I didn’t do anything creative myself, but I did go watch others be creative at the Decatur Book Festival, people like Roy Blount, Jr., and Mike Luckovich.

The Festival had a lot of booths set up around the square with lots of book stuff going on. The local libraries were there, university presses, the Ferst Foundation, small presses, and an amazing number of self-published authors.

These all seemed to be pushing either their murder mystery/thrillers or memoirs. All of them seemed to be about 230 pages long. (Is this the limit for self-publishing? Would Leo Tolstoy have been out of luck?) Having been exposed to several self-published works before (Vampires of Dixie, anyone?), I hesitated to stop at any of these booths.

There was one booth which was a federation of literary magazines. That was very tempting: dozens of titles, filled with poetry, short stories, literary gnoshes just waiting to be sampled. But how do you choose?

All in all a fun time and worth doing again. Word of advice: if you want to see a particular author, get to the venue at least 30 minutes early to get a seat.