Everything was set for me to take off for Nairobi next week to attend the Storymoja Festival, but then the air ticket had a problem that couldn't be sorted. So- sadly- I am no longer attending. I was looking forward to it, especially the master class on writing for teens and the panel discussion on romance writing- but oh well, things happen.
Coincidentally, on the same day I learn I won't be attending a literary festival, my piece I wrote many months ago on litfests goes up on Kalahari Review: The Best of Times- The Worst of Times. Here's a bit of it:
Attending literary festivals is part of a writer's life. They are wonderfully horrible experiences, especially for someone like me who lives in a tiny comfortable pond in which I take up an inordinate amount of water space, but at these gigs I morph into the microscopic plankton that the normal plankton eat.
I am slightly known as a writer in Botswana, a few select people (I try to tell myself the better, discerning types) in South Africa might know me, might have read something written by me, and a handful of people around the continent have heard my name, almost exclusively other writers. But jump off this lovely, huge island called Africa and it is a wasteland in terms of my writing career.
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