Noir at the Bay Tales Bar

This weekend, I attended the fourth annual Bay Tales Crime Fiction Festival in Whitley Bay. It’s a brilliant festival and you should all buy tickets for next year, but that’s not the point of this blog post.

On Friday evening, the night before the main event, I took part in Noir and the Bar. (If you don’t know, Noir at the Bar is a fab event where writer read out excerpts of their writing to a willing and enthusiastic audience.) Over the last year or so I’ve been submitting a new book to agents and publishers without much success. Thinking this might be the only chance anyone ever gets to hear about it, I decided to read a chapter from it.

Before I started practising last week, I hadn’t read any of the book for a long time. I’d got to the stage where I was starting to accept no one would ever read my book. (Unless I self-published and I’m not quite sure I’m cut out for that!) Imagine my surprise when, upon reading the chapter I intended to perform, I found I really quite liked my own writing.

I actually liked it, and felt proud of what I’d written! (I’m still getting over that to be honest.)

And then when I read it out in front of fifty or so people, they liked it too! People from the audience made a point of speaking to me during in the breaks to let me know how much they enjoyed it and how they hoped it found a home soon so they could read the whole thing. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I had been quite convinced that this was going to be one of those books that sat in drawer, thinking about what it did wrong, and would never see the light of day.

While I write this, I’m on a train, hurtling south towards home, very tired after a busy weekend, but with renewed motivation. And I’ve just submitted The Clearing to four publishers 😁 (Keep everything crossed for me!)

This is all to say two things. Firstly, to writers: distance yourself from your work before you write it off as a pile of rubbish! Secondly, to readers: if you enjoyed a writer’s work – tell them! You may well put a smile on their face during a particularly rubbish time.