This week Craig and I will be off to York for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (which most people understandably shorten to “Harrogate”).
Festivals are a staple of an author’s summer: for us, there’s Harrogate in July, Bute Noir in August, Bloody Scotland in September, Bouchercon in later fall - this year in Calgary in October.
I’m a big fan of book and writing festivals and conferences - I think they’re essential business for an author, as I’ve written about here - incredibly inspirational, and as much fun as they are useful. So I’m reposting an old blog about my early impressions of Harrogate.
Harrogate is a lovely little Georgian-era spa town with elegant stone mansions and Victorian gingerbread flourishes, gorgeous flowering gardens and ubiquitous hanging flower baskets, hilly cobbled streets lined with restaurants, pubs, and even more mouth-watering boutiques.
And there are a huge number of bath houses. The respectable kind, at least so it seems from the outside of them. I do love a Turkish bath!
At one of my first Harrogates I wrote up some of the differences between US and UK festivals/conferences:
US: The host cities and hotel venues often change conference by conference (there are exceptions, like Thrillerfest and Malice Domestic).
UK: Harrogate is permanently in the Old Swan in Harrogate.
2. US: Except for a few headliners, authors generally pay to go to U.S. cons, and most authors who pay their conference fees on time are given a panel spot, which means there are a lot more panels on and the quality of those panels varies wildly.
UK: Authors are invited to panels by a programming committee, and they are paid both for the panel and for travel and accommodations. Obviously I’m in favor of this “authors are paid to appear” thing.
Are the UK panels better for being curated? Sometimes yes, sometimes absolutely not. A panel very much depends on what the moderator (the “chair” in the UK) brings to the table, and there are just as many bad ones on the curated panels as on the more random US ones. It’s important for authors to bring the energy to every panel they’re on and to not be shy about steering the panel if the moderator is not getting the job done, which happens much more frequently than it should.
3. US: Conference attendees pay for either day passes or a full conference pass and then can attend as many panels/events on that day or days as they can handle.
UK: attendees pay for individual tickets to events of their choosing. So you can choose what you attend and how much you want to spend.
4. US: There are lots of panels on at any given hour and people tend to panel-hop, and it’s perfectly acceptable to move in and out of panels, which is kind of great.
UK: There’s usually only one event going on in the one huge double room, capacity about 500 people. (Since COVID it’s been moved to a big event tent outdoors, which means there is far less chance of attendees passing out from the heat). So you can conceivably see the entire program, and the conversation in between events tends to be focused on one event, which is also kind of great.
More specifically about Harrogate:
5. The Old Swan is really quite small compared to big US downtown hotel venues, and the event hall and the bar and the lawn area (which hosts a bar tent and a signing/bookstore tent) are all right up against each other, so despite the impressive 15,000 tickets sold for various events over the weekend, it feels like you’re at one four-day long party of about 400 people.
7. There is a quiz, traditionally hosted by the always hilarious Val McDermid and Mark Billingham. But the questions are really, really hard, and to put it in British-speak, I am rubbish at quizzes, so I avoid it like hell.
8. Last year it rained constantly. Really, really wet. I’m told more often there are sunny days everyone spends lounging out on the expansive hotel lawn. This year we got what I think of as beach weather – alternating pleasantly windy and cool/ pleasantly windy and sunny, and humid, but not muggy. It only rained in the early morning, which meant I missed it.
9. There is more drinking.. I wouldn’t say much, much, MUCH more, but still, it felt like more. But I always feel like a lightweight in a UK drinking crowd. I’m usually up for anything from two a.m. karaoke (Anchorage Bouchercon) to after-midnight absinthe (Romantic Times New Orleans) to drag queen bingo night (Thrillerfest) to a hike through Mayan pyramids on a blazing Caribbean day (Florida Romance Writers’ Cruise With Your Muse), or dressing up as God knows what at Writers for New Orleans or Romantic Times, or a midnight Jacuzzi party (any number of cons in every genre) but after five straight weeks of traveling and accompanying jet lag I was in bed by a reasonable 1:30 a.m. both nights, therefore blissfully unhungover in the mornings.
But it could very well be that the lack of sleep and the overabundance of alcohol combine to create a highly suggestive state that makes you absolutely convinced that the panelists are speaking directly to you, advising you on plot problems and career dilemmas. However the hell it works, the bottom line is it works. I woke up on Sunday morning, reached for my notebook without really opening my eyes, and wrote ten pages on where the story was actually going rather than where I thought it was going.
10. There were no bloody battles between indie published authors and traditionally published authors (that I saw) and I had a very civilized conversation with a Big Five publisher who shall remain nameless, but who was open to hearing about why so many authors I know are happier with the way Amazon treats them. I hope all of this enmity is on its way to dissipating, because the important thing is that authors now have all kinds of ways to make enough money to keep writing great books.
11. In the UK, they call the readers “punters,” which I know is affectionate… (she says hopefully) but which I still find a little shocking. (I have a mouth like the Berkeley hippie child I am, but Brits can outswear me by ten words per sentence.) We’re all readers, aren’t we? Isn’t that the point?
12. Some things are exactly the same. Friday night was the publisher dinners, and I had a fabulous time at the White Hart meeting my new Thomas & Mercer colleagues: authors Helen Smith, Jay Stringer, Louise Voss, Mark Edwards, EM Powell, Mel Sherratt, and Daniel Pembry, and our charming T&M hosts Emilie Marmeur, Sana Chebaro and Neil Hart.
13. The main reason I didn’t make it to many events was that I knew a lot more people than I expected to, not just Americans like author Laura Lippman and editor Kelly Ragland – but quite a few British authors and readers I know as regulars to Bouchercons and Thrillerfests and World Fantasies and World Horror Cons, like Sarah Pinborough, David Hewson, Martyn Waites, Mark Billingham, Stuart Neville, Kevin Wignall, Simon Kernick and Russel McLean. We Americans should really be ashamed that the Brits are so much more willing to travel to the U.S. festivals.
I also realize I’ve met a fair number of terrific UK writers and readers and bloggers during my not very long residence in Scotland, like Helen Fitzgerald and Sergio Casci, Julia Crouch, James Oswald, Chris Carter, Mari Hannah, Rhian Davies, Danny Stewart, Lisa Gray. And I met a whole slew of wonderful new people who are now part of the ever-growing and forever circle of conference friends.
14. I’ve come away every bit as fired up to write as I am after any U.S. conference. I woke up this morning and wrote five pages without even getting out of bed. Magic is magic, in any accent.
Next up: Bloody Scotland. And I can’t wait to see people again there!
- Alex
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