3-Day Novel Contest makes a road trip to Toronto

That lunatic institution, the 3-day Novel Contest is coming to town on Wednesday, August 6, from 5:30 - 9 pm in Toronto. It's ostensibly an opportunity to brief the prospective inmates on how to survive and thrive during the marathon over the Labour Day weekend. But it's as much a party, with John Kupferschmidt, winner of last year's contest, reading from In the Garden of Men, his newly released winning novel.

Doors open at 5:30, readings start around 6 pm at The Rivoli, 334 Queen Street West.

The contest was started 31 years ago by a number of Vancouver writers (including Stephen Osborne, publisher of Geist and occasional contributor to this blog) and has inspired the creation of thousands of novels, twenty-five of which have been published by the contest administrators. The contest has had many homes but is now managed as a labour of love by Barbara Zatyko in Toronto (whose day job is publisher and general manager of Magazines Canada) and Melissa Edwards in Vancouver. A history of the contest is available at the website. As it says:

Throughout its history, the 3-Day Novel Contest has been called a "fad," an "idle threat," a "great way to overcome writers block" and "a trial by deadline." Unconcerned, it continues to fly in the face of the notion that novels take eight years of angst to produce.