Derbyshire Literature Festival 2010

I spent a very enjoyable day in Derbyshire, at Shirebrook and Holymoorside, talking about and reading from Tell it to the Bees. My audiences were both of the best kind: appreciative (I always like that) and challenging. There were both readers and writers in the audiences and so some of the questions people asked were about the characters (who was Charlie based on? Did I see myself as being like either Lydia or Jean?) and some were the more techie kinds of questions that writers spend ages discussing between themselves: writing in the 1st person or the 3rd; staying inside one character’s head, or roaming about; why put in the frame? etc.

And in case I think that I’ve written the character of Pam in as too mean, once again somebody in each audience said that they had a “Pam” in their family. Indeed, recently somebody said they had someone in their family who was worse than Pam!