26 November 2009

BFS & Fantasycon Needs You!

First the good news: the prelim details for Fantasycon '10 have been released...
It'll be on 17th–19th September 2010. (Probably at the Britannia in Nottingham, but it doesn't say anything about location in the announcement...)

Early bird bookings are available until 31st December at the vastly reduced rate of £35 for the entire weekend. From then until 31st March the price is £45, and on 1st April it rises to £55. From 1st July the price will be £65. Non-members pay £10 more in each case.

Tickets for Saturday only will be available for £35.

Now for the bad: both the BFS and Fantasycon are grievously short of volunteers to do... stuff... especially Fantasycon organising stuff. Apparently the lack of interest from new blood getting involved is reaching crisis proportions (and the printer mishaps with the last piece of the latest membership mailing isn't helping much...)

So if you want to help out, don't be scared and check out the the Fcon news page for the emails to contact...

Nano Day 26

Wheeeeee! Technological crisis averted. Typical, ain't it, that just when you want perfect performance from your writing machine, it keels over and dies. And then so does its predecessor. Luckily, this time, the back up discs were actually working....

So, here we are at Nano day 26, and my current wordcount is now a sniffle over 132k! Woohoo! This means that I've beaten my wordcount from last year and, with luck, may just exceed the wordcount from the year before (which was 155k.).

Alas, England: Elsewhere is rapidly falling down the Word War scoreboard. We're at no. 7 currently, with absolutely no chance of ever approaching those lofty scores that Oxford and Birmingham are pulling...

So, the werewolf thing is well and truly done, the not!TombRaider one is done, if a little on the short side, and I'm now switching between the pirate-mermaids and the urban fantasy short story collection thingy. Which is fun. :-)

Though it must be admitted that the words are increasingly harder and harder to find. Just have to keep looking at my spreadsheets from the last couple of years to remind myself that, yes, this is actually a normal thing...

05 November 2009

Nano Day 5

Alas, my lovelies, did not quite manage to hit the 40k target last night. Gave it up at 38,001 on account of no conceiveable brain cells left.

On the plus side, I did manage to write 8,000 words in 5 hours. Which was nice. :-) (I make no comment on the actual *quality* of said words...)

So what's new from Nanowrimo-land? The regional word wars have started up and Team England: Elsewhere are running second on the leader board. (out of 15 regions competing.) We're being soundly beaten by the mad gits in Oxford, who have one insane chap who reached 50k last night. This is the same chap who regularly pulls in epic level wordage - he was at 18k on the first day. Yipes. We've plotted to kidnap him from the Oxford team but they've hidden him in a secret location...

The Inter-Family Word War is new thing for this year. For some quite bizarre reason both mum and li'l sis have decided to have a crack at Nano. Surprising mainly as our Hell's doesn't write, and has had no previous desire to. She's at 9,057 words so far. Nice one that Evil Twin! :-) Mum's progress is also nicely surprising and is making her very pleased with herself given that she's got two manic businesses to run at the same time and is always complaining she doesn't have enough time to think about writing, let alone do it.
She's at around 27k at the moment, but keeps forgetting to officially update her count on the site....

What's particularly fun about mum playing this year is that she's by nature a very fast typist so we were in direct competition Sunday on the word front. She was keeping about 1000 or so words ahead of me all day until bedtime, when I snuck in an extra 100. I'm getting the advantage at the moment as I don't have as much day-job work to do as she does, so currently I'm in the lead, but things will probably get very interesting when the weekend hits. (Or they will once the associated day-job paperwork has been cleared up...)

Then there's the funky BFS peeps... (waves at funky BFS peeps!)
We've got Adrian F. rocking the house with 19,484
Stephen Theaker's at 9,085
Selina of Girlycomic fame is at 5,611
Ben McG was floating around the 2k mark last we checked.

And that's before we hit the Authonomy crew!
(Waves at Patty Jansen, who''s at 37,027!)

Me, my goal for the day is to attempt to reach 50k. Possibly I should have got up earlier this morning... :-) Ah well, what you gonna do? Vamps to kill, wolves to unmask as traitors to the cause, ghost callers to take down...

04 November 2009

Nano Day 4

Knackered. But happy. This shall be my mantra for the next three weeks. That and Must. Write. Faster.
So before today's wordage get started, here's the state of play in Nano-Land.

Current words: 30,423
Body count: up in the 40s somewhere. (There was a break out at a blood farm, carnage ensued!)

So, now our kick ass chick has discovered she's being haunted by a vague ghosty presence, had a couple of failed attempts at finding the mobster's son, managed to finally kill crazed werewolf, been kidnapped (wolfnapped?) by blood harvesters and helped stage the amazing break out and mass destruction of the blood farm. She's also picked up another possible lead re. mobster's son and moved into wolf town after getting evicted on grounds of werewolf.

Today's action: spying on a sorcery retreat/commune thingy, extracting mobster's son whilst avoiding the mage wars that are about to spring up, more ghostly pesterings and then there's the vamps bringing charges for her killing their head enforcer. Which is going to get very very messy. :-) (More body count!)

Aiming to hit 40k by end of play tonight, but we'll see how that goes!

Now I've just got to squeeze in the work on two OU courses... honestly, non Nano stuff in November should be illegal...

02 November 2009

Gemmell Award News

We interrupt your Nano broadcast with some awesome news from those funky people at the David Gemmell Awards...

-- PRESS RELEASE --

New Award Categories

"When we established The David Gemmell Legend Award For Fantasy it was with the intention of subsequently introducing further award categories to cover other aspects of the fantasy genre. We are now pleased to announce two new, additional awards, to be presented at next year’s ceremony. They are -

The David Gemmell Morningstar Award for Best Newcomer
and
The David Gemmell Ravenheart Award for Best Fantasy Cover Art


"The Morningstar Award will give recognition to emerging talent in the field of fantasy fiction. As David Gemmell always took a keen interest in new writers, and helped many onto the path to publication, we regard this as an appropriate category to add, and one we feel sure David would have approved.

"The Ravenheart Award will honour the best fantasy book cover art. The importance of fantasy cover art deserves admiration, as do the artists who produce it, yet there is no major UK award acknowledging this. The Ravenheart Award will fulfil that role.

"Like the Legend Award, the winners of these new awards, for best debut author and best cover/artist, will be decided by popular vote. The first Legend Award, for best fantasy novel of the year, presented at a ceremony in London in June of this year, garnered an incredible 11,000 votes from around the world. We are confident that the Morningstar and Ravenheart awards, which are being created with the full approval of the Gemmell family, will be greeted with no less enthusiasm.

"Details of the process whereby these new awards will be administered can be found on our website.

"Our aim is to establish, over time, a set of awards covering all aspects of the fantasy genre. Launching this pair of new awards takes us a step nearer to that objective.

"The 2010 David Gemmell Awards ceremony will again be held at The Magic Circle headquarters in London, on Friday 18th June."

01 November 2009

Nano Day 1

So can I just say, word count for the end of Nano Day 1 is... (drumroll...) 11,110 ::faints:: This makes it an all new Nano first day record. Woohoo!
Body count so far: 3. And they totally deserved it too.

So far, kick ass chick has been attacked by ghosts, had her beloved bike nicked, been attacked by a crazed werewolf, then attacked by some idiot muggers just as she was going through her first change, had to juggle with the bureaucratic aftermath of being a new werewolf who needs to get registered and also avoid getting done on a murder charge. (It was totally self defence, I swear!) And that's before having to deal with the ex husband and a couple of highly arrogant pack enforcers...

Tomorrow there will be adventures in witch country, the hunting of both the crazed werewolf and the missing mobster's son and possibly some sneaky ghosts mucking things up...

And I'm soooo done for the day! :-)