Xponorth is a festival of Scotland’s Leading Creative Industries, held in Inverness, annually in June.  This year it opened Wed 7th and runs Thurs 8th.

Today’s word for the day on my calendar was “ragout – or ragu – a well-seasoned mixture” – and this is a fair description of the festival – which manages to mix Shetland craft knitting, scriptwriting opportunities, showcases foreign short films, platforms new musical talent, has producers, editors A&R men, Icelandic Designers, publishers, writing agents, plenty of leaders of industries and entrepreneurs – creative producers speaking to new talent and motivated people keen to learn how to take the next steps in their production.  A rich mix of new music, new films, seminars and discussion panels.

I went along to the “Starting your television Writing Career”, followed by a talk by Patricia Van der Akker who crowdfunded a book of craft. (I’ll put up separate posts on these as there was just too much excellent info to cram into this blog post.)

Today, I discovered the first rule of Festival going – travel solo if you want to have smooth travel.  I was sharing transport with 2 others, and plans had to change to suit one person’s lateness in getting up.  On the plus side, it was good to reconnect at different times through the day and compare notes on the varying talks we went to.

Everywhere you looked there were people talking animatedly, some crouched over laptops, and cameras everywhere.  A definite buzz.