Wise Words: Vic Watson
One of the North East writing community’s most-loved members has an extraordinary story of her own.
Meet Vic Watson, wearer of many literary hats. She’s best-known as co-founder and organiser of the hugely successful Bay Tales, an annual crime conference held at Whitley Bay Playhouse. With Ann Cleeves as patron, Bay Tales has featured best-selling authors and attracted hundreds of people from all over the world.
The route to this and her love of a good book began when Vic was tiny, living in Newcastle, enjoying her dad making up stories about her favourite characters - the Wuzzles - while her mum was at work in the evening.
She said: “My dad also used to make up stories for me then I graduated to reading Jill Murphy novels like the Worst Witch. I still love Jill Murphy’s books and regularly read them to my little boy.”
By her own admission, Vic is highly-strung, always needing to be on the go. To help wear her out at six years old, while her mum was pregnant with Vic’s younger brother, she began swimming lessons which led to her setting the Newcastle City record for 25m breaststroke. It still stands some 30 years later.
Ever the pragmatist, Vic realised an early desire to be an Olympic swimmer was not an ideal long-term plan and decided to concentrate on her studies and try to become a journalist.
After A-Levels Vic worked in a bank, the youngest of five Management Trainees across the UK, but decided to study Media, Communication & Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, followed by an MA in Creative Writing at Northumbria University.
The novel that impressed her most at this time and began her love of dark writing was Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.
This was followed by Linwood Barclay. In Vic’s words, “No Time for Goodbye blew my mind and made me realise the possibility of writing fresh, clever stories. His novels are absolutely brilliant and have stayed with me and made me think ‘I want to do this’.”
Vic was selected to be an Evening Chronicle Young Reviewer in 2008. This was a scheme designed to increase young people’s access to and interest in the arts. The scheme provided her with free tickets for shows and concerts as well as books and CDs. It started the passion for reviewing that has stood her in good stead ever since.
Random side note, Vic and her now-husband, had their first date thanks to the Young Reviewers scheme - with free tickets to see the Prodigy. Who says romance is dead!
Life then knocked Vic sideways at 27 when she suffered a debilitating illness. This was initially misdiagnosed as a condition which could reduce her life expectancy to five years. This terrible shock changed Vic’s world. She was eventually told she had Sjogren’s Syndrome, an auto-immune disease. At this point she was so poorly Vic became housebound for months. She said: “Sjogren’s Syndrome affects me every day, to varying extents. It’s not a condition many people are familiar with but it can affect every part of your body and your life.
“Because I love reading, and it was one of the very few things I was able to do while bed-bound, I lost myself in books and set up a blog to review all of the novels I’d enjoyed. I was new to Twitter and I started to talk to authors and enjoyed chatting with them. As a result of all this, once I felt well enough, I set up a writing group. We produced anthologies and had several successful events. Some members are now published authors, which is wonderful.”
As well as reading, Vic was also developing her own writing and in 2012 she won the North Tyneside Libraries Story Tyne short story competition with a piece called The Piano. By then, she was also the official blogger for the Whitley Bay Film Festival. Her writing was included in two charity anthologies compiled by crime novelist Luca Veste. In 2015 Vic began working with North Tyneside Libraries to judge their Story Tyne competition, deliver workshops and facilitate author events.
All of this brought Vic to setting up the Newcastle chapter of Noir at the Bar, where crime authors read their work in a bar, following a model set up by Peter Rosovsky in Philadelphia in 2009. Because of her now well-established reputation, authors were keen to read. One, Ashley Erwin, even flew over from the U.S.
Hosting these events found Vic outside her comfort zone but more was to be asked of her MC skills when the pandemic shut all events down. Ever the innovator, and using the ‘getting stuck in’ mentality which had served her so well, Vic switched to Virtual Noir at the Bar or VNatB.
She said: “I had a number of friends who were going to launch their books in 2020 including debuts. Their plans disappeared overnight. I wanted to support them so we ran 22 online events, one a week, to showcase writers. People watched globally, some in New Zealand even got up in the middle of the night to watch it live every week.” One of the big thrills of this experience for Vic was being able to showcase unpublished and less well-known writers alongside some of her writing heroes including Ann Cleeves, Ian Rankin and, of course, Linwood Barclay.
The success of VNatB resulted in it being shortlisted for Event of the Year by The Bookseller magazine.
Vic built on this by launching Bay Tales online which grew into a real-life crime writing conference post-pandemic. There were 517 tickets sold for 2024’s event with over 50 world-renowned authors appearing over the events - including a fringe festival - between 2022-2024. This year’s keynote interview was TV’s Steph McGovern interviewing Val McDermid. For 2025 the line-up includes Janice Hallett, Mark Billingham, Sarah Hilary, CL Taylor and William Shaw.
In terms of advice for women following in her footsteps, Vic said: “I live by what my late dad used to say, ‘JFDI (Just F***ing Do It)’. If you have the desire to do something, just get on with it. Spot a gap in the market and fill it. I’ve never had loads of self-confidence but at Bay Tales, I’ve interviewed authors in front of literally hundreds of people. Don’t ever sell yourself short. I'd also say that, while there may be lots of similar events happening, books being written, or podcasts being produced, there is more than enough space in the market for everyone. Each artist, events organiser or person has a different perspective, outlook and goal - I don’t think we should see each other as competitors but support one another.”
With a new baby girl, Vic doesn’t have much time to write at present but is keeping a note of new ideas in the hope that, one day she’ll be able to start writing regularly again.
The Stand-Up Mam has funny family stories, do you have one to share?
“My dad used to tell me lies out of daftness. This meant I was 26 when I tried to stop my husband eating a raw mushroom as I thought it might prove fatal.
Further embarrassment followed on a helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon on my 30th birthday. My friend asked the pilot whether he had voted for Obama in the previous election. I put my hand over hers and told her to stop as it was illegal to ask people how they voted. She enjoyed that more than the Grand Canyon itself.”
There are probably some residual tall tales still to come so watch this space!