It’s festival time! I’ve always thought of book festivals as moveable feasts (originally, holidays with variable dates) with all the spiritual and secular resonances of those celebrations.
Summer is book festival season, and this week is always one of the true highlights of our year.
The Bute Noir Crime Writing Festival takes place the first weekend of August on the beautiful Isle of Bute off the Scottish coast. Getting there feels like journeying into a fairy tale.
Running a book festival was not on my list of author goals, or Craig’s either! And yet it’s become one of the most magical (if often fraught!) elements of our author lives. For ten years we’ve been throwing a yearly party for our author and reader community on a fairy-tale gorgeous Scottish island.
That’s the way the Universe works, though. Excuse me while I go full Californian on your now… but I did make a written list of what I wanted as the experience of my life (and if you haven’t, I highly recommend doing the same). I did have intentions for exhilarating, inspiring, adventures in gorgeous places, with passionately creative people. Which may just be the definition of a book festival!
I have that throughout the year at the various festivals we attend as crime authors. But Bute Noir really is special, from the train station to the ferry to the first sight of the town of Rothesay. I love first-time attendees’ raptures over the setting! And then the fun really starts.
But in the beginning, we were tricked into it by a canny group of Scottish islanders…
I know that some of you out there in the Bookstack community have your own book festival inside you. So I’ve written more about the festival here:
Bute Noir: How we started a book festival by accident
Front steps of the Glenburn Hotel, Rothesay
And I’ve written about the places and faces of two more of our regular festivals here:
Bouchercon (more writer-oriented!)
But that’s barely scratching the surface of July. Hard to believe we packed this much into one month!
We survived our epic RV road tour for our just-released road trip thriller The Grapevine — met fabulous nomads, readers, booksellers and law enforcement all over California and learned reams about the real experience of RVing that is informing Book 2.
Did I mention we survived? Looking back, that’s kind of a miracle. We now have such an appreciation for what our intrepid and more than slightly crazy heroine Lou Gomersall experiences on a daily basis.
We’ve already done quite a few posts on the tour (with photos!) which we’re collecting in a new section of this Substack: The Grapevine. This section will also be where you can find bonus material on the book and upcoming books, such as deleted scenes.
And - if you’re subscribed here, you’re automatically entered into a monthly drawing for books, gift cards and other prizes. Congratulations to the month’s winner (not publishing the name until I know that’s ok with them)!
We’ve just turned in a second round of edits on Lost Highway Book 2, which takes our crew up to the Wild West wildernesses of Humboldt County, along with other weird and wonderful California locations:
At Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park
We’ve still got a lot of polishing to do on The Vanishing Road, but we’re also now back to our solo books - mine is Book 7 of the Huntress Moon series, for which I expect to face more MAGA threats and possibly political imprisonment, but that’s the state of the US until we do something about this dystopia in November. Not speaking out is not an option.
All six Huntress books free on Kindle Unlimited.
If you’re a writer, I have a whole Screenwriting Tricks for Authors newsletter that goes out weekly - for well over a decade I’ve been showing authors (and beginning writers!) how to write better books using the storytelling tricks of their own favorite movies.
And this is the time of year I encourage people with a book in their heads — or the desire to live with a book in their heads — to DO IT. Start now, follow my prompts, and you’ll have A Book By the End of the Year.
On the travel front, there are more book festivals to come:
Bloody Scotland is up in September (thankfully no travel for that one!) then Bouchercon in Calgary in October, where I’ll be paneling on what I think is the most important topic for authors to be writing and speaking about, now and always — the problem of human evil.
In between those we’ll be going to Spain, Sicily and Malta (photo below) on non-book related adventures. It’s still hard for me to believe that these exotic destinations are now easier for me to get to than LA to San Francisco! Can’t wait,,, and will write about them, with photos of course.
You want to talk books? I love talking books! In my continuing quest to organize this newsletter/Substack, I’ve made a page where I can put my book reviews and links so I - I mean subscribers! - can find them.
There’s some film, TV and theater in there as well. For example -
I’m working my way through Mad Men again for I think the fourth time. Why would I do that when there is so much new stuff out there to watch? Because it is one of the perfect TV series of all time and there is always another layer to spot.
But especially because of all this zeitgeist about trad wives and all the books cashing in on it without mentioning, never mind condemning, the far right’s plan to make it political reality. It made me want to go back to this far superior depiction of what life was life for women when they were legally and financially forced to live as trad wives.
I am especially interested to track the character arc of Ken Cosgrove, who starts off the series as just one of the pack of slobbering misogynists at the Sterling Cooper agency, but ends up as probably the most evolved man on the series. We could use a whole lot more of that these days.
And how is your summer going? What are you reading/watching/writing? Where are you going? How are you coping?
—Alex
I’ve turned on paid subscriptions because apparently it helps with the algorithm, but please subscribe for free, and buy one of my books if you’d like to support my cats. I mean my writing. Most of my books are also free on Kindle Unlimited!
Newsletters are emailed monthly-ish; I post online more often. Newsletter subscribers are automatically entered in a monthly drawing for free books, gift cards and other prizes.
The Grapevine is now out in hardcover, e book, and Audible: more audiobook versions to come in September, and paperback soon!
Amazon (free on Kindle Unlimited!)
All six Huntress thrillers - free on Kindle Unlimited
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