My Fantasycon 2017 Schedule

Can it really be that Fantasycon will be my first convention of 2017?  Apparently it can.  But at least I'm making up for my absences at - well, every other con on the planet, I suppose - by keeping myself busy.  And the other notable fact this time around is that everything I'm doing has neatly ranked itself in order of most to least petrifying, so that I get to begin on a note of sweaty-palmed terror and slowly calm down from there, until be the time I set off home I'll be merely mildly spooked.

So, without further adoing, here's what I'll be up to over the coming weekend:

Friday 6.30 pm ‐ Ready Steady Flash
Lee Harris (mod), Guy Adams, Anna Smith Spark, Jeanette Ng, David Tallerman

How hard can it be to write a complete short story in five minutes?  On a topic that you didn't know until a moment before?  And then to do the same thing again and again, in competition with three immensely talented writers?  Well, I don't know, having never tried, but my guess would absolutely goddamn impossibly hard.  The thing is, I'm not the quickest of thinkers; ideas don't explain just pop into my head.  So, yes, I've very nervous about this one indeed.  But unfortunately for me and everyone else, a few years back I decided to never say no when I was asked to do something, at least unless it was patently illegal and / or life-threatening; I mean, if you ask me to smuggle pandas into North Korea then the chances are I'll turn you down.  Anyway, point being, why not come along and watch me stare in rigid horror at a sheet of paper for an hour while far sounder minds produce scintillating word-pictures of unadulterated wit and insight?  It'll be fun!

Friday 7.30 pm ‐ Writing Fighting!
David Tallerman (mod), Anna Smith Spark, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Simon Bestwick, Stewart Hotston

By comparison, plain old moderating a panel promises to be a relative breeze, assuming that the paramedics have managed to get my heart beating in time, of course.  And what panelists I have!  This one promises to be brilliant, and aside from my baseline level of nerves, I'm actually pretty excited for it.  Especially because, with The Ursvaal Exchange, I finally feel like I've begun to really get the knack of this whole writing action sequences lark and won't feel like an utter fraud among such respectable company.

Saturday 4.30 pm ‐ Genre Films: Hidden Treasures
Eric Ian Steele (mod), Lynda Rucker, Gavin Williams, Gary Couzens, David Tallerman, Sean Hogan

Whereas this I'm just plain old looking forward to, no nerves or anything.  Talking about movies?  Yup, I will happily do that anywhere, at any time, in any circumstances and for any reason - which, thinking about it, probably has a lot to do with why I'm single and people don't like to sit next to me on trains.  But hah, who cares!  Movies are way more important than things like human interaction or not getting thrown out of funerals, right?

Sunday 10 am ‐ Reading: Fantasy
David Tallerman, Simon Bestwick, Joely Black

And lastly, at ten o'clock on the Sunday morning - which is basically my version of the crack of dawn - I will be reading, probably from The Ursvaal Exchange but maybe not, I haven't quite decided, in the company of Simon Bestwick and Joely Black.  By this point I've no doubt that I'll be too tired and hungover to find anything short of an Ebola outbreak stressful, though the flip side of that is that I may well fall asleep mid-sentence.  Either way, there's the promise of a restful hour!

But wait!  I have a surprise last minute panel!  What can I say?  Someone dropped out, I got asked to fill in, and as noted above, I almost never so no to anything.  So I'll also be moderating the following, which promises to be easy enough, because who out there doesn't hate film franchises?

Seriously?  Almost nobody?  Oh well, in that case this should be an even quieter end to the weekend than the reading!

Sunday 12.30 pm ‐ Genre Film Beyond the Franchises
David Tallerman (mod), Gary Couzens, Gavin Williams, Romain Collier, Nina Allan

And that really is it!  If I get asked to do anything else, I'll almost certainly say no.

I mean, probably.

It's Nearly Time For The Ursvaal Exchange

It's in the nature of publishing that things move very slowly until suddenly they're moving very quickly indeed.  It seems only a couple of weeks ago that I was working to finish off the third draft of The Black River Chronicles: Level One sequel The Ursvaal Exchange, while Mike and I back-and-forthed about getting our star copy editor Anne Zanoni and our genius cover artist Kim Van Deun booked in.

And the reason for that is that it actually was only a couple of weeks ago.  But now the third draft is in Anne's more than capable hands, and now Kim and I have discussed where we'd like to go with this second cover, and basically it's all happening, with the finish line still a little way off but definitely in sight.  Having given my all to the third draft for the last couple of months, I'm rather glad that the book will be Anne's problem for the next few weeks, and that my main job now is just geeking out with Kim over how cool we can make this thing look.  Even based on the rough sketches I've seen, I can say that the answer is going to be, very damn cool indeed.  I sort of wish I could share them, but I can't, and not only for the obvious, publishing-secretiveness type reasons either.  Nope, I have to keep quiet because Mike's told me to sort out all that cover-related stuff myself this time around, and he doesn't want to see anything until it's done.  No pressure right?  Well, not really, as it turns out, since all I have to do is prod Kim in the general direction of ideas for an awesome image and then let him knock it out of the park.  Basically, covers are by far the most fun part of making books, and anyone who says differently is a liar.

(Though, hey, audiobooks are pretty fun too.  And I just reminded myself that the Level One audiobook that was recorded a while back has finally made its way through whatever labyrinthine process it takes to get an audiobook on Amazon.  It's also really astonishingly cheap - $1.66 at time of writing - and since it's not likely to stay that way forever, this might be the ideal time to nab a copy, yes?  And because I can't stop thinking or talking about covers right now, can I just say that this is my favourite version of Level One's: it's just so satisfyingly square, and I like the logo down there in the corner too.  Digital has cool logos, and they don't get showcased enough.)

Anyway, we were talking about The Ursvaal Exchange, right?  We don't have a release date locked down yet. at least not to the day, but I can say with confidence that it'll be out before Christmas, and hopefully by a comfortable margin.  There'll be more news, of course, as we have it; and who knows, perhaps a bit of a sample too?  That certainly seems like the sort of thing we could rustle up.

Short Story News, September 2017

Well, it has to be said that 2017 is turning into a horrible year for short story sales, which is frustrating to say the least, if only because I'm pretty sure that I'm sending out some of the best fiction I've ever written.  But the compensation is that, for the moment at least, I still have stuff coming out in some very cool venues.

Taking things in reverse order, May saw my somewhat Lovecraftian, somewhat Howardesque sword and sorcery story Now That All the Heroes Are Dead come out from Read Short Fiction.  It's a thoroughly screwed-up tale, if I do say so, with a lot of subtext about who generally ends up doing the dirty work and why, in fantasy worlds or elsewhere; I guess the clue's at least partly there in the title.  Anyway, it's fairly short and it's free to read, so why not take a look?  And if you never quite trust traditional sword and sorcery stories afterwards then don't blame me, they were never that trustworthy in the first place.

Next we have my only comics work of the year, and something that's been slowly coalescing for absolutely years, mine and my C21st Gods co-creator Anthony Summey's short strip Conservationists in this year's Futurequake anthology.  I've already talked about this one quite a bit, so I'll just add that as of last month it's available on Comixology at a really reasonable price - see here - and that I was hugely pleased to come across a review that singled Conservationists out.  I was convinced no-one would get this one, what with dialogue-free alien invasion stories with animals as protagonists not exactly being a major subgenre, so it's nice that at least one reader responded to what Anthony and I cooked up.

(Speaking of reviews: there have been a few for Horror Library volume 6, but the only one I managed to keep a note of was this one, for reasons that will become apparent if you read it.  All right, yeah, the reviewer picks Casualty of Peace as their favourite story in the collection.  But it's also a really thorough review, so there.)


July also saw my personal highlight for this year on the short fiction front, my second appearance in a Flame Tree Publishing anthology.  I can't stress how stupidly gorgeous these are!  I suspect my biggest regret when I die will be that I didn't somehow figure out a way to wrangle a story into every single one of them, because they're some of the nicest books I've ever seen; at any rate, to be in not one but two of them has been a huge thrill.  This time around, it's The Sign in the Moonlight - lead story of the eponymous short story collection - in their Lost Worlds collection, and I'm up against such vaguely prestigious sorts as Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.  Oh, and those Howard and Lovecraft blokes I plugged earlier.  Seriously though, these books are absolutely fantastic, and if you're into classic genre fiction then you owe it to yourself to track them down.

Which brings us up to the present day, and the podcasting of my flash horror piece My Friend Fishfinger by Daisy Aged 7 at 

YA market Cast of Wonders.  As much as I was ever so slightly disappointed that they didn't manage to find an actual seven year old girl to read it, I'm happy to settle for Head Editor Marguerite Kenner's take; as I pointed out to her afterwards, I know how hard it is to read this grammatically challenged little story out loud, and Marguerite does a fine job.  You can hear it here.

Lastly, I have a couple more stories pending at what's basically my authorial home now, Digital Fiction Publishing - those being Twitcher on the horror front, first published in Pseudopod, and SF story Free Radical, which appeared in the Second Contacts anthology a year or two back.  Sad to say, with me now slush-reading on both the fantasy and science-fiction sides, I've had to bar myself from submitting due to the blatant conflict of interest!  Still, it's been a heck of a run, and I'm really proud to have so much work with what's become, out of nowhere, the most consistently excellent reprint market around.  And yeah, I'm horrendously biased, but that doesn't make it any the less true.

Writing Ramble: On Invisible Words (Pt. 1)

A few weeks ago, I was discussing editing with a couple of writer friends, and the conversation came round to the topic of overusing common words.  The consensus seemed to be that such words were effectively rendered invisible, and so it didn't matter how frequently they cropped up; their very familiarity would let them slip under the radar.

Now, I won't say that's not true; for many readers, I'm sure it is.  Get engaged enough in a story and it'll take more than an overabundance of speech tags to drag you out of it, or even eight uses of a word like "look" or "then" or "but" on a page.  But it's certainly not universally true, and I say this as someone who was taken to task by an editor last year (quite rightly!) for abusing a certain popular pronoun - or, more recently, by a reviewer for over-reliance of a word just uncommon enough to stand out.

The lesson I learned the hard way was, however invisible you might think a word - or phrase, or stylistic tick - is, if you overuse it enough, there'll always be someone out there who'll call you on the fact.  So, in honour of that eagle-eyed reader, here are four reasons that overusing words, even ones so common that they hardly register, may not be such a great idea...

- If They're invisible, Why Have Them?

Look, I don't mean to be invisibilist here, I've seen enough movies to know that invisible people can make meaningful contributions to society.  But I'm not convinced that's so true of words.  "Said" is a fine example here: I've heard it claimed that no matter how many "he said"s and "she said"s you throw at a reader, they'll never tire, purely because the phrase is so fundamental that it goes ignored.  I beg to differ - in fact, I'd argue that ending every line of dialogue with a speech tag makes your writing look like it belongs to a five year old! - but that's beside the present point.  If the reader's going to ignore those speech tags, what are they doing but taking up space?  If you're getting paid by the word then fair enough, but if not then maybe they'd be better stripped down to a point where they're actually serving some useful purpose.

- Bad Habits Become Worse Habits Become Bad Writing

Nine times out of ten, you overuse a word or phrase because it's easy to do so; that's the first word or phrase that comes to mind in a particular context, and you're rushing, and there it goes, the fifth "only" or "even" or "however" of the page.  But good writing and easy writing are in many ways polar opposites, and the habit of accumulating favourite words and even sentences may give you a recognizable style, but it'll be a recognizably crappy one.  Soon enough you're writing everything according to the same rhythms, with similarly shaped paragraphs and dialogue that follows the same patterns and not a jot of energy or variety left anywhere.  Of course, you're probably hugely successful, because I've just described every hack writer ever, but who cares about that, right?  Formulaic writing might put food on the table, but challenging yourself - um - probably feeds the soul or something.

- My Invisible Isn't Your Invisible

Okay, so this is basically the point I made in the introduction, but it bears repeating: reading habits vary wildly, and what you think is perfectly fine might be just what's guaranteed to leave an editor frothing at the mouth.  Here's an example: I recently read a story where the author leaned heavily on comma splices; you know, those sentences missing a crucial coordinating conjunction that Word loves to stick green lines under.  One or two, or even one or two a page, would have passed unnoticed, but once I noticed that they were cropping up like clockwork they became so hard to ignore that they were all I could see.  And really, the last thing you want as a writer is to have stylistic ticks that are so obvious they're all the reader notices.

- Just Because A Word Works That Doesn't Make it the Right Word

The more you favour certain words in the assumption that they'll slip under the radar, the more likely you are to try and fill square holes with round pegs.  There's a lot to be said for taking extra time to really dig through the thesaurus in search of that word that actually means what you're after, instead of making do with one that's more or less in the right ballpark and hey no-one's going to notice anyway right?  Making the quick and easy choices can leave a reader puzzled, and trust me when I say that as a slush-reader it's a colossal turn-off to realise that a writer's gone for the lazy word choices every time at the expense of clarity, detail and complexity.  Once you're tuned into that, it gets really hard to miss, and all those supposedly invisible words that are either doing nothing or taking up space that could go to really useful words begin to stand out like so many sore thumbs.

Now, this is obviously all just my somewhat warped perspective, and I'm conscious that a lot of that warping was done by the fact that I seem to have spent most of this year editing rather than writing, and now I can't read a license plate without hunting for typos.  Still, I think that the basic points are sound: overusing words, especially because you've persuaded yourself that no-one will notice, is a risky business, and one that's sure to bite you in the ass.  Or see you landing a multi-million pound contract.  But definitely one or the other!


And in part two, if and when I find the time and energy to write it, I'll go over some of what I've personally been up to track down those darn invisible (and not so invisible) words...