In the tradition of Harlan Ellison and Louis L’Amour, children’s author Simon Cheshire is writing the eighth Saxby Smart comedy crime mystery in the window of a Borders bookshop in the UK.
Ellison also wrote at a table in the middle of a Worldcon, and L’Amour once set up his typewriter in the middle of Hollywood and Vine. I suspect that the easy part is finding wildly inconvenient public places to write. Getting reporters to take notice is the real trick.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]
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“Ellison also wrote at a table in the middle of a Worldcon”
A custom built hand-crafted elevated wooden platform specially built by the committee, or more specifically, staffer Phil Paine, at the 1978 Worldcon, Iguanacon II, to be specific. Cost money; took significant time (days) and effort to build. Not just “a table.” No one could have seen him if he just sat at a table in the atrium. Well, ten or fifteen or twenty people could have, but not the hundreds who instead were able to.
I don’t remember if it was elevated or not, but I do remember it was under a transparent plastic tipi or some such — I remember carrying it from the Garret to the hotel for Phil.
As Mr. Ellison finished each page of the story, it was posted on the nearby wall he sat facing so people could see it grow. While he wasn’t there, some jackass had the gall to “correct” his punctuation, causing him to glower like a looming monsoon thunderstorm. Gofers were assigned after that to sit in his chair when he was away to keep people from altering his work, and I remember him, white-out in hand as he corrected the posted pages, telling Jackie Simpson, who was taking a volunteer shift (about as gentle a human being as ever lived) that if anyone touched his pages again, to “tear their throats out with her teeth.”