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Showing posts with the label Emerging Writers Festival

Q&A with Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo founder

National Novel Writing Month is the brain child of Chris Baty, a San Franciscan who took November off to write a book and found a few friends to join him. It 's become a global phenomenon with more than 150,000 participants. Chris chatted about the future of writing, the Office of Light and Letters , book piracy and the bright future for the story in the age of laptops and Kindle. Hackpacker: What made you start NaNoWriMo? Was it a tool to beat your own procrastination? Chris Baty: The "why" of it all is such a good question. It wasn't because I had a novel in me that I was dying to write. I'd always loved novels and worshipped novelists but had never really thought I would write a book of my own. Until I started planning the first NaNoWriMo, I believed that novelists were a (superior) alien race that had been beamed down to Earth to delight and intimidate the rest of the planet. Then, in 1999, I quit my full-time job and try to make a living as a freelance wri

Edinburgh Book Festival update

Wondering what's happening over at the Edinburgh International Book Festival? As part of our Duelling Blogs series, our good friend over at the Saturation Point of Bells sent this update (crossposted). My first Edinburgh Book Festival gig (the first I was let into anyway) was to see Ian Jack , who was impressively articulate and perceptive, as well as pleasingly rumpled, as a journalist shoud be. I could have happily listened to him chat with the venerable Ruth Wishart for some time, as I think could have the rest of the audience. Alas, it was not to be.The audience was completely white, mostly middle-aged, and entered with a kind of furrow-browed earnestness that said 'I'm not here to enjoy myself, my national identity is at stake.' It was wall-to-wall tweed and natural fibres. Until, that is, the speakers arrived. Enter stage left a very slim woman with perfect make-up, a blonde bob with edges as sharp as a knife, a short, red, body-hugging dress, heels and a broad

Literally Melbourne

This weekend saw the opening of the Emerging Writers' Festival , a uniquely Melbourne event that was created to showcase "the best writers you haven't heard of yet". Friday's opening night First Word was a packed program that included hilarious sketches by List Operators , launching of the 48-Hour Play Generator, a Call to Arms from comic book writer Shane McCarthy and a hypothetical about the city's Centre for Books Writing and Ideas . And all this just on the opening night. The ever-witty Michael Nolan hosted the hypothetical which looked at what the centre for Books Writing and Ideas could be as it prepares to open at the State Library of Voctoria later this year. There were a few digs at Readings becoming the official bookstore of the State Library of Victoria (the store's owner is a board member of the Centre) and some pointed remarks about it creating an ivory tower (from memory Nolan's delightful phrase was "Stalinism with good coffee&qu