Interesting times at the Scottish Association of Writers’ Conference 2024. Half of the awards were announced on Friday and half on Saturday, with the winners of the short form writing being asked to read out their work to the assembled crowd. That’s enough to put you off entering the competition in the first place. You look out over that crowd of people smiling encouragingly and you just know that some of them are probably thinking; ‘Get on with it!’
As I said in the previous post, my daft sketch about the astronauts on the ISS discovering that their journey home is definitely economy class won the Largs Shield. I got fourth place in the humorous short story competition, with two writers in my group taking second and first place for the same competition. Given that there’s only nine of us in the group, we got a lot of attention for that.
Not much attention, but it pleased me – I was awarded third place in the Constable Stag competition for the best novel extract. I’ve never seriously thought of writing a novel; putting in my entry was more of a test of how good the basic idea was. Good enough, it seems.
After the Gala Dinner on Saturday (this time I dressed a bit smarter than blue jeans and boots) the president had a game of Tops and Tails – everyone stand up, listen to a question and choose answer A (hands on your head) or B (hands on your bottom). Usually it’s all over within five or six questions, but twenty five questions later we were still cheering the two women choosing the right answer every time – one of them from our own small writers’ group. In the end the president ran out of questions and Sue asked for the prize to go to the other person as she wasn’t able to enjoy either the chocolates or the bottle of red wine.
After the gala dinner I ended up chatting to a man who turned out to be the adjudicator of the Constable Stag. I do love that about this conference, that the people who judge the competitions are there in the room and ready to talk. He was enthusiastic about my entry – he encouraged me to get on and finish the novel. When I told my writing friends, they said “That’s what we keep telling you!” Looks like I have a new project for the year.
It was past eleven when I rejoined my group in the bar, and not far short of midnight when we all dispersed to our rooms. At quarter past midnight, the fire alarm went off right over my bed. I’m used to setting off the smoke alarms at home, so I spent a minute trying to work out what I’d done to set this off before thinking of opening the door to the corridor.
All the alarms were going off, and a couple of people were heading for the fire exit (about twenty yards from my room). It’s always some idiot smoking in the loos, so I slung on just enough clothes to be decent and grabbed my room key on the way out, thinking I would be going back in soon and would feel a right prawn if I couldn’t get into my room.
Some people had done the sensible thing and left the building immediately. Dress code ranged from full jacket and boots down to bare feet and bath robe. Two women near us had thought to bring a duvet from their room and were standing wrapped in it.
Two women in bathrobes and slippers told us that their room was right there in the corner. The thick column of smoke was coming from the room directly under theirs, getting denser as we watched. They told us that they had rung the night porter twice in the last forty minutes to report a smell of burning; at midnight they had opened their window as the room was uncomfortably hot and smoke had blown into the room. They had just put on their bathrobes to go to Reception for a third complaint when the alarm went off. They were on a free spa weekend as compensation for a previous visit that had gone so badly wrong, that it was like a Fawlty Towers episode.
By now they had the three of us and a growing group of SAW attendees gathered around listening and we were asking them all kinds of odd questions; ‘What was the story behind that bad experience?’ ‘What did the smoke smell like, did it make your eyes water?’ ‘What were you thinking as you ran to the exit?’ They asked us why we were all here, and we said we were on a writing conference. “Oh, writers!” they said, as if it explained everything. “We were told the hotel was full of writers.”
There was frost on the cars when we arrived in the car park. Some people were offered refuge in other people’s cars and the staff allowed some people access to the hotel’s entrance hall, the tiny space between the doors to the car park and the doors to Reception. The rest of us spent two hours in the car park in falling temperatures and increasing breeziness watching six crews from Scottish Fire work on the hotel, followed by almost an hour in Reception and the bar with the alarms still screaming for about half of that, and we finally got back to our rooms. Mine was far enough away from the site of the fire that I got just the whiff of burnt-toast (though I have very little sense of smell, so it might have been stronger). I tend to be organised anyway, so it was automatic to me to put out tomorrow’s clothes in order of putting on, just on case.
It’s a long drive home from Cumbernauld, so I’d booked an extra night. That left me free to go to the final session and to Dragons’ Pen (five people pitching their novel idea). I was looking forward to a restful night and an early start. Laws of Sod, the fire alarm went off at 10.30pm. False alarm this time, but it left me keen to drive home.
The SAW Conference 2024. Drama right to the very end.
Julia Chalkley 