Writer as Performer.

Well, I spent Monday sitting in the window of Waterstones, Crawley, writing a complete science fiction story on a theme that I was given when I turned up at 11:00. I was part of Crawley WordFest and a thoroughly good event it seems to have been.

Actually it wasn't me, it was Ren Holton who did the writing. Ren was glared at by several dozen people who obviously thought she was a shop window dummy until they got close enough to see how fast she types.

In my own persona I recieved two Creme Eggs from a loyal fellow writer who will be reading this (thanks David!) conducted a quick tutorial on mind-mapping a story brief with somebody I'm mentoring, and got @tweeklet (who found me via my twitter stream) to name the antihero in my story.

Also, almost incidentally, wrote 5495 words of quite coherent prose and finished my story with 'the end' at 16:02, two minutes after my (highly movable) deadline. The story is called 'The Planet That Couldn't Lie' and is very definitely an homage to the classic school of scifi promulgated by Asimov, Clarke and more recently Niven and Pournelle - which is odd, as I almost never write that kind of thing. Anyway, I am very happy with it.

It was really odd to be performance art, and yet I wrote much more than I would usually have done. Weird.

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