I Got Paid Good Money To Speak At a Writer’s Festival

This writing thing pays. Sometimes…

The author pictured seated down, second from the left

A couple of days ago I was a guest speaker at a writer’s festival.

It was the sort of festival where everyone sat around in purposefully dimmed rooms, asking and answering self-important questions and trying very hard to sound smart — that is to say, it was like every gathering of writers I’ve ever been.

I got paid something like $200 to play the literary guy. I dislike events like these but I liked the money. And so I took it…

Now, you might say that $200 isn’t much. And it isn’t, in the grand scheme of things. But for a writer as down on his luck as I am, it’s a lot of money indeed. Hell, getting paid anything at all as a writer is in itself nothing short of a minor miracle and worth celebrating.

The event itself went fine. There were the usual family and friends in attendance, as well as the book groupies here to meet and ogle at the people whose words they’ve read. The friends and family I didn’t mind so much — somebody has to support struggling scribblers, after all — but the groupies were something else. I minded them because most of them asked obvious questions and were very ugly.

“Oooooh, Calvin…” They would ask. “Tell me, why do you write about the things you…