Bobs.

A few days back I was in one of those teenage depression spirals, where there seems to be no meaning to life and no purpose to it. That all vanished when I set foot in the town of Bellingen for the local Readers & Writers Festival. Writing is normally a lonely, depressing craft, but now I was in a town full of writers, many of them published authors.

Never had there been so many eyebags reaching such southerly extents in the one place. Masses of middle-aged women packed the local coffee shops, struggling to determine which of the four women with thin, black-rimmed glasses and a sophisticated bob was their companion. There was squinting, and sipping, and shouting, and bitching, and laughing, and learning, and countless late comers to every session.

So much coffee was consumed over the two days of the festival that on two separate occassions, people actually attempted to barge into my toilet cubicle before I even had the chance to display the engaged sign.

But it wasn't all coffee and perversion. There were, as one would hope, actually panels of people from the realm of writing, discussing everything from Telling Refugee's stories to the internet. I really pity the panel that had to encompass all there is to know about the great sea of information that is the internet in just an hour. But they managed, barely, and I discovered that there is hope for queer writers on the internet, something I've been worried about ever since I started this blog.

I also met up with Alex Neill, one of my inspirations, who worked with me at last years festival to polish a piece of short fiction. And then I added another person to my list of inspirational writers; Alice Pung. I haven't yet read her work, something I'm not proud of and probably shouldn't put on the internet, but I intend to.