Complet
20 August 2007
When looking for a hotel room in England, No Vacancies is not what you want to see. In France, Complet is full up, sold out.
Greg and I were delighted to discover last week that our events at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival are almost sold out. We are doing one together - an in conversation about getting published and the thorny issue of collaboration. Plus Greg is teaching a session on the interplay of plot and character. Then I'm talking about Sepulchre.
It will be my first public Sepulchre event and I think I'm going to read from the Prelude - the first time that anyone outside the closed circle of my husband, agent and editor will have heard any of it.
Later in the autumn, at the second Chichester Writing Festival - of which Greg and I are co-directors - I'll be too busy interviewing other authors to talk much about my own work. The residential tickets for CWF2 are almost complet as well, but a few can still be had via the wonderful venue - www.westdean.org.uk.
Once all the full-time CWF2 tickets are gone, the only way to take part in the whole weekend will be to win our short story competition. As I announced last week, we would like you to write a story of no more than 1000 words that includes at least one hat pin! Click this link for details of how to enter.
In the six or seven years of the Labyrinth website, Greg and I received loads of brilliant entries to our regular competitions. I think the one we liked most was the story of a small group of refugees, fleeing war in England for the Welsh border. It was a wonderful combination of mundane preoccupations - the baby crying, looking for food, waiting in line at the frontier - alongside the awful catastrophe of an imagined war.
The story was called How we came to Wales - I would love to reproduce it, but I would need the author's express permission - and it seemed to Greg and to me to create a complete imaginary world with remarkably few words.
Complet, again, you see.
Move in a circle within the Sepulchre.
