A New Season of Ace Stories

It feels like you "should" stay in on a Sunday night and prepare yourself for the week ahead, but by going out you make the weekend last longer, and Ace Stories (at Hotel Pelirocco, Brighton) is a great excuse to leave your cosy bedroom!

First up was the poet Mike Loveday. His extraordinary observations of everyday life made me smile. Especially the poem about what you might find in a lift.

Next author to take to the stage was Lizzie Enfield and she revealed that what motivated her to write What You Don't Know was that she saw one of her colleague's novels in a supermarket and thought I could do that!

Lizzie has a great sense of humour and read a couple of extracts from the novel, featuring a husband bordering on OCD behaviour and his wife mixing up his CD collection, shelving Radiohead under H ... (I do that to my brother!)

The headlining author for the evening was Jayne Joso who has written a very original novel called Perfect Architect. The widow of an architect challenges four other architects to build her the perfect house ...

Jayne was interviewed by the event director Jay Clifton before her reading, and it was fascinating to hear how the idea for the novel sprung from a non-fiction book about architecture that Jayne had ghostwritten.

Another interesting thing I found out was that Perfect Architect is actually the first novel Jayne wrote, but as she had difficulty finding a publisher at the time her second novel got published before the first ... (This has motivated me to crack on with my new novel idea!)

To finish the evening off Fire Eyes played some great folky rocky tunes.

Ace Stories now have a website and I'm very happy to be the event photographer! Check back later for more photos. (Also this post looks better if you view it in Firefox.)

PS. Ace Stories finishes at a sensible time (9pm ish) but I wasn't sensible enough to leave then ... But hanging out in the bar after is part of the fun, and I love to talk to writers and other artists about their work. Also it was nice that the audience were not only made up of writers. Among others I spoke to a psychologist and woman selling dresses.