Book Week SCotland | ann burnett

This week has been celebrated as Book Week Scotland when writers all over the country have left their garrets and travelled the length and breadth of the country talking about books and writing and more books and more writing.

My friend Michael J Malone has been touring the west coast talking about his new book, House of Spines. (Cracking great read! I recommend it.) He’s been to Rothesay, Dunoon, Millport, Tobermory and …er…Wishaw. Definitely not on the west coast, that one!

The Pencil, Largs

For my part, I was in Largs, not as part of Book Week but to do some research for my next novel. It was a beautiful sunny clear day with the temperature just hovering above freezing as we walked along the shore to the Pencil monument commemorating the Battle of Largs in 1263, and then on to the Marina, filled with yachts of all shapes and sizes, mainly parked up until the spring. And there was a very welcome restaurant where we had coffee and Danishes and thawed out before we walked all the way back.

Then it was to Perthshire, and past the Ochil Hills just tinged with snow, to the Auchterarder Book Fair, part of their celebration of Book Week. We set up our stalls, or rather tables, in the hall with our books on display. I was surrounded by historical novels, crime, science fiction and fantasy, and did I detect an element of competition as we tried to attract customers to look at our books and hopefully buy one? books

I was one of the authors who gave a short talk about their writing life, starting with my five years with Postman Pat and moving on to the present day and A Scottish Childhood, and the future with my novel Festival Fireworks. 24255073_1980255258879716_3265096166631918755_o

And all this gallivanting doesn’t stop there. Next weekend is the Society of Authors Christmas lunch in Edinburgh where there will be many friends to catch up with and have a jolly, merry afternoon.

Can’t not mention the success at the Imprint Writing Awards of members of Ayr Writers Club. Six members were shortlisted and the club scooped 1st, 2nd and 3rd in the poetry section, (one member winning two prizes) and 1st and 2nd in the short story. It’s a sign of a very vibrant and talented club and one I’m pleased to belong to.

Shortlisted for Imprint

My tagline is A Writer of Many Things, and last week showed me exactly why I called myself that.

Ayr Writers’Club Trophy Winners 2017

I gave a workshop on writing short stories to fellow members of Ayr Writers’ Club where I tried to get them to produce some of the various elements like character, voice, dialogue and conflict, that go to make up a short story. If nothing else, it provoked quite a bit of merriment as they attempted in pairs to have their characters meet as strangers in a public place, especially when they had to read out what they’d written to the assembled company. But hopefully there was a germ of a short story in some of them that they can work on and enter in one of the many competitions around.

I was just recovering the next morning when the competition entries from Largs Writers’ Group landed on my mat. I had spoken there about writing for children (see my blog) and set them to write me 1000 words of a children’s story, stating what age range they were aiming at. And what a lot of work some of them have put into their entry! There were drawings galore for the picture book entries and many even set out their text as they would in a picture book. Others had aimed at older children and boy, were they scary. There are some excellent stories among them although as I have only read them all through once, I can’t decide yet who the winners will be.

And a week or two ago, I heard that my novel, Festival Fireworks, had been taken up by Tirgearr, an Irish publisher selling mainly to the American market, and will be out in March. It’s a romance, not my usual genre, but then what is, and there will be editing and proofreading to keep me busy till then.

Meantime, I’ve started another romance novel, seeing as how I should strike while the iron’s hot (a cliché I know but I can’t think of what else to say!) and anyway, it’s NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. I won’t say how many words I’ve managed so far but at least it’s a start.

Book Week Scotland is at the end of the month and a group of us are up in Auchterarder in Perthshire for their Book Fair. I’ve been making sure I have plenty of books to take with me to sell and designing bookmarks to hand out.

So I’m definitely a writer of many things, which I thoroughly enjoy. After all, a change is as good as a holiday. (Not another cliché surely!)

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