How to eat at a grand buffet and attend MWF

Writers’ festival programs are like the buffet at the Grand Hyatt: a big ol’ fancy tease. That first glance is near overwhelming: towers of cakes and pastries, silver platters featuring rows of fresh seafood, fruit, nuts, ganache and coconut, sausage rolls the size of your thumbnail and cream puffs like clouds of angel’s breath. You’re eying off that lemon meringue pie like nobody’s business, but there are also those delectable little salmon quiches and dear god, yes, butterfly cakes dusted with chocolate. You have died and gone to culinary heaven, and yet the unfortunate truth is that even if you tried your hardest, even if you wholly devoted yourself to that most divine of tasks, you could not eat it all. It’s unlikely you could even sample everything, and you resign yourself to the fact that you will need to make a judicious and limited selection. But how do you choose? 

My research¹ indicates that Festival Indecision² is a common affliction. Those of us on a shoestring budget in particular know the symptoms of FI all too well, and while we probably won’t ever get to a Grand Hyatt buffet (I did gatecrash it once, though, true story, and there was, like, a wall of champagne) we might be able to make it to a couple of writers’ festival events.

So, in the interests of fellow sufferers, I have come up with a selection of ways to choose which MWF sessions to attend. (Warning: some of these suggestions may have adverse side effects, but desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.)

Ahem:

 

How to Choose Between MWF Events

1. Send a barrage of emails to the publicists or agents of the authors on your shortlist. Attend the sessions of anyone who replies. If they reply angrily, buy a copy of their book. If you already have it, buy a copy for your mum. If they take out a restraining order, we don’t know each other and you never heard this from me.

2. Play a game of pool with your bestie, assigning an MWF event to each ball. The order of balls pocketed is the order in which you must buy your MWF tickets. Buy tickets accordingly until you hit your budget. If you lose the game, buy your bestie a round. If you win, buy yourself a ticket to Friday Night Live.

3. Borrow a harried friend’s child for the week and take them along to the Schools’ program. Your stressed out friend will be grateful for the break and you’ll remember how awesome kids’ books are and regret ever having to grow up and read totes srs literature.

4a. Stick the pages of the MWF 2012 Program to the dartboard at your local pub. Throw the darts. Attend any session skewered. If the dart knocks over another patron’s beer, invite them along, too. If you accidentally hit another patron, attend every Big Ideas session. If you get into a fight with the big burly regulars because you’ve plastered the dartboard with newspaper, run.

4b. Variation: accost passers-by and get them to throw the darts for you, thereby availing you of all responsibility for the outcome. If the session sucks (Unlikely! But even the food at the Grand Hyatt sucks sometimes³) you can blame that old stringy guy with the weird eye.

5. Make it your festival mission to uncover the identity of @WFQuestions. Pretend you’re playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Use her tweet-stream as a guide to the festival. Wear your running shoes in case she finds you first, waves her dream beads in your face and tries to sell your her erotic e-book 50 Planes of Sexy Flying.

 

Now: what are your suggestions for dealing with the dreaded Festival Indecision? And if MWF 2012 were a buffet, who would be the meringue?

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¹ listening to my friends complain
² a real disease
³ I guess