Some events are like old friends. The Bournemouth Writing Festival is now in it’s fourth year, but it feels like it’s been part of my life forever. As I’ve written before, I tentatively went along to the first one a few months before the publication of Dead Man Singing, and ever since I’ve thrown myself wholeheartedly into the Festival and the community that has grown up around it.

This year I was leading a workshop on elevator pitches, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which the participants (I think) enjoyed too. I wanted to send them away with practical tools that they could use themselves, and just about everyone said at the end that they felt better equipped for pitching their books than they did at the start.

My workshop took place around lunchtime on the Sunday, which meant I couldn’t go to one of the networking lunches that day, but I made up for it with lunch and dinner with other attendees on Saturday, and the networking evening event at Urban Gardens on Friday night. One of the best things about the Festival is the chance to get to meet other writers in all sorts of different disciplines and at very different stages of their own journey. One of the things that I’ve learned is that most writers are incredibly supportive of one another, rather than seeing others as competition, and that’s the dynamic that makes the Festival such a great place to hang out.

Like everyone else, I’ve still got more to learn, so I enjoyed several talks and workshops across the three days which have given me plenty of ideas to put into practice in my current work in progress. I can't wait to see how they influence the shape it takes.

I also managed to tell lots of people about the September release of Imogen Imagine, and the response when I shared the concept of the book – young woman whose life is derailed when her ex-boyfriend has a massive hit single with a song about their breakup – was uniformly positive. One person (Hi, Billie, if you ever see this) even asked if it was available for pre-order yet. It is, and if you’re so inclined, you can do so here.

The only downside of the entire Festival weekend is that now we have to wait another year before we can do it all. If you’re a writer yourself – published or aspiring – why not come and join in the fun next April? You won’t regret it.