firestation, details HERE. Apparently there is some dispute as to whether "bookswap" is all one word. IT IS. Even if I am the only person who says so. As ever I will be co-hosting with SCOTT PACK but FAR MORE EXCITINGLY THAN THAT our guests this month are TIM COATES, who used to head up Waterstones and is now a(n) historian, and who I invited to take part because I did an event with him a few months ago and he was so incredibly interesting that I was SLACK-JAWED WITH AMAZEMENT - how often am I slack-jawed for any reason? Why, NEVER. And TOM MORTON aka @DRSAMUELJOHNSON on Twitter. Non-Twitterers, you can still read Tom Morton aka Dr J's twitterings by going to www.twitter.com/drsamueljohnson and I'm fairly sure that you will find him so funny that you will either JOIN TWITTER and go around saying to people YOU KNOW, I NEVER USED TO UNDERSTAND THE POINT OF TWITTER, BUT NOW I DO, or BUY HIS BOOK or - radical suggestion - COME TO THE BOOKSWAP. Or ALL THREE.

Is that enough? IT'S NOT ENOUGH. On Monday September 27th we are doing ANOTHER BOOKSWAP. I don't know where. It's just in my diary. But I think it's at the Independent Bookseller's conference in Warwick, which you may not attend, UNLESS YOU ARE AN INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLER.

AND THEN on Thursday September 30th I am doing a STORYTELLING EVENT in which I will be TELLING A STORY and also providing the words for some FICTIONAL LETTERS to be read by people OTHER THAN ME. This event is called TALL TALES and takes place at the GOOD SHIP in KILBURN and I am NOT REMOTELY SURE HOW YOU CAN ARRANGE TO COME TO THIS, it is arranged by ROBERT HUDSON, go and bother him about it, why don't you.

On October 1st, I will be staying in and watching television.

THAT IS ALL.

I am returned

Had a lovely time in Tuscany, but feeling a bit fragile as a beloved friend passed away while I was on holiday. Not yet ready to resume trademark inconsequential frippery. Although, to be fair, said beloved friend was a big fan of inconsequential frippery. The last text message I got from him was to alert me to the fact that Samantha Fox of Page Three / bad pop / lesbian / born again Christian fame has rabies. So, not least in his honour, the fun will return.

Meanwhile, a reminder that we're having our first ever London bookswap at the London Review Bookshop on Thursday at 7.30pm. Our guests are James Miller and Patrick Neate. It's very close to sold out, so if you are planning to come, please don't show up without a ticket as you will almost certainly not get in. You can book ahead here. Looking forward to seeing some of you there.

UPDATE: LRB bookswap is now sold out.

Events, dear boy, events

Next week is ACTION PACKED with events. ACTION PACKED I tell you.

On Tuesday 13th April I'm hosting a pub quiz at the Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green in London to launch Granta magazine's latest issue. The theme of the mag is Sex, and so is the theme of the quiz. Let's not speculate about why they asked me to do it. No. Let's not. Details are here, alongside a list of other related events which unaccountably do not feature me.

And THEN on Thursday it's the Firestation Bookswap in Windsor, hosted as usual by me and Scott Pack, and featuring young feminist Kat Banyard, novelist Ray Robinson, and cake. Lots and lots of lovely cake. I could do a great post with lots of clever links to everyone, but as it turns out Scott did that already so if you want more details pay him a visit.

Hope to see you at one or both events. One will have more sex and the other will have more cake. I will judge you entirely on which you choose.

Because I Am A Girl

Updating my website mariephillips.co.uk - which is pretty awful, by the way, mostly because I designed and maintain it myself, and I'm not exactly an expert at that kind of thing, and I sort of can't be bothered, ahem... The plan is to redo it when my next book comes out ("when", not "if", ever the optimist). Well, anyway: updating it, I realised I had completely forgotten to mention that I have a new publication out and an event to support it. (That's an event in addition to the flourishing Bookswap, every third Thursday of the month at the Windsor Firestation. It's £5 to get in and I believe we are the only literary event to let you in for free if you bring a home-baked cake. But moving on.)

The piece in question is called 'Change' and you can find it in the Plan International / Vintage anthology Because I am a Girl.

(I notice Amazon are selling it at a discount. Hmm. All the profits go to Plan, so...)

'Change' is an account of my visit to Uganda to witness Plan International's work there. Without wishing to spoil the story, I was so appalled, and say as much, that Plan had to publish an official retraction straight after my piece in the book. There's a cracking review of it over here - thank you, Independent on Sunday.

What's that? You want an extract, you say? Oh god, I'm probably not allowed. But here you go, as long as you promise to buy the book. It's my first day in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and I have been taken to visit a project which works with prostitutes there:

The streets of Kampala are not a safe place to sell sex. The women complained of rape from clients, rape from the police who periodically round them up to clean up the streets. Then there are the other risks, notably from HIV and AIDS. Condom use is not popular amongst johns in Uganda, and even if the prostitutes insist on it, it’s easy to get around the issue by insisting on sex in a dark corner and then lying about the condom. And anyway, as one pointed out: “You can get a man to use a condom but you are still a sex worker.” These are not happy hookers. The only time anybody laughed was when my Plan chaperone mentioned the Dutch model of legalised and regulated brothels, which reduced the entire group to hysterics.

The Moonlight Stars project aims to provide sex workers with healthcare - AIDS tests, condoms and so on - as well as training and financial support to help them set up their own businesses outside the sex industry, such as baking or hairdressing. But the funding has run out. So while Moonlight Stars aims to provide healthcare, financial support and training, what it actually provides is “outreach”. I asked the women what outreach is. They told me that it’s going out and telling other prostitutes about what Moonlight Stars aims to provide. It’s not my last encounter with “outreach” in Uganda. This is probably the right place to mention: outreach is cheap.

Before we left, the women asked us to give them money for the project. We explained that it doesn’t work that way, that we have to report back to Plan in London who make the funding decisions. They were not impressed. In my notes I have written: “I felt as if they were thinking: who the fuck are you and what are you here for if you’re not going to give us any money?”

Cheerful stuff, as you can see. The talk's on Thursday March 4th at Central United Reformed Church, Grove St, Bath, 6.15pm, £7 / £6 concessions, and my fellow speakers will be Deborah Moggach and Xiaolu Guo. You can get more info and buy tickets here. It should be an interesting, challenging, controversial evening. Hope to see some of you there.

Firestation Bookswap: September Preview

Announcing the Bookswap guests for September!

We've got poet, biographer / memoirist, and frequent flyer at the Guardian Kate Clanchy; and historian, Russianist (great word) and novelist Helen Rappaport. I am very keen to get my mitts on Clanchy's Antigona and Me, her account of her relationship with her cleaner and nanny, a Kosovan refugee, and also Rappaport's Ekaterinburg(aka 'The Last Days of the Romanovs'), which is not her most recent (that's her Lenin biog 'Conspirator') but I have heard so much good stuff about it that I can't resist.

We're kicking off at 7.30pm to give out-of-towners a fighting chance of getting home afterwards, and we're going to be a tad more organised about proceedings after last month's amiable chaos (notably there will be an interval for drinking and weeing purposes) but the essence of the night is still the same: questions on all kinds of topics from Scott Pack, myself and the audience, and the soon-to-be wold famous Book Swap for which the night is named, which will be much assisted if you bring a book with you to swap. Tickets are £5 and can be bought here.

As before, if you can't make it, do leave questions for our guests in the comments, and I will try to ask them.

Firestation Bookswap: Ruston / McCrum

Very much enjoyed last night's somewhat chaotic inaugural Firestation Bookswap. By now I'm sure you all know that this was a hybrid author event / book club hosted by Scott Pack and myself at Windsor's new(ish) arts centre, The Firestation. We'd invited guests Jessica Ruston, whose intelligent-yet-glamorous blockbuster debut Luxury has just come out, and Robert McCrum, who has a wealth of writing and editing experience encompassing fiction, memoir, biography and long stints at Faber and The Observer. We'd persuaded Scott's wife Rhian to bake delicious cakes and macaroons for our guests and audience. We'd got everyone, guests and audience alike, to bring along a book to swap with each other. And then we gathered everyone together, put the kettle on and off we went...

Chat was a mixture of bookish and non-bookish topics, bolstered by audience questions from the anonymous question jar, and less anonymous contributions from the floor. We covered a huge range of issues from broadsheet reviews (six pages in the Observer divide into new releases from big names, books related to news and current affairs, and only small provision for what McCrum referred to as "The History of Sand" type books) and the difficulty of reading Harry Potter out loud, to the most annoying places on earth (Ruston: 'a delayed plane', McCrum: 'the Hay literary festival') and the efficacy of cat worming tablets (no, really). Jess even brought a compilation CD for us to listen to as we mingled afterwards and swapped our books. I was delighted to pick up 'For Richer, For Poorer', Victoria Coren's account of her life as a poker pro, from McCrum but regretfully had to give up my copy of Luxury in return (I will be buying another).

I am sad to say that the number of audience questions means that I did not have a chance to ask Lilalia's question about the physicality of the written word, but I did manage to get in Persephone's regarding whether McCrum ever looks back on 'My Year Off', his memoir of recovering from stroke, and wants to footnote it saying he has changed his mind... His answer started as 'yes, the whole thing' and then swiftly changed over to 'actually, I wanted to write it as it was, and keep it detached but helpful for other stroke sufferers, so no', before settling on 'I have actually blanked out the whole experience so it's a useful record to remind me what happened'.

Thanks to all who came. Our next event will be on Thursday 17th September and I will announce the guests as soon as I can. Meanwhile here is a lovely review from Emma at the Independent blog who can verify the deliciousness of the macaroons... Surely that's incentive enough to join us next month?

A bit of me

Do you miss me? I miss you. But my gorgeous, demanding little nephews and their equally gorgeous, slightly less demanding and far less little parents are visiting me from Mozambique so I am ignoring my responsibilities.

Fortunately, here's an interview I did earlier. Just to keep the wolf from the door.

And you're coming to the Firestation Bookswap on Thursday of course, so I'll see you there. Remember, if you can't come because you live in Canada or something, you can post questions for Jessica Ruston or Robert McCrum here and I'll ask any that aren't actually obscene.

'Moon' + Q&A, Screen on the Green 19.07.09

Now this is going to be tricky, because I want you to go and see this film, but I also don't want to tell you anything about it, because the less you know, the more you'll enjoy it.

The film in question is 'Moon'. I went spontaneously yesterday afternoon, because I was walking past the Screen on the Green and noticed that they were having a Q&A after the movie with the director, Duncan Jones, and there is very little I enjoy more than a Q&A with a director. But one of the things I enjoy at least as much as a Q&A with a director is a good sci fi movie, and I didn't have anything else planned for Sunday afternoon, so all in all this was a bit of a result.

Here is as much of the story as I am willing to tell you, and I would urge you not to find out more before you go. It is the future. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his three year contract, working alone on a mining station on the dark side of the moon. All he's had for company over this time is a friendly robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey) and occasional video messages from his wife and daughter. He watches old sitcoms, he is whittling a model village as his hobby, he plays ping pong against the wall, and every so often he goes onto the surface to deal with breakdowns in the otherwise automated mining equipment. And he is fed up. You'd be fed up too if you'd been woken up every morning for three years by a musical alarm clock playing 'The One and Only' by Chesney Hawkes. He's only got two weeks left on base, and things have just started to get weird...

Anyway, it's a terrific, intelligent, scary, funny film, made on a shoestring budget (£2.5 million, which is nothing for a sci-fi movie), heavy on character and light on explosions. Much of the success of the film is down to Rockwell, who puts in a great performance as Sam Bell, and it was only after the film ended that I looked back and realised how good his performance had been. He makes it look easy and natural when it's anything but. Meanwhile, in part because the film is so low budget, the special effects are done the old-fashioned way, using models and camera trickery instead of CGI, and it's all the more atmospheric for it. A film like this stands or falls on its believability, and the simplicity and tangibility of the models and sets really helps with this. Equally, when the film takes on a more violent edge, the pain looks seriously painful. The film's physicality is so brutal that I kept flinching in my seat. But it's never over the top either, so you can't dismiss it. It has a fantastically understated aesthetic which packs a bigger punch than films with far more money to throw at spectacular effects - everything that needs to be real is so real that it's easy to buy the unreal elements. It's exactly the way sci fi should be.

Afterwards, Duncan Jones was brought on to answer questions. I was nervous. He's the son of one of the world's most famous stars (David Bowie*) and he's a film director: two very high risk indicators for being a self-obsessed arrogant cocktard. Or at the very least having terrible hair. But he's lovely, and his hair is completely normal. He answered all the questions with modesty and a fair amount of nervous laughter, and as it turned out it was one of the most interesting Q&As I've been to (and I have been to a lot), because when you're talking about the art of making films, little is more interesting than how to put together a convincing film, set in space, when all you've got to spend is the paperclip budget for the pre-production of Angels and Demons. Though again, I can't give any concrete examples as it would ruin the surprises in the film.

You could feel the audience warm to him very quickly, so much so that there was an audible rise in tension when a pedant in the audience got him into the following exchange:

Pedant: I think you'll find that there's no atmosphere on the moon, and so you wouldn't actually have been able to hear the trucks driving around.
[collective eye-rolling from audience]
Jones: Yes, I know. We tried it without sound and with no stars in the sky, but because it was so cheap it really did look like someone pulling a toy cart across a cardboard moon.
Pedant: Kubrick managed it in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
[Loud muttering throughout auditorium.]
Jones: I promise you, I tried it and it didn't work. But you can always watch it on DVD and turn the sound down.
[Applause]

So, fab film and charming director. I urge you to go and see Moon, and / or get the DVD (volume controls of your choice) as the commentary is bound to be fascinating. Also, it would be a personal favour to me, as Jones will use profits as funding for his next project, a Bladerunner homage based in Berlin, and that's a film I really want to see.

*UPDATE: Filled with terror that I have inadvertently slagged off David Bowie, my first ever crush. I would cheerfully eat my dinner off his feet. However, being a child of anyone famous can do odd things to a person, like growing a potato in a shoebox. Also, Bowie does sometimes have quite odd hair.

WWTTM Benign Book Dictatorship: Asylum.

First, an announcement. As previously mentioned, from next month Scott Pack and I will be running a monthly literary event in Windsor, the Firestation Bookswap. Tickets for the August 20th event are now on sale for a measly £5. We'll be dragging some sofas out of the props cupboard, brewing up a pot of tea, and discussing all manner of topics, including but not remotely limited to books, with guests including the new queen of blockbuster fiction Jessica Ruston and associate editor of the Observer, biographer, memoirist and novelist Robert McCrum. Information on how to get to the venue can be found on this highly informative page. I can confirm that it is very easy to get to from London. Less easy, perhaps, from some of the other places readers of this blog come from: Canada; Australia; Mozambique... Which is why I have decided to run a monthly Virtual Firestation on this blog, instead of the book club. I know, very sad. But think of it as a new, advanced book club! A month in advance I'll post up the names of our guests, so that those who are interested can investigate, and even read, their work. Before the event, anybody who has any questions or comments for our guests can post them here. Then afterwards, I'll do a post writing up the event, and open it out to discussion in the comments box.

Meanwhile, this month's book club book was Asylum by Patrick McGrath. Like an eejit, I have come down to Dorset without my copy. Fortunately it is a memorable read. In 1959, a young woman, Stella, is brought by her husband to live within the grounds of the hospital for the criminally insane where he is deputy superintendent. While there, she falls under the spell of a highly charismatic but dangerous murderer, Edgar. They have a passionate affair, and escape the hospital together. Edgar's sanity begins to crack; Stella begins to suspect she may be in danger at his hands; and the law and her family are on her trail. What transpires is a tragic indictment of love that can neither be lived nor denied.

What I remember finding most disturbing about the book was its vision of love as an obsessive, destructive force, bringing not joy and redemption, but the intense desire for the possession of, and even a murderous consumption of, the other. It reminded me very much of Wuthering Heights in its wilderness setting and its portrayal of the addictive, unshakable qualities of passionate love. Also in its seemingly cool narrator, reminiscent of Nellie Dean, but who by the end turns out to be just as twisted and implicated in the destructive force of passion as his patients. I am brought back to the question I posed when I suggested this book a month ago: is love itself a form of insanity?

Over to you.

London's weather forecast for tonight is rain...

...so how better to spend the evening than listening to me give a talk about How To Write A Novel? I have totally written the talk on index cards and everything. I am a bit nervous about it because I'm not sure that I'm going to be very interesting, but I am wearing a red top to compensate.

More info here. Looking forward to hordes of blog readers turning up because you can't live another moment without knowing what my voice sounds like. (Although, in a word: posh.)

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.

I'll remind you of this nearer the time (probably)...

...but I'm giving a talk at the London Writers' Club, on how to write a novel. Something I have succeeded in doing once, and failed to do on any number of other occasions before and since. Hmmm. Anyway, if you are on Facebook, there are details here and you can sign up on the page and show the world just how brilliant and popular the talk is going to be. But if you are not on Facebook, I will show mercy and give you the details anyway:

Date: July 7
Time: 6.30-8.30pm Bar opens at 6.30 (it stays open 'til later)
Venue: Clerkenwell House, 23-27 Hatton Wall, Clerkenwell EC1
Tickets: £10 in advance, £15 on the door.
Website: www.londonwritersclub.com

Tickets go on sale June 9th. Be there or etc.

Can't you at least mention your reading?

(said Lilalia).

Readings are strange. People always ask me if they "went well". It's very hard to tell. You read out loud, people listen, sometimes they ask a few questions and then they go away. It's almost impossible to tell whether they enjoyed it or not. Much easier to guage, say, a bookgroup appearance, because then you get into a proper dialogue with the audience, and then you can tell if they're lively and responsive or bored or angry or whatever else. (I do get angry audiences, because of the god thing.) This is even more true at Bestival where the lights were shining right in my eyes so I couldn't even see the audience and it was impossible to tell whether there was anyone there at all. So I know you'd like me to report back about my readings but there's almost nothing to say. I read extracts of chapters five and six, and the "hand relief" bit got the loudest laugh. The fact that there was a laugh at all is a very good thing, as it means there was someone there enjoying it - so if you came, and you laughed (or even if you didn't), thank you! And thanks also to the nice folk from Bookends in Christchurch who were selling my book on the day - and to the nice man who bought one...

Confession

I totally cheated at the festival. I didn't camp. Instead I stayed at my parents' weekend place which turned out to be a convenient 20 minute drive from the festival site, and which also, even more conveniently, had beds and proper loos and showers and everything. Being a performer meant that I could drive in and out of the festival site every day without queueing and park backstage, avail myself of the free tea, coffee and bottled water, and have famous people walk past me from time to time (Billy Bragg! Suzanne Vega's bass player, who looked like a short fat Ben Stiller! One of the Flaming Lips' Roadies! Etc!) Aside from that it wasn't very rock and roll. No crack. There was a small bowl of fun-sized chocolate bars though. I had two miniature Milky Ways and a tiny bag of Skittles. (Note to our American Readers: what we call Milky Way is what you call Three Musketeers. What you call Milky Way is our Mars Bar. If you have Mars Bars I don't know what they are.)

Despite the bed and the good hygiene, I still seem to be ridiculously tired, although that might have more to do with all the additional work travel I'm doing at the moment (today: research trip to Cheltenham; next up: reading at Blackwells Oxford, Thursday 6.30pm) because if I stay in London for more than 48 hours in a row the wind might change and I'll be stuck this way. So I was going to tell you all about everything, but I'm too tired, and I want to go to bed, and tomorrow I'm at yoga in the morning and then I have to catch up on all the work I'm missing because I keep going out of London for all of these events and -

You know what? Here's the Flaming Lips.

Happy Campers!

I'm reading at a festival this weekend. You can tell by how the clouds are gathering, it's growing cold and threatening rain. Apparently there are sunny festivals sometimes. I have never witnessed such a thing. The very first festival I went to was Reading Festival in 19ahemahem (bad enough I had to admit to the 19) and it rained so much that I fell into a bog on my way back to my tent one night and had to be pulled out by kindly passers by. I was encased in mud up to my chest and the only thing I had to clean myself off with was a packet of Wet Wipes. My clothes were so filthy and wet that on the last day I had to walk around in my pyjamas. I thought that was bad. A few years ago at Glastonbury I woke up at five in the morning to find it raining on my face through a tent that was not built to withstand monsoon. By noon half the site was underwater. On that occasion I had to resort to walking around wearing only a bikini and a bin liner, and there was such a rabid queue for the welly stand that the police were brought in to control the crowd. But hey, as long as the music is good and the drinks are cheap, who cares.

Anyway, if you too are anxiously scanning the long-range weather forecast for Lulworth Castle because you are heading to Camp Bestival, well then meet me in the intimidatingly-named Laughter tent at 5pm on Friday where I will be reading out loud from my book, assuming the pages are not so sodden that they have degenerated into one great soggy mass only suitable for making a mishappen bowl with, in which case join me in the Laughter tent at 5pm on Friday for an impromptu class in papier mache.

See you there, bring your own brolly. I'll be reporting back next week.

The Living Dead Writes...

A good night in Luton. Big, friendly, interested crowd, mostly from bookgroups who had read my book, so lots to talk about. And of mixed ages...

Right now I am doing my taxes. It's kind of like being dead, but more boring, and not lying down.

P'Talbot

Are the people of Wales nicer than everybody else, or is it just an aural illusion because they have such beautiful, kind-sounding accents? In any case, the folk at P'Talbot were lovely. No religious nutjobs either, I did get one question about religion, but it was an interesting, relevant one, not a ten minute lecture on the Truth of the Resurrection. And they laid out a great spread too. In fact, if it hadn't been for the evil trains delaying me each way so that I spent over seven hours travelling yesterday, it would have been perfect.

One thing I did notice though was that almost everyone who came was over sixty. (Kymz, I would have spotted you immediately.) Not that there's anything wrong with being over sixty, I hope to be over sixty myself someday, but it did make me feel quite sad. Do the under sixties not read? Do they not go to book events? Or do they just not use libraries? in which case what will happen to libraries in a few decades once the current batch of over sixties no longer have any need for them? (That was a tactful way of putting it, wasn't it?) Maybe it doesn't matter - maybe there will just be a new bunch of over-sixties to read, go to events and use libraries. And I will be one of them.

In other news, I had my ears microsuctioned. I can't believe how loud the clacking of my computer keys sounds now. Microsuctioning is exactly as it sounds, they put a mini-hoover in your ear and suck out all the wax. It is incredibly loud and you can feel all the wax unsticking and zooming out. If you are a fan of faintly disgusting things, like squeezing your spots and cleaning mud off wellington boots - and I am - you will love it.