The Spoons That Are My Ears!

The Crawley WordFest begins on Saturday 2nd April; and I have been invited to attend. So I'm going. According to the blurb on the festival website... "WORDfest is Crawley’s first ever festival dedicated to celebrating words and writing in its many forms. Spearheaded by Waterstone’s County Mall Booksellers and Crawley Library. It is a pilot grassroots week-long programme of events..." The list of writers, publishers, etc, who are attending is too long to give here, but it can be found on the festival website on the "Writers & Artists" page.

The most famous name there (to me at least) is Wilbur Smith. I remember seeing copies of his novels everywhere when I was a youngster, generally on the shelves of obscure B&Bs in places like Bournemouth. He was one of those authors of well-crafted adventure stories who seemed to thrive in the 1970s. In my mind he is associated with Alistair MacLean and others of that ilk, but in fact Smith is superior. His novels set in Africa form a uniform sequence; and his concern for the welfare of the people, animals and environment of that continent is wholly authentic. You could do a lot worse than to seek out his works. I especially recommend the omnibus volume depicted here...

Anyway... I don't have much time left to prepare for this event; to my surprise I'm doing an event this coming Sunday; and on the following Tuesday I am required to sit in the window of Waterstone's bookstore (I think that's the right shop) and write a story in public on a laptop... I will be given a keyword and the story must flow from that. I'm looking forward to this! The great Harlan Ellison was fond of writing in shop windows; so there's a noble precedent for this kind of activity... By the way, Crawley isn't especially creepy, but I couldn't resist the pun: hence the title of this blog post!