A day out

Last Saturday saw the inaugural Lesbian Authors Festival take place at the Hideaway café in Manchester. The venue is perfect for intimate readings and I was pleased to have been invited to take part. Seven authors participated and we had an audience of about twenty people. The organisers had given us each a ten-minute reading slot with time for questions for each author after their reading. I wasn’t as nervous as I had been for my first public reading at the GCLS Conference in July, so I managed to do it without losing my voice.

There was also time for a Q&A panel session with all the authors after the readings. And a bookstall had been set up so we could display our books and hopefully entice someone to buy one.

I enjoyed the interaction with the other authors and the audience. During the panel discussion there was an interesting exchange of views about how much sex readers either wanted or expected in this particular genre of lesfic.

All in all, a good day out. I sold a paperback of Starting Over and later, via Facebook, someone who had been at the reading mentioned they’d read this book and enjoyed it. I let her know that the sequel, Arc Over Time, is available. A few days later, I received a message from her saying she’d bought it and read it very quickly, wanting to find out what happened. She then posted this lovely comment on Amazon:

“So beautifully written this is a heartwarming tale of love and passion that had me reading until dawn to finish it.”

It is this kind of feedback that helps us writer-types to keep going.

And, speaking of Arc Over Time, Diana Prince interviewed two of the characters for the Affinity eBooks blog and the transcript of that interview is available here. As with anything involving Kathryn and Denise, it doesn’t go as smoothly as planned.

Finally, just because I like it, here’s a photo I took from the airplane window as we were approaching Copenhagen on our visit there two weeks ago.