Fork

This probably comes as no surprise at all to anyone but H&N is well and truly dead. I'm attempting to email everyone about stuff today. So, subscriptions will be refunded shortly, other outstanding bits and pieces will be well and truly sorted by the end of this month. If you've concerns you might be forgotten, please email the majorarcana (jen [at] majorarcana [dot] demon [dot] co [dot] uk ) address and copy in isisdirect [at] aol [dot] com.
Issue 8 will not be going ahead. I'd hoped otherwise, I really did, but there's just no way.

Huge apologies to all those who've be hanging on waiting to hear about submissions - I'd been certain things were going to be otherwise, but they weren't so it's not fair to anyone to keep things up in the air like this.

BFS bits
Also, Prism is getting new editors as from April - Jay & Selina being the more capable hands. And Vicky is taking over various BFS mailing and cyberstore duties. Bless her.
So all I've got to do is sort out the Feb Prism and I'm done there too.

(Still doing Fcon, though.)

Other bits
So Demon, or possibly BT Surftime are changing their bloody packages again. Bastards. This would be the blatantly obvious attempt to get everyone on to bloody broadband else face paying by the minute again. I don't want to go on to broadband, I've heard nothing but bad from all sorts of people using all sorts of different packages. Bastards bastards bastards. Possibly I'm over-reacting due to being permanently pissed off at the moment. Or possibly I'm just a luddite... Mind, swapping to a new ISP might actually be a bonus, given various problems, and if nothing else it may stop the ridiculous prawn spam levels that have started flooding in again. Ah well, got 'til March to sort that one.

Whinge whinge whinge.

Department of Work Avoidance
Lets Go!


Department of Work Avoidance II
When Fangirls Attack!

Pretty, Fizzy Paradise

Stressed, depressed & terminally jaded, signing off...

Remind me not to be optimistic. It's lethal.

For various reasons I've been mostly offline since November (eek!) ... I won't bore you with why, (think the usual reasons, plus a few more for added spice) - it's too depressing and I'm trying to keep to a mostly upbeat blog...

Updates on that H&N thing (Hi Fran, thanks for reminding me, thought I'd done it!) & misc. BFS things another time. Later this week, maybe. I've got masses of end of month accounts to sort first else I'm getting evicted.

Apart from that... happy things to blather about... hmm, tricky... give me a minute, something'll occur... erm, the last Lucifer graphic novel is due out shortly, likewise the latest Fables... and Resi Evil 3 is still set for coming out this year, so that'll be nice... :-> (You can tell I'm really reaching here, can't you!)

Erm... snow! Okay, so it was last month, but how (briefly) cool was that!

Erm... erm... oh, just heard the Fcon hotel have a small room they're going to give us for free so we're double & triple streaming this year with more workshop type things and I wasn't going to do BFS stuff today so I'll stop...

Ugly Betty! Not a great TV watcher as a rule (who has the time!) , but Ugly Betty rocks!

Other people. That's always more cheerful... so that mother person has started up yet another new business - chiropody (cue cries of 'why would you want to play with manky feet all day?' apparently she enjoys it!) - of course, there's still the massive family business to be looking after so guess who gets lumbered while madam is doing unmentionable things to old people's toes... ok, so probably not a good topic to go into after all...

Magic Rob! That's always fun. Magic Rob is Evil Twin's other half - a gigantic 7ft tall guy (who makes her look like like a pygmy in comparison... and we're not a tall family to start off with...) and they had their first Xmas together this year (aah!) So in a carefully calculated fit, he threw in his job as a financial advisor and has taken to doing his magician thing full time... (mind, he did start off wanting to do mentallist magic, but childrens parties is where the money is...). And he has puppets! A duck and a dog, apparently. Both with the same name, because, according to himself, only one gets to make an appearance at a gig so it doesn't matter.
Luckily, it seems to be going quite well but they're currently considering moving up nearer the M3/M4 corridor as the money is better this way (whereas, down in Blandford, it's fair to crap.)


Enough. Burnt out.

To Nanowrimo or not to Nanowrimo, that was the question. On the one hand, with stacks of outstanding stuff to do should one spend a month frantically writing 50,000 words of variable quality just because it sounds like a fun thing to do; or should one ignore the whole thing and use the excuse of non existent spare time?

Well, the clocks went back, which means waking up earlier, so more time in the morning to get things done, which means new optimism for achieving things... so you guess!

*

Went to the Heffers in Cambridge thingy the other night (spent all yesterday recovering!) and it was a great li'l event. Lovely BFS authors were there and as friendly as always, other authors were there too - had the beginnings of a nice chat with Mike Carey about Lucifer but got struck down by the usual forgetting everything about everything, else I'd have drifted into Hellblazer chat too (but couldn't remember if he'd done any, even though I kinda thought he had...)

Had many many books bought for me as November is birthday month so the perfect excuse for a book binge. (Though I'm not going to have much time to read them until after Xmas! Yipes!)

Had most of the books signed, too! I never get books signed. I was in shock!

Also had the opportunity to bounce ideas about next years potential Reading BFS thingy. First couple of weeks of July was suggested as a good time. Venue, possibly, to be Reading Town Hall as there's a bunch of (reasonably priced, according to my expert) function rooms, plus it has its own cafe/bar, plus it's in the next street from the station so there's fairly easy transport links. We've got a BFS committee meet on the 18th so will be thrashing things out then.
Personally, would love to have a Reading event of any sort (alas, no Fcon in Reading as the only 2 suitable hotels are being asses about the accomodation rates...)

Oh, talking of events, did you hear that Eastercon '07 in Liverpool has been cancelled. There's mumblings about someone emergency organising a scaled down Eastercon , possibly in the Britannia in Docklands. Thought it's all theoretical at the moment, I think.
Ansible has the best updated info on it, as well as links to related news...

Ok, so not completely offline... need the stress relief...

And, as expected, holiday cover has already driven me beyond batty... seems to get worse every time they go...

On the bright side, waiting for tenants to finish moving out (dudes! you knew what time you had to be out... the appointment was booked months ago!) and waiting for them to turn up (ditto!) does give plenty of time to catch up on the for-fun reading...
So I've managed to read both Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House (v. good, though not quite as scary as I'd been led to believe. Great storytelling, though.) and Stan Nicholl's Orcs Omnibus... a comment on the BFS forum said the books were improved by having them all together in the omnibus edition, and I agree... but then, most series are better if you can binge read them...

Anything else not biz related I haven't had a chance to look at in great detail yet... got an offer for help for the next batch of H&N submission reading, which is fab. (Thanks mate!)
Sorted out piles of things that need dealing with... (including the shock revelation that the income tax self assessment deadline was 30th September! Yipes! Missed that one...)
Had to wake up briefly to deal with some complete arse and their totally incorrect claims and rants... which just gets a tad wearing...

Robin Hood eppy 2 was marginally better than eppy 1. Which isn't saying much. Good god, people, it can be done miles better than that...
Saw a trailer for eppy 2 of Torchwood (yay!) on Youtube somewhere - looks fun!

Had a frantic moment when I thought I'd broken the business mobile... (the boss'd kill me!) but seems to be working ok now...

Hating the Reading roads with a passion... they've started fiddling around ready for this reworking of the IDR they reckon they're going to do (idiots!) so a couple of main access roads have now been bus-lane-ised and there's only one route out of Reading. Which is a terrible road. Terrible. And if you want to get to Caversham (where one of our other main agents is based... also there's a not bad independent bookshop that way...) there's, like, 1 decent road to use now... and of course everyone uses it... and getting to the agents in Reading is almost as nightmarish as finding parking for them...

I'm a Wokingham girl, me. Really. Despite quirks in the address, Lower Earley is technically in the Wokingham district. (Don't ask me what that's about... we pay taxes to Wokingham, but Royal Mail has us down as Reading...) And it's a lovely little town (used to have my market stall there... and hated it as no bugger ever spent anything! And I'm a lousy saleswoman. Y'know, if you don't want it, I'm not going to force you into it... ) and the roads and the parking is nice and civilised.

Just give me the amazing power of teleportation and my life would be sooo much easier... :->

Hold that thought...

Shall be completely offline and not even haunting the usual online places for the next week due to reasons of:
a) necessary finishing off of outstanding catch up work... (almost beaten the submissions!)
and
b) it's that horrible time of year when I get sole charge of the family biz while everyone else nicks off to Lanza-grotty for some sun... (honestly, they already did a week back in, what, May was it? 2 in one year's just greedy!)

...not that I mind the people going off on hols bit... it's the bloody estate agents and landlords and tenants and rebellious staff and emergency last minute we need it first thing tomorrow morning jobs... and having to answer calls from 7.30am to 8pm, 7 days a week...and the paperwork... god, you wouldn't believe the paperwork... keeps you working til late night, gets you started early morning ... drives you utterly mental... and I do not want to be spending my evening arguing with a tenant about why they have to pay for the whacking great hole they kicked in someone's wall because the estate agent is too chicken to do it... or explaining over and over to the landlord why they can't charge the tenant for a new carpet because of a couple of minor marks on an ancient and already ratty pre-existing floor, because the agent is too chicken to do it... (hmm, a trend emerges...)

Chanting for a quiet week... (oh please, oh please, let it be a quiet week this time... nothing like the bloody chaos of the last time... quiet... calm.... quiet... calm...)

More Fcon blather

So one of the (as yet unnamed) GoHs we were relatively sure of getting, probably won't be able to (ironic, given that the date we chose was because that was his only free weekend next September... )

So now we argue about who else to get in, and it's fun and it's frustrating and just how do you choose who'll make the best guest?
There's economics... you want a guest that will tip people over from 'meh' to 'ooh, just got to go to see X' so you want someone bordering on interstellar...
But what if the author you really adore isn't quite interstellar? How do you decide who's big and who isn't?
What if the not so interstellar one will be better entertainment?

And then there's keeping balances. Between horror and fantasy. Between
the ones that might possibly be at Fcon anyway and those that wouldn't. Between the ones you love and the ones you've not heard of but rumour has it they could be good.

And then there's the interesting point of non author guests. If we're really to cover the full lot what about comics guests or artist guests or media guests or editor guests? There's a limit to the amount of people we can afford to have a GoHs, so do we go for a bunch of authors, or delicately balance the authors with the others?

And that's without the tricky business of overseas guests...

Flying visit...

Just a quickie, as I'm mid submission reading (hallelujah!) - so expect to see the Slushblog updated in 2 or 3 days...

So Fcon again (what? I'm a girl obsessed, I know!)
We've got confirmation and are announcing the first 2 guests and MC....

GoHs: Michael Marshall Smith & Stephen Jones; MC: Peter Crowther.

And we've got 2 more GoHs in the pipeline, plus a possible extra one, maybe, possibly...
(We weren't going to have so many for next year... but you know how these things go, they snowball... gonna be a great lineup, and that's without some of the attendees we know are going to be there but can't announce yet!!)

And the website has already been updated with the first lot of details (gotta love that picture of Pete... it's something about the hat...) but if you have any suggestions, complaints, general comments or the like, please pop over to the BFS board as that's where you'll get the quickest and best answers!

Random girlie blather...
...so, apparently, the reason my feet were absolute murder over Fcon was because my old trainers were past it. Discovered I had a whacking piece of plastic sticking up through the inner sole... (no, I don't know why I didn't notice it before either...) so this week have had to go through the torture of buying new shoes... I hate live shopping if it's not for books. I especially hate shoe shopping because unlike most other things, experience proves it can't be done online because sizes are just too variable... was going between size 6 to size 8 depending on the shoe and the shop.... and it really couldn't be put off as I only own the one pair of shoes...! So 4 shops later, finally found the perfect pair. Phew. That's me good for another 6 or 7 years then!

Eeuurrggghhh...

I am that Shaun of the dead zombie...

Gosh, where did last week go? Fcon recovery only happened yesterday, as everything between then and Fcon is a blur of slipping in and out of consciousness (apparently it's the M.E. relapse - happens every so often. Bah. Humbug. I spit on your M.E. relapse. When I have the energy.)

And now we're talking about next year!! Venue is confirmed as Britannia, Nottingham. Date is confirmed as 21st - 23rd September 2007 (did I say this already here?) and we've got 1 guest and the MC confirmed, are waiting to hear back from guest 2, and are discussing guests 3 and 4. Guest 3 is someone most have been nagging us about for years... guest 4 is a wee bit unusual for an Fcon - if we can get him.

The official announcement will be made in a couple of weeks, I think. Once we've heard back from at least 2 of the outstanding guests...

And if you want to have a nosy and what people thought of Fcon check out the BFS forum thread here - http://www.marieoregan.net/bfsdiscuss/index.php?topic=806.0 where someone with improper use of awake time has dug out blog links and the like for peeps that talked about Fcon... (ok, so it was me...) There's links to Juliet & Clive's speeches too.

-

So with Fcon both gone and upcoming nicely covered for the time being, onto other things...

Prism & DH STILL at printers! Will have to check to make sure they haven't sent them to Finchley as well... (They (the printers) been taken over by someone new and there seems to be a few teething problems... so may have to find a new printers! Arrgh! They used to be so good too...)

Next Prism will now be 1st week of November (ish - have to carefully time it to come between the Prism/Dh mailing and the Xmas mailing) - with Fcon report and reviews and columns from James Barclay and Mark Morris and hopefully a debut author section. Would also like to do a complimentary old masters type section so authors published about 15 years or more ago can have a wee bit of exposure. Sort of a who's been an influence and why type thing - (useless at explaining it - Juliet managed to wrap it neatly up at the AGM but can't for the life of me remember what she said!) Want to have a review of one their books plus a short blurb on their influence either on the genre or on someone personally - or if they're still alive, a short interview! (volunteers to write one please speak! Or send something in on spec.) And the new mantra is - please remember that DH is the place for the longer features etc. - Prism only gets the really short stuff as we're news, reviews and the odd views! Zat is the law!

--- BFS bit ends!

All things Bradan...

So now that all that is under control, I can finally get to grips with all this other outstanding stuff... and you know how this goes so a little more bearing with me... there's Ish 8 to finish off, the subs, the emails, the odd outstanding stuff that I thought I'd sorted but obviously hadn't...

And, seriously chaps, if anyone wants to volunteer to help me out with the mag, let me know. No money will change hands, alas, but if someone with a quirky taste in fiction wants to help out on submissions reading & replying ... I'm waiting to hear from you!!

Fantasycon...

Gosh. How cool was that? I know I said last year was best Fcon ever - but dudes! This year! Totally, absolutely, BEST FCON EVER!!! (Apart from my feet - been killing me ever since Friday lunchtime and was v. painful to walk for the whole weekend...) but apart from that...

Chaz Brenchley & Juliet McKenna!!! Hands down, the best double act in the world. Ever ever. Their interview should have gone on longer... And I got to sit with Juliet at the Banquet! She's totally, totally fab!
And Chaz was totally on form! There could be some mega-cool BFS/WF combi events in the pipeline if conversations can continue... (and apols for the high school teen speak that will be peppering this post - it's early, I'm excited...)

We made £1000 on the raffle (split between Black Dust and Daisy's Dream)

Neil Gaiman - what a terrific chap! I shook his hand! And talked to him!

Clive Barker - great guy! What a trooper! He was poorly all weekend but still managed to come up with an on the spot after dinner speech... and when he signs books he draws pictures!

Ramsey Campbell! Shorts in September! The only man I know who can make a story about cheese toasties sound entertaining!

Ray Feist - fun guy! Looked like he really enjoyed it and could be found hanging in the bar chatting to everyone! Great sense of humour, that man!

Garry Charles! Thanks for the CD!

Steve Jones - total sweetie!! And his reaction when he won the Special Award was just excellent!

Dave Howe - worked his ass off! Buy his books!

Awards! While I remember (although, this is from memory, so I may have mixed up winners and categories and the like...)

2006 BFS Award Winners are:

British Fantasy Award for Best Novel: The August Derleth Award
Neil 'shocked, delighted, bemused' Gaiman, ANANSI BOYS

British Fantasy Award for Best Novella:
Stuart 'Shocked and utterly speechless' Young, THE MASK BEHIND THE FACE

British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology:
Allen 'I've just scored the winning goal!' Ashley, THE ELASTIC BOOK OF NUMBERS

British Fantasy Award for Best Collection:
Joe 'twice in one day!' Hill, TWENTIETH CENTURY GHOSTS

British Fantasy Award Best Short Fiction:
Joe 'the plaque's dropped off' Hill, BEST NEW HORROR

British Fantasy Award for Best Artist :
Les 'share the glory with the other artists present!' Edwards

British Fantasy Award for Best Small Press:
Peter 'back in the game!' Crowther, PS PUBLISHING

And the Karl Edward Wagner Special Award went to a very surprised Stephen Jones! Who took at least 5 minutes of persuading before he'd believe we were actually trying to give an award to him! (You had to be there... :-> )

The Committee also decided to present 4 Special Founders Awards this year in appreciation of the people whose hard work and enthusiasm got the BFS rolling in the first place: Keith Walker, Rosemary Pardoe, Phil Spencer & David A. Sutton. Dave accepted on everyone else's behalf... and what a sweetie he is.

And we surprised Pete & Jan with champagne and gifts...
And we surprised Debs & Rob too!
And the hotel was brilliant (the bar staff were a bit dodgy - we got one of them fired!!) - we're pretty much 98% certain we're using it again next year (and how cool would it be to have a permanent Fcon home for a while?) but just need a couple more discussions. As soon as it's booked, we'll announce the date and first two guests...

And I actually did a banquet! And could eat the food! (That never happens!)
And the food stayed hot and was good quality (which, apparently, hardly ever happens!)

And we had a bunch of people join up as new BFS members!
And we sold things off the BFS table!! Lots of things!!! (Can't remember the last time that happened!)

And didn't get into the dealers rooms to spend money due to the headless chicken thing but there looked like a whole heap of great stuff!!

And the raffle went on *forever*!

And other lovely guys and gals: Mark Morris! Andrew Hook! John L. Probert! Nick Lermentov! (Sorry, can't remember his real surname!!), John Connolly, Mark Chadbourn, the guy from Chronicles Network whose name slips my brain (and his business card is stashed in the luggage somewhere), Paul Cornell (dropped in for a surprise visit on the Saturday and would have been squeezed onto a panel if we could have thought of one!!!), Paul 'also worked his ass off' Campbell, Mike Chinn, Peter Coleborn, Chris Teague, Jan Edwards, Nicki Robson, Sandy Auden, Mandy Slater, Anne Sudworth, Talking Dead Bob, Erik Arthur, and many more...

And the AGM was terrifying - huge room, we were up on stage, with microphones!! Arrgh! Next year it's going in one of the smaller rooms. I am organiser, that is the law!!
And we were overrunning before the AOB bit so that was waaay shorter than expected -I'm sure we must have forgotten something...
We voted in a non-fiction award, no one raised the Newcomer award that was talked about, though, and I only remembered about it on the way home last night... I think the whole DG newcomer award thing was being done independentally or something.. I dunno, brain went into meltdown..

And, Fcon and Prism (ie. my report areas) got the most discussions on them... you gits! Did I mention I hate talking into microphones? Suggestions were made, notes were taken... beyond that, my brain is going hazy...

And I don't have the final attendee count but it's got to be around the 350 mark! Gosh!!

And there were loads of new people there!

And you were all so nice! And thanks for coming!!!

One of those Friends/elbows moments...

EEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!! (That's me joyously screaming) :-> It arrived! With one hour to spare! Despite the fact that half the boxes were addressed to one of the other houses on our road (thank god we got a smart delivery driver!) A bit battered, but all there.

Phew.

And now I really am going...