4 – 8 March at InterContinental Hotel, Dubai Festival City
Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is held under the patronage of
His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum,
The Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.
Seumas Gallacher will be sharing posts with the LitFest every fortnight.
…Man is a quirky animal at best… and this ol’ Jurassic’s as prone to quirkology as any… but, happily, I’ve discovered over the years and decades, gazillions of yeez indulge foibles as much as I do… the nub of it is this… yeez usually do something, anything, on a regular basis, because yeez derive pleasure from doing whatever it is… oh, I don’t mean fundamental stuff like breathing, earning a living… that all comes in to the ‘staying alive’ category… this lot refers to optional behaviour… not the kinda thing where yeez ask an employee why he/she performs a repetitive series of functions at wurk, and the response is, ‘…Jimmy said I should do it this way’… yeez ask, ‘…where’s Jimmy?’,‘…oh, he died twenty years ago’…so, not that… consider the attraction that bubble-wrap paper holds for most people… yeez get yer hands on some of it, and then spend hours popping the wee bubbles… benefit to Humanity?… zilch, zero, not one iota of productive output… but yeez enjoy it!… there’s the thing… when I began to Blog a few years back, my motive was simple… I wanted to develop my building the platform through extending my purview into the SOSYAL NETWURK whirl… ulterior objective?… to flog my crime thriller masterpieces… seemed a good idea at the time… it started with a wee fling a coupla times a week, then I discovered I truly enjoyed doing it… gone went the ‘task’ element of the commonly-distilled wisdom for self-publishing authors to ‘blog to survive’… I found the difference in content and style of the blog provided a great offset to the heavier-duty quill-scraping involved in the novel-writing… a light-humoured touch evolved, along with some of the ‘quirkiness’ in language usage, which for me has become a little touchstone of my own persona… it has provided a rhythm to my daily scribbling routine… I need amuse, entertain, educate, fawn to, no-one but myself… and here’s a deal-clincher, for a Scotsman… it costs me NUTHIN… by automatically linking it to all of my SOSYAL NETWURK channels, it also gives me an outreach to common-spirited Lads and Lassies of Blog Land… a much richer and fraught-free literary-pals medium than any matchmaking websites… so, as an indie, listen if yeez must to the splendid advice to broaden yer authorial reach by blogging… but if yeez do it, do it because yeez want to do it… and better still if yeez enjoy doing it… I’ll see yeez in the virtual coffee shop, same time, same place…
