Fringe benefits

Once in a while, this makes a nice change. Someone else writes the story; I merely perform it, and drink in the wild applause slight tittering from the second row. As usual, my palsied hands shake the script in front of me, visually undermining the confidence I think I'm projecting via the microphone. The London Short Fiction Award took place recently, culminating in rather enjoyable readings of all the shortlisted entries in the West End last Wednesday, and some kind of ceremony for the winners of this and other London Fringe events to come on the 26th. I was proud to take part, if only as a stand in reader for my friend Sarah, and her short story The Biscuit Man - by the time I was performing it, I'd more or less forgotten I hadn't written it myself. I guess this is what happens when I'm in a competitive frame of mind.

But, there is a lesson in this somewhere. The first rule of story competitions should be, you do not discuss the judging mechanism. Somehow it doesn't reassure me know that the ultimate winner was decided on a whim in the interval of the event, after only the shortlisted readers from the first half of the alphabet had read their work; nor that the published scores before the event reveal the judges to be of remarkably dissimilar mind to each other; nor that two judges pointed out that fiction wasn't really their area as such, but they did read it (oh good!); nor that the other judge cheerfully pointed out he'd had four drinks with his agent before he'd even arrived. Maybe it would be better just to keep the whole process mysterious?

But god it was worth it, to see how alarmed the judges looked, when a microphone was thrust in front of them...