Actual Real Life Writers

I've never ever been to an actual real life Writer's Festival before. Not properly anyway. I've been to lots of author signings and readings. I walked through the Sydney Writers Festival once, on my way to interview an author for a fundraiser gig. I know some actual real life writers and I even bought a ticket for a whole day of a festival. Thanks to a minor family emergency though, it was given away. 

My work meant I was often out of town on weekends and so I always missed entire programs. Last year was the closest I've come to finally making it. I'd moved back to my hometown, lived a mere kilometre from the action and my newly acquired student status seemed to be my ticket into the Bendigo Writers Festival. 2013 would be the year the stars aligned to sit me before a collective noun of authors, who would reveal their innermost secrets about this thing they do called writing.

I looked at the date. 10th August. Dad's 60th...for which I'd organised a very large surprise party in Melbourne and was reasonably expected to attend. I shook my fist at the Writer Gods, stomped my feet and swore. A lot. Then I took out my big black texta and blocked out all of August 2014 in my diary.

I was determined. If I couldn't afford it, damn it then I'd volunteer. I got in touch with Festival organisers and said lots of things like "How do I volunteer? Can I come? I'm at Uni now...can I come? Pick me! Pick me!" and generally made a nuisance of myself. I even managed to win a book pack via their Facebook page, coincidentally of one of the few authors I actually have seen speak at a Crime Writer's festival. When I met with them to pick up the latest Kerry Greenwood novel, I made sure the Festival organisers knew I was serious. I wanted to play too. 

In fact, I had finally embarked on the university degree I really wanted to do - the one with the words and the writing and the reading. The stuff I enjoyed but had never had the guts to discover if I was any good at. I wanted to know how those writers did it... what was their secret? It was something I'd been trying to discover ever since I found out that authors are actual real life people who you can talk to, and meet, and ask questions of.

Way back when in the 1980's when singing budgies danced locomotions, my Year 7 English teacher revealed to our class the stunning news that you could write to authors. And that sometimes, they wrote back! You mean to say Miss, that all those books I spend so much time hiding within have actual, real life people behind them and we can just look up their addresses in the White Pages? Human bodies alive in the suburbs of Melbourne who might possibly maybe read my words and respond to them? Crazy stuff!

I promptly wrote to an author whose name I can't recall and who I just as promptly never heard back from. Fear not. Five years later I was cramming VCE chemistry and biology into my poor, non-numbers brain, trying to get into a university degree I was doomed to never finish. I was also carrying out a semi-regular, old fashioned snail mail correspondence with favourite fantasy author Tad Williams.

While I was trying to wrap my brain around hydrophilic molecules - thanks to my teacher's habit of costume-lead role-play education, still the main chemistry concept I can recall today - Tad was introducing me to concepts of archetypes and tropes. Very patient fellow that he is, and with the invention of interwebz technologies, Tad and I still chat about writing, American politics and ice zombies.

Twenty years of employment, life and not-being-a-scientist later I sucked it up, princess that I am, and put fingers to keyboard. I've just completed my first year of a History/English double major Bachelor of Arts (I'm not sure I know what that all means either) and am looking at my enrolment for second year. Imagine my glee when it was announced that I could combine my writing and reading education with attending the Bendigo Writers Festival... and it would count towards my degree! 

I might finally get to spend enough time with these actual real life people, who write words in a such a magic way that it makes people want to read them. If I don't magically absorb their writerliness by osmosis, maybe I'll discover instead that they're people like me, which of course logically means that I should be able write too.

The End.

Image of Tad Williams from his page.