Author Archives: James

About James

James specialises in digital literary heritage projects. He spends most of his time in front of a computer screen writing about life instead of living it. Therefore, do not trust a word he says.

Festival of Words 2013

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Chair photo by Paula Schmidt on Pexels.

The Festival of Words is nearly upon us and it’s testament to the power of volunteering to make things happen. Members of the Nottingham Writer’s Studio alongside our partner organisations at the city council, LeftLion, Writing East Midlands and our two universities, have made this festival happen.

The festival has been led by two separate committees; a steering group and a marketing and communications group. There’s roughly eight people on each,all of whom have sat through endless meetings for the past six or so months as well as the never-ending email conversations that have left me fondly dreaming of the pre-internet days of my youth. Then there are the numerous volunteers actioning each point. We have a small army behind us.

 

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There is a saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee and having worked on numerous committees in my time there’s a degree of truth in this, but this has not been the case here. We’ve produced a thoroughbred stallion. It’s been a pleasure to be involved in a project where everyone has the same objective and motivation: to give Nottingham something to shout about and end the ashamedly barren run of forty odd years without a literature festival in the city centre. The fact that we’ve managed this without paying anyone is amazing as it’s been done out of love, which also happens to be one of the themes of the festival.

Although our members would much prefer to be at home writing, I think the experiences generated from working on the festival have added valuable skillsets to their portfolio which will help them survive an increasingly brutal publishing industry that demands more rounded professionals who, in addition to writing, are able to promote their own work, understand social media and are able to organise and deliver public readings to help shift those copies taking up space in the warehouse.

The studio is made up of writers from all disciplines – playwrights, journalists, poets, publishers, copywriters, etc, all of whom have benefited from this process. Anne McDonald of Pewter Rose Press has learned how to add widgets to the festival wordpress site so that a tweet button appears next to articles (as have I), meaning she can now do the same with her own website. Ian Douglas, a writer and journalist, has made many local and national media contacts through promoting the festival, all of whom he can pitch articles to or request reviews for his forthcoming novel. Others have learned how to put together a brochure and the varying costs of the print industry. Then there are the members giving their first public performance or involvement with a festival. They’re learning the nuts and bolts of performance: selecting venues, overheads, audio-visual requirements, marketing, collaboration, creating themed events, and seeing their work in the context of a festival rather than the comfy confines of the page.

Now we need one thing. People to attend. It really is that simple, Nottingham. Let’s not wait another forty years…

www.nottwords.org.uk Twitter: @Nottwords

This blog was first published on the Nottingham Writers’ Studio website

 

Toyo Shibata: Never give up.

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Photo by Caryn at Pexels.

Today I did something that I haven’t done for yonks. I wrote some fiction. I started out writing fiction a decade or so ago and was fortunate to have early success. One story won the Jo Cowell Short Story Competition, others were published in the Roundhouse Review, Staple and the New Writer and Route published a short collection of five in their anthology Route offline. And then I fell into journalism and spent the next decade promoting other people’s work. It’s been a wonderful apprenticeship, though, and now I feel hungry for my own writing again.

It was through journalism that I discovered a competition and knew I had a previously published story in York Tales that I could rehash (the bread and butter of journalism) and sent it off. I got some good feedback from some readers and decided to beef it up and submit it for radio only to discover that Radio Four had reduced its budget and weren’t broadcasting as many stories anymore and the only info on the BBC Writers’ Room was for play submissions.

A quick google brought up a fiction desk with a list of magazines that were not only in print but paid as well. I thought, let’s send it out elsewhere and see what happens. I selected five random magazines I’d never heard of before and followed the links and a familiar pattern emerged: Chimera were ‘closed until further notice’ Bonfire were thankful for the interest in their publication but ‘unfortunately we do not plan to publish any more issues’. Etc.

Then I came across a publisher who was accepting novel manuscripts. Now that my agent is treating me like a one-night stand and no longer deems it necessary to communicate I decided to send them over a copy. I followed the online drill and tinkered with the font and spacing and all other titillating requirements and then, amazingly, managed to write a new synopsis in under thirty minutes. Previously this had taken me months. This is another skill learnt through journalism – cutting to the chase. I converted the file to the appropriate format and then followed the submit link which said ‘we are no longer taking unsolicited manuscripts’.

All in all the entire evening was a bit of a waste of time (bar the synopsis) and a reminder, perhaps, of why I began to lose interest in sending work off. But then I read that Toyo Shibata had recently passed away, a Japanese poet whose first collection Kujikenaide was published at the grand old age of 98, selling over 1.6 million copies in her home country. And Derrick Buttress, who I commissioned to write about the Sillitoe Trail for The Space, had his first short story collection Sing To Me published at 80. I slept well that night, realising there was plenty of time.