I know how this looks, but I promise I'm not running for Congress!
I spent Saturday morning refreshing a webpage to see where I was in a queue to buy tickets. They went on sale at 10, and having set not one but two alarms (one for 9:50, one right on the hour), I clicked "get in the queue" just as tickets went on sale ... and found that I was 1,658th in line! I just had to go check a screenshot, because that number seems impossibly high--this wasn't one of the concerts of the summer I was trying to get into, it was the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Impossible, but true.
You've surely heard of the "Edinburgh Festival," which is actually at least four festivals: the Edinburgh International Festival (broadly speaking classical/non-popular music and "legitimate" theater from around the world), the Fringe (technically Edinburgh Festival Fringe--comedy and pretty much anything else imaginable--and lots that I wish were unimaginable), the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the book festival--all of which take place in the month of August.
In other words ... at a time when the city is so crowded that lots of residents get the hell out of town (it used to be that homeowners could finance a new bathroom by letting out their home to festival performers/attendees, but short-term rental restrictions have made that much trickier of late); when there are so many other entertainment options; and when vacation-loving Scots head to sunnier climes (which is just about anywhere in the world--and I am not complaining) ... 1,657 people hit the "buy tickets" button before me in the first milliseconds after 10 a.m. What a great city this is!
My turn finally came around 10:40, by which point one of the events I wanted to attend was already sold out--Jackie Kay giving a tour of her recent donation to the archives of the National Library of Scotland--but I snagged tickets for the other three items on my first-priority list. There are several other festival events I would like to check out--but I'm holding back on booking others until I have a better sense of what else might demand my attention in August. So far, I just have these three book festival events, Brian Cox as Fred "The Shred" Goodwin in Make it Happen in the festival proper, and former MP Mhairi Black's Fringe comedy gig (I worship her, but it does seem a bit of a pivot) on my schedule.
In other news, I finally made an author website! As a longtime podcaster, I must have read literally hundreds of ads for Squarespace, and I have been intending to make my own site for years. I remember just a couple of weeks after I signed the contract for A Place of Our Own, being on vacation and spending several hours in Provincetown Library (hush, it's lovely) trying--and failing--to set up a site. And then, last week, I made one in a day, because "making it" isn't hard, but deciding what to put on/in it can be. This is still very much a work in progress--and I'd love your help. Many of the people who get this newsletter are writers. What have you learned from your author site? What parts are essential--links to live events? links to buy books? reviews?--and what do you regret putting on there?
- Technically the demonym for residents of Edinburgh is Dunediners, but I didn't want to sow Kiwi confusion.
UPCOMING EVENTS: On Wednesday, June 25, I’ll be on the panel “(Re)imagining Queer Forebearers” at the “Pride in Writing” event at Social Refuge in Manchester. More info about this fall’s visit to the Pacific Northwest coming very soon, I promise!
RECOMMENDATIONS: I am slightly mortified to admit this, but while I have managed to resist the siren song of true-crime podcasts, I am a sucker for a trial podcast. Enjoyed isn't the right word, but I've been pulled in by coverage of the trials of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, Brianna Ghey (the podcast was very well done, but I was left with the feeling that someone else might well have been involved), Lucy Letby (I do not think she did it), Daniel Khalife (when so many young people believe they can just make themselves into TV presenters by starting a YouTube channel, is it so strange that a young man figured he could set himself up as a spy?), Kim Kardashian (for real, this was a good one), and of course the golden toilet. But let's face it, Karen Read's was the ultimate mediatized trial. For daily coverage, I stuck with Canton Confidential, from Boston's NBC Channel 10, but I was so glad when my favorite true-crime authority, Rebecca Lavoie, made a few episodes of her mostly Patreon podcast The Readathon, available to all. There are none better than the Crime Writers On team when it comes to talking about how the media cover crime (and also Law & Order).
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