A Wild Weekend in Leeds...

I’m a relatively newbie when it comes to the Romantic Novelists’ Association events. It isn’t that I’m not gregarious, although I am a little bit backwards at coming forward. It’s that RNA events are usually in London and, as I have no real reason to be in London at any other time, it isn’t worth it to trek all the way down to the Big Smoke for a couple of hours.

The conference is different, for two reasons. Firstly, with events scheduled from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, you get a lot of bang for your buck. Secondly, it’s almost always held somewhere a lot more accessible. My first year it was in Lancaster, my second in Telford and my third, from which I’ve just returned, in Leeds.

I don’t want to give a blow by blow account of the conference, because if you’re that interested in the details of who I met and why I heard you were probably there, but I do want to pick out a few reasons why I think these conferences are worthwhile.

Writing can be a lonely business. You can surround yourself with friends who don’t write and even the best of them, while nodding and sympathising over your successes and failures, won’t quite “get” what you’re talking about, how you’re feeling and why the kindest rejection can feel like the worst in the world (so near and yet so far).

So the you walk into a room of strangers you know one thing. They’re all writers. You can tell them about the rave rejection and they’ll say: “yeah, that’s rubbish” and understand.

Then there are the conference sessions. Inevitably they don’t all fall out perfectly, and you end up having to choose between three you really want to go to and three you really don’t have any interest in, or which aren’t really relevant to what you do. My favourite of the talks was one on writing sex, which featured a whole load of double entendres and a practical (writing) session set to a soundtrack of Jane Birkin singing Je t’Aime, and which left a lecture theatre full of people in fits of laughter. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I learned a lot.

There are the industry one-to-one appointments, at which writers get a chance to pitch their work to agents, editors and publishers — an invaluable opportunity which has seen many a writer get their break.

But probably my favourite, and I suspect the most lasting, memory of this week will, I think, be that of sitting around a table with friends old and new, under the stars (and the wings of the planes coming in to land at Leeds-Bradford) downing a glass or three of sauvignon blanc. We began with books and we ended up putting the word to rights.