Cons and stuff

Where's my room service gone?! I was getting used to that :->
(My Visa, however, will be spending the next three months trying to recover. Ah well.)

Anyhoo... the rest of Eastercon also fun, if a bit knackering. Apparently they're holding it there again in 2010 - April 2-5, 2010 with GoH: Alastair Reynolds, Liz Williams, Mike Carey. Definitely be going to that one. Not so convinced about next years Eastercon in Bradford though...

In the meantime, had a wild and impetuous moment over the weekend and booked into Newcon 4 which is happening in Northampton in October. It's run by Ian 'sells ice to eskimos' Whates and Ian 'lovely voice' Watson. The main event isn't based in a hotel, but why let that stop you!

Alt Fiction looks to be good fun this year - which is a shame cos it's on the same day as mum's birthday and she got a bit stompy when I mentioned the possibility of actually going this year...

Back to Eastercon - spent all my money cash in the Dealers Room. Books, books and more books... and a t-shirt. Have only read one of my purchases - Dalton Quayle Rides Out by Paul Kane - published by Pendragon Press - and that one I highly recommend as it's ridiculously funny. It's a bit of a Sherlock Holmes spoof that shamelessly takes the rip out of a whole heap of other genre things too!

From the panels - the Mythology panel was interesting but a bit distracting due to the prancing about of the tech guys in the scaffolding rig to the side of the room. Liz Williams is an excellent panellist (and she also has a shop in Glastonbury! Think it's the Magick Box one...)

The supernatural romance panel was quite fun, mainly because Tanith Lee was beyond brilliant! (Must now read some of her books... ).

Books on the web turned into deep discussions on copyright issues. Plus Mr Boing Boing showed us a pic of his new baby! Toughening up Fantasyland good due to the fabulous Joe Abercrombie... although another distracting one due to a) the people eating a sloppy curry on the back row... coincidentally, during the discussion on Fantasyland stew! b) the woman knitting a stripy sock not two chairs away from me and c) the strange person with a wooden ale mug attached to her belt that kept doing odd exercises in her seat.

People-wise - chatted to Chris Teague, Andrew Hook and Jonathan Oliver (poor boys!), said a very quick hi to Juliet McKenna, waved to Chaz Brenchley and was this close -) (- to Joe Abercrombie! Have I mentioned he's fab? He seriously needs to do a panel or something at Fcon...

-
And talking of the always excellent Juliet McKenna... she'll be running a workshop at the Winchester Writers Conference this year in June. Have always wondered though... what exactly happens in a workshop? How does it work? Must hit up my experts and ask...

Eastercon

Morning! Long time, no blog.
So to get things back and funky, today's blog is live from Eastercon at Heathrow! As this is my first Eastercon, Fcon/Econ comparisons are inevitable so let's get them out of the way first.

Eastercon is huge! 1200 registered people, most of whom have already signed in (according to Mark from the committee who I had brekkie with this morning) Goodie bags are much the same sort of thing as you'd get at Fcon... Econ went a little better and did a groovy Econ mug. Scored myself a Neal Asher book (Polity Agent) as the book-in-the-bag. Never having read the chap before this is proving to be quite an interesting experience...
Registration was total chaos. Queued for a good 30 mins to get to the desk. (Never have that problem with Fcon!)
And the hotel is a total maze (including helpful signs pointing the way to the minotaur!)

The panelling so far has been a lot of fun and there's a great atmosphere going. Yesterday I did the 'so you want to be a SF writer' where John Jarrold depressed everyone by saying that out of the millions of subs both he and big publishers read, they only take on one or two a year. Ian Whates moderated that one and the boy done good. He's very entertaining.
Then there was the 'hovercraft of disbelief' which the panel peeps worked out was the rant panel for the weekend so they ranted and we ranted about all those irritating inconsistencies that you get on the telly and in books and wotnot. Never mention a King Arthur film to a Celtic Historian... Paul Cornell was also on that one and he was really good.

'When it changed', a panel about women f/sf writers was quite interesting - Juliet McKenna subbed for Pat Cadigan at the last minute, Kari Straun (?) was an excellent mod. Got a bit distracted by the room though as it was done up with staging and a huge flat screen to the side and a scaffolding rig with the tech guys in. Gosh. You don't get that at Fcon!

People wise, despite being totally unsociable, managed to accost and subsequently bore Andrew Hook, Gary Couzens, Martin Owten, John Aitken, George Budge, Billy Stirling and a very chirpy Steve Jones.

Hotel wise, excellent! Great rooms, good food, very friendly staff. Although it's easy to spend a lot of time wandering the corriders... they move, I swear. Peeps are calling it the Raddison Euclidian.

Like this as a venue. If Fcon ever gets monumentally big, then this would be a good spot.
Not that I'm biased because it's only 30 mins down the road from mine. (Or an hour if you get as monumentally lost as I did once I left the motorway...) Really embarassing thing is I grew up around here (in my defence, I was six when we moved... but still... :-> ) Our old house is a couple of roads down the A4 from the hotel (Firs Drive - you'll pass it if you decide to get on at J3 of the M4 when leaving the hotel...) and my old school is up a little bit if you're trying to sneak up Sipson Road to avoid the one way system and get on the M4 at J4 (William Byrd, since you asked).
Also, if you open your bedroom window, you can hear the planes taking off, which is fab. (Ah memories... in my day, we lived so close to the airport we used to get plane headlights shining in our windows at night!)

And with that merry thought, I'll leave you for the day!

strike

A short link post today...
The Writer's Guild of America is on strike. Doris Egan explains why here, Stephen Gallagher explains what this means for UK writers and Joss Whedon adds his views here.


Oh, and in other news... Nanowrimo count = 80,045 words... Woohoo!

nanowrimo is go!

If it's November, it must be Nanowrimo madness! My wordcount so far is just a few words over 40,000. In 6 days! Woohoo! Am starting to lose the ability to type though.
I blame the Word Wars. I love the Word Wars. We just got my region signed up to the UK & Ireland multi region war so the new goal is to whip the asses of everyone everywhere... Oxford are the reigning champions - for three years straight they've topped the daily average word count... this year victory will be ours!

Film Fun
Just watched Mirrormask - got a nifty box set with Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and MM in, and, actually, MM is better than I expected. Probably to do with the lead actress actually being good. The plot was a wee bit wobbly at times, but there were some fun visuals.
Have also discovered that I can't watch Dark Crystal without giggling at the voice work. Can't even watch it all the way through as it seems to drag a lot more than it used to do. (Oh, and according to the back of DVD box, 'Jen' is an official trademark! Perhaps I should be changing my name?)

Book Fun
Have also just finished reading the latest Tom Lloyd - The Twilight Herald. (Though after discovering his blog, keep wanting to call it Twiglet...) It's been a while since I read the first one, so there was a few moments of 'what was that about again?' and some of the early viewpoint changes almost lost me, then came a point about a third of the way through where the 'can't-stop-reading' kicked in, so all was right with the world! Utterly champing for the next one now.

fantasy communities

So, across the blogosphere and other places has sprung a debate about the existence, or lack thereof, of a fantasy community in the UK. It kicked off in Nick Cirkovic's myspace blog here, (not to be confused with his other blog elsewhere) and after he posted his comments on the BFS forums a fascinating set of arguments have popped up. Mark Chadbourn has waded in with his feelings about the need for splitting the BFS as he feels it's predom horror and not serving fantasy as well as it could. This, of course, has garnered the same sort of responses as the last time it was raised on the boards...

The essence of the main points seems to be a desire for places that concentrate solely on fantasy, and not fantasy & horror, or fantasy & SF or all three. Which is fair enough, I've been carping for years about wanting fantasy magazines and anthologies and the like... although I'm always confused about the difference between horror and dark fantasy, myself, surely they're the same thing?

So, fantasy communities then... as the interweb is the new place for building communities, are there any just-fantasy places for a bod to hang out or get news and wotnot from? UKSFnews covers all three genres, as does Ansible and Locus.

Forums: apart from the BFS one, we've got SFFworld - which covers all three genres, as does the Chronicle Network. I know there are horror forums around, but are there fantasy forums around? Other than the ones specifically connected to author sites, that is. If there are, I don't currently know about them but a prolonged google might reveal otherwise. (And if you know of any, please post them somewhere on the BFS forum so's I can have a looksie, ta!)

And another thing that crops up, like it did the last time on the boards, is that the definition of fantasy is erring towards epic fantasy again. I like epic fantasy, but concentrating on the epic side (ie. Gemmell/Martin/Jordan/Brooks etc.) is abandoning a lot of other sub genres and personally my preferences are stronger towards contemporary and comic fantasy than epic and would I want a place/community that was just epic fantasy? Nope. Would I like a fantasy community that's as strong as the SF one? Oh hell yeah.

fcon blog carnival

Ah yes, the Fantasycon Blog Carnival!
Roll up, roll up, ladies, gentlemen and those who have yet to decide... here's who thought what in the blogosphere...

Ah the awards... such a glittering event... Tim Lebbon was a shaking wreck, Mark Morris has been waiting 20 years for it and Ellen Datlow via her emissary, was very happy about her award too...

Chaz Brenchley has issued banquet connected grounds for committal... and GoH Stephen Jones agrees that, as usual, it was barely edible... (but you'll need to check out the 'appearances' page on his site as can't get a direct link!)

Meanwhile, the small press peeps were having an interesting time of it... oh the book boxes, or lack thereof... Chris Teague almost didn't get his but they were hiding being PS... Screaming Dreams were there in their first official capacity and will be doing a longer report in the next Estronomicon and Murky Depths fell asleep twice during the raffle...

Mark Samuels managed a feat that most Fconnies don't (unless it involves the fabled curry hunt) and got away from the bar to see the outside world... yes, apparently there is a world outside the Britannia Hotel - he has the photos to prove it. Dave Price also discovered the outside world.

Martin Sketchley had a short piece to say about the doom and gloom in all the panels about publishing

Gary Greenwood actually managed to do some work at the con!

And Allyson Bird teases us about Dracula, the hawthorn bush and jaffa cakes...

And that's it on Fcon for this year!

Books

Have I mentioned that Chaz Brenchley's River of the World is utterly lush? (As we used to say back when I occasionally went to school...) RotW is the sequel to Bridge of Dreams, (both of which are published by Ace Books, over the pond) and what a sequel it is. Chaz has this wonderful knack with language and a gift for creating vibrant cultures in his books which leaves the average reader utterly spellbound.

But what of the story? River of the World continues the story of Issel, the water seller turned mage & resistance fighter; and Jendre, the general's daughter who married a short lived sultan; and what happened when their two worlds collide...
It is, as you might have guessed, beautifully told, with action and emotional wrenches aplenty - the only flaw being that Jendre's story is wound up too fast at the end - or perhaps it's because what you really want to happen to the bridge doesn't, frustrating one of Jendre's main motivations throughout both books.

I hear tell that Chaz has sold a short story involving a couple of the chaps from Bod & RotW (yay!) - now any chance we can get a story about Armina and her lot? Pretty please...

more fcon

Anyhoo, bouncing around forums to see what the peeps thought about Fcon gets some nice comments.
It's the not so nice comments which are illuminating though - I like those ones, it helps you work out what needs fixing for next year. (Not that I'm the one in charge next year... but you get the picture...)

So on Shocklines there's a thread here -
http://p082.ezboard.com/Back-Home-From-Fantasycon/fshocklinesforumfrm2.showMessage?topicID=50996.topic

which pretty much summarises the main complaints we get from everyone. If you're a member of the Shocklines board please go ahead and post your thoughts...

For myself, in response to the comments -
Publicity - you'll get no arguement from anyone on the committee that we screwed that one up this year. They'll do much better next year. Much much better. Trust me on that. They have people. :->

Attendance figures - just checked the final numbers and we had around 330 peeps there. (See my below post for why the place seemed empty!) This is a good number. Last year with the Gaiman and Barker duo we had 420-ish.

Guests mentioned: one we had a couple of years ago, one has been asked every year for the last few years and for various reasons can't make it, two have been asked a couple of years running and have commitment issues...

Goodie bags: we underestimated numbers - totally my fault, that one. There was some good stuff went in the bags if you signed in Friday/early Saturday morning (and about 80% of people arrived Friday!)

The other media guests: good god we tried. We really really did. No one we approached could do it. And we approached a lot of people.
They'll be trying again next year, I'm sure.

hurrah!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was Fantasycon 2007!

Give me about a week or so and I'll do the Fantasycon Blog Carnival I was muttering about on the BFS Forums - need to give everyone time to blog their thoughts first! (In case there's confusion, the Blog Carnival will be posted here, the idea was what was on the forums... sorry, still a bit dazed!)

So, how was it then?

Well, still mostly sick as a dog but managed to stay vertical long enough to do sensible things. General consensus is that the con was a bit on the quiet side - however there were more events going on so people were more spread out... (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!) And next year they're getting a proper publicity dedicated person and more help to shout about it in the necessary places and I know they're also getting help to improve things to the next level. (Whatever that may mean!)

(And for some reason I also promised I'd do a couple of odd things for Fcon next year. But I'm definitely not on the committee. Oh no. Can't catch me that way.)

But back to this year.
Only panel I got to see this year was Jo Fletcher's editorial one which was absolutely brilliant. Would have liked to have seen Chaz's Write for Life thingy that came after, and a couple of the others but alas, could not be done. Will have to rely on others for panel chatter.

The bar almost managed to cope - except 4am Sunday morning they had to kick people out because they thought they were out of beer. (Actually they weren't, because when Richard, our go-to manager guy arrived in the morning he said there was a spare stash and he'd left instructions with them about where it was and he was going to kick their asses for being idiots.)
Also, one of the pumps broke.

The raffle... was long. Very very long. Had to leave after an hour or so (sick as a dog!) - apparently this one lasted about 3 hours.

The banquet... hee! Now that was fun. We did the room up Halloween style, with a couple of books on everyone's seats, spooky soundtracks playing, neon green cobwebs, candles...
Very cool!

As for the awards - well, it was a bit different this year - done properly on stage, with two presenters per award (and an attempt at 'Hollywood glamour', apparently)
The winners:
The Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award - Joe Hill (collected by Pete Crowther)
Best Non-Fiction: - Mark Morris: CINEMA MACABRE
Best Artist: Vincent Chong (collected by Pete Crowther)
Best Small Press: Peter Crowther, PS Publishing (who started to run out of room on his table)
Best Collection: Neil Gaiman: FRAGILE THINGS (collected by Steve Jones)
Best Anthology: Gary Couzens: EXTENDED PLAY: THE ELASTIC BOOK OF MUSIC
Best Novella: Paul Finch: KID (or K.I.D. if you're Chaz B!) from the Pendragon Choices thingy.
Best Short Fiction: Mark Chadbourn: WHISPER LANE from BFS A Celebration (collected by Sandy Auden. Also, rumour has it the story has been picked up by a couple of reprint anthologies too...)
BFS Special Award: Ellen Datlow (Collected by John Grant)
Best Novel: Tim Lebbon: DUSK (who needed a drink and Pete Crowther got a bit nervous so had to whip his wine away before it got it nicked!

All in all, rather good fun!
Thanks to everyone who came, you were all fab!

...eurgh...

The good: the fab Debs fixed the computer problem. Hurrah!
The bad: still sick as a dog. At this rate, I'll be spending Fcon in my hotel room...

Other Fcon news - that infamous duo, Smith and Jones, will be previewing Monstermania on Saturday night at 11.45pm - this will kick of the late night film program (of which I have no idea what's being shown...)

Mass signing: Peeps participating in the Mass Signing so far are:
John Grant, Stephen Jones, Michael Marshall Smith, Terry Brooks, Peter Crowther, Chaz Brenchley, Mike Carey, Allen Ashley, Joel Lane, John L Probert, Ian Watson, David Howe, Simon Clark, Tony Richards

So bring your books or buy some in the Dealer Room!