Short Story News, September 2016

I remember thinking a few weeks back that nowhere near enough had happened on the short story front to warrant another of these posts.  Somehow, by the time I reconsidered, far too much had happened to reasonably cram in.  But I'm going to anyway, it's been a rotten week and a post full of good news might be just what I need to remind myself that 2016 hasn't been altogether a horror.

Firstly, I have books out!  At least, there are anthologies out with my stories in - a whole three of them, in fact.  Two of those are from Digital Fiction Publishing, making my total number of DFP anthologies out now a number bigger than I can be bothered to work out right now, but certainly no less than six.  And the reason I keep submitting to these things, other I suppose than that I keep getting accepted, is that they're really good.  I get the impression, as well, that readers are increasingly waking up to that fact: they've been pulling down some pretty tremendous reviews, one or two of which come from readers who've liked one book enough to try another, which is a heck of an achievement for a still relatively new small press.  Anyway, gushing aside, this time around I have Black Horticulture in the fantasy collection Uncommon Senses and Passive Resistance in the SF collection Operative Sequence.  That particularly story also recently got its own individual e-book release, as all these collected tales do: you can find it here.

Nextly, the Mysterion anthology that I seem to have gone on about quite a lot over the last few months is finally out to buy.  You can pick it up on from Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.  It only really occurred to me as I was thumbing through my contributor copy that perhaps it's strange that I, an avowed atheist, would have a story in a collection subtitled "rediscovering the mysteries of the Christian faith."  And to my eyes, Golgotha is a story upon the topic of religion clearly written by a non-believer, albeit one who's always found the subject fascinating.  But honestly, I think that's why (asides from the gorgeous cover) I've been so enthused about this project from day one: Donald and Kristin have put together exactly the book that they promised, one that digs about in those weird and fascinating corners of Christianity that normally get politely overlooked.  This spirit is nicely summed up in a comment from Kristin's introduction: "Mysterion is about Christianity.  But we're not sure it is Christian."  From what I've seen, I'd agree, and for that reason among others, I do hope this book gets the attention it deserves: it's a genuinely interesting project upon a genuinely unique topic, which is more than many anthologies can claim.  And Golgotha is among the top tier of short fiction that I'm proudest of, a nasty, wriggling thing full of difficult questions and uneasy answers.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, I've been selling more stories.  What's particularly unusual this time around is that fully half my sales from the last couple of months were effectively commissions; that's definitely never happened before.  A couple of those I can't talk about yet - I wish I could, they're exciting! - but the other two I probably can.  In perhaps my most surreal sale ever, Alasdair Stuart and Marguerite Kenner, respectively owner and editor of Cast of Wonders, happened to be in the audience when I was reading from The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.  And they enjoyed the story that I read - the deeply screwed up My Friend Fishfinger by Daisy Aged 7 - enough that they decided they'd like to podcast it.  Would that all readings went that way!  Meanwhile, at around the same time, one of my favourite editors pushed new publisher Great Jones Street my way, and they picked up both Jenny's Sick and Great Black Wave, with possibly - finger's crossed! - a couple more to follow.  (Great Jones Street, by the way, I'm sure I'll be talking about more, as they're up to some rather interesting and exciting things.)


The traditional sales front hasn't been going so shoddy either.  Br(other) is down for the middle volume of the three volume Let Us In anthology from Time Alone Press, which is due to start appearing next month.  And I enjoyed last year's Gaia: Shadow and Breath anthology enough that I thought I'd try for this year's entry in the series; as such, they'll be publishing my Feet of Clay, Mind of Coal, which I probably do no favours by referring to as my golem sex story.  (Hey ... I see an overlooked niche and I jump on it!)  Finally, I overhauled one of my earliest publications and gave it the title I realised it should have had approximately the moment after it saw print, and now Old Skin for the New Ceremony will be appearing in the sci-fi issue of Creepy Campfire Stories (for Grownups).

I'll finish up by noting that my slush reading for Digital Fantasy Fiction has come to a temporary halt, as they're closed to subs for a few weeks, but it was fun while it lasted.  Now I'm getting excited for the fact that at some point there's going to be an anthology coming out where I picked most or all of the stories, which is certainly as close as I've ever come to wearing an editor's hat.  And as much I may have grumbled at points, we did get a few really good subs, along with a couple of absolute stunners; if both of those make it into the same volume then I'll be very excited indeed, and probably pushing it a lot harder than I ever do my own stuff!

Nine Worlds 2015, Part 1: The Very Good Indeed

I would say that of all the cons I've been to - and that's a rather high number, now - this year's Nine Worlds was, on average, the one I enjoyed the most.  And it occurs to me that, for once, I can say specifically why that was, rather than having to make up vague nonsense to cover the fact that I can't remember why I was having fun because the alcohol I was pouring into myself to help produce that fun killed off all of the relevant brain cells.  I think it's fair to say, in fact, that the hours I spent drinking in the company of friends both old and new, whilst tremendously entertaining, was for once not even my favourite waste of time.

(For this, I have to thank the main bar of the Radisson Blu and its combination of abominable service with the most hysterically absurd prices, but more on that in part 2.)

So if my abiding memories from Nine Worlds aren't of loitering in the bar then just what the hell did I get up to?  Well, a great deal of what went right can be laid at the feet of the Comics track and its human-whirlwind ringleader Hazel Robinson, who only ever seemed to be sitting down for long enough to moderate one of the most well-moderated panels I've ever been fortunate enough to be a part of.  From my point of view, the first of those - with Ed Fortune, Sally Jane Thompson and Alasdair Stuart - was on How to Break Into Comics, and given that I personally didn't feel like I had much of a clue how you'd achieve such a thing, it seemed to actually generate a ton of good advice.  Then on the Sunday I had what I'm just going to flat out declare to be my favourite panel of all time, The Humanitarian Element, with Roz Kaveney and Alasdair again.  The topic of humanitarianism in comics keyed in from Hazel's point of view to her day job working for the extraordinary Médecins Sans Frontières and from mine primarily because of the post-apocalyptic superhero novel I began writing a mere couple of weeks ago, and in a world where panel topics seem to get recycled ad tedium and beyond it was extraordinarily refreshing to be discussing a topic that felt genuinely fresh and meaningful.  (Even if we did go off on some deeply silly tangents; Hazel's attempts to summarize the Avengers vs X-Men crossover from a couple of years back still makes me chuckle.)

While that was mostly it for my official involvement with the Comics track, it did lead into the weekend's other great time sink.  Having made vague promises to help out with a boardgaming night that Hazel had planned for the Friday evening, I'd optimistically lugged along a copy of Galaxy Trucker, and was surprised when not only did I manage to persuade people to play it with me, I succeeded in explaining the rules not too terribly and it wound up being a pretty classic game.  (Everything went brutally wrong in the final round, which if you know Galaxy Trucker at all you'll understand is absolutely the best thing that can happen.)

Thus it was that when, on the Saturday, I turned up for one of the few program items I was really eager to go to and found it full, it occurred to me that for once I had an option other than drifting over to the bar.  And thus it was that I spent almost the entire rest of the day playing board games (in this case Splendor and King of Tokyo) with a variety of very friendly strangers.  I don't know that anything sums up why I like Nine Worlds so much as the fact that there was a large, well-organised space set aside for that and a comfortable enough environment that it was really easy to get games going.  Seriously, it's easy to ignore how special a thing that it is, but it couldn't work without a ton of thought and effort - and for that, Nine Worlds organisers, I salute you.

That takes us, more or less, back to the Sunday, when I just about managed to drag myself in in time for an early meeting of the Super-Relaxed Fantasy Club, only to pick up the handouts for my Monsterclass that afternoon and discover that they hadn't been stapled together.  Cue a little bit of panic on my part, (I wanted people to treasure these things for years to come, and what madman treasures an unstapled handout?) which eventually drew in half the staff of Nine Worlds, quickly descended into low comedy - the stapler was locked in a room which no one had the key to, but was also empty of staples, those being kept by an entirely different bunch of people, and I'm not even making this up - and ended with me wandering into another hotel and asking if I could borrow a stapler from them.  (They were really nice about it.)  Anyway, the running about burned off some of my nervous energy over the prospect of delivering my first ever workshop, and though my stress levels started to climb again over the fact that a scheduling clash meant that I basically had to run there from the Humanitarianism panel, I managed to make it just in time.

Lo and behold, it seemed to go quite well.  My biggest worries were that no one would turn up or that those who did would expect me to do all the talking*, and neither of those things happened even slightly.  The room was filled to capacity with, I think, twelve people, and everyone was eager enough to get involved that it ended us as much more of a discussion than a lecture, which was precisely what I'd hoped for.  That aside, to get such an intelligent, thoughtful group was more than I'd dared expect, and made an hour and a half fly by.  (It was supposed to be an hour, and the fact that we overran massively without anyone showing signs of boredom seemed to me a mark of success.)  With the proviso that there's not a whole hell of a lot you can teach people about the nuts and bolts of short story writing in an hour and a half, I felt like I got a few good points in - not to mention, of course, supplying some beautifully stapled handouts.

There were other highlights, but they were less directly Nine Worlds related.  It was a pleasure to have lunch on the Sunday with my Tor.com editor Lee Harris, and getting dive-bombed by a barn owl in the early hours of Sunday morning was a pleasant shock; who knew they had nature at Heathrow?  For that matter, I suppose that the other reason I had a slightly better time than I've had in the past was precisely because I was looking after myself that bit better.  I didn't waste too much time nursing hangovers, I ate relatively proper meals, and I went to bed ... well, at three o'clock on the Sunday morning, but even that's not terrible by my standards.  It also helped that I was staying in a much nicer place then I normally manage, the Heathrow Hilton, which meant that what sleep I had was actually pretty good sleep.

And that, I think, about sums up the good stuff, which it should be obvious by this point was clearly in the vast majority.  Still, it wasn't the whole story, and since this wouldn't be a David Tallerman con write-up if I didn't grouse at least a little, what say we meet back here in a couple of days time so I can do just that?  At the very least, I can guarantee more vitriol aimed at those accursed bar staff...





* Actually, my biggest worry was that I'd realise I wasn't wearing any trousers and that the group would consist entirely of my primary school teachers dressed as the great dictators of history, but fortunately that one was always going to be an outside risk.

Twitcher Up At Pseudopod

At the risk of repeating what I just said in that wholly unimaginative title, my zombie story Twitcher is now up at the world's favourite horror podcast site, Pseudopod, introduced by the marvelous Alasdair Stuart and read in fine style by Roberto Suarez. 

When Pseudopod asked me for a fact to share with their listeners, I mentioned that the title was a fortuitous gift.  I'd recently finished the story and was having lunch with my then-manager, who asked me why I was staring out of the window.  Not wanting to point out that I found his conversation deathly dull, I told him I'd been watching a bird hopping about, at which point he asked me, "you're not a twitcher, are you?"  I replied that I wasn't, and indeed hadn't a clue what a twitcher was.  When he explained that it was another word for bird-watcher, brain-gears clicked satisfyingly into place.  My story, then called "Little Red Wing" in a nod to one of my favourite Tanya Donelly songs, had a new name, and it was perfect.

What I didn't mention, because it was something I'd forgotten until I listened to the story just now, was that Twitcher started life as a dream.  In the dream, it was vampires and not zombies, but the basic elements - a bird-watcher guarding over rare red birds whilst the world went all to hell around him - were all there.  True fact: for all the hundred times that dreams are weird and disturbing and generally horrible mind-vomit, there's always one you can recycle into a short story.

You can listen to Twitcher here.   It's positively, absolutely the last zombie story I'm going to write, because we're all bored sick of zombies by now, right?  And this makes three now, one of which was my first sale to Pseudopod, thinking about it.  But hey, if you're going to listen to one David Tallerman zombie story this year, make it this one, because it's weird and catastrophically bleak and I'm rather proud of it.

Nine Worlds 2014: Part 2

Part of my plan for Nine Worlds was that I'd make a proper go of the Saturday, according to the logic that the middle day of a convention is invariably the one most worth devoting your energies to.  This was why I'd gone to bed at a reasonable time the night before and this was why I dragged myself out of bed at an entirely sensible nine o'clock in the morning, having slept for precisely twelve minutes due to my misguided attempt to save money by staying in the cheapest place I could find.  So up I got and out I went, arriving just in time for the first program slot. I picked a lecture on Temporal Lobes and Spiritual Experiences, which turned out to be not such a great start: a rather dull and aimless take on an interesting subject.  Not to be deterred, I used the opportunity to wade through the schedule (of which there remained an insane eleven pages worth) and then left half way through and milled until the next slot.  I tried for Writing the Other, which turned out to be advance booking only, despite the program saying nothing of the sort.  In vague desperation, I wandered into Policing the Net, mostly because it was next-door.  Not a bad choice as it proved; Jane Fae offered some intriguing food for thought on the topic of - yes - policing the net, and if I didn't agree with most of her conclusions, at least it was interesting to hear them.

Annie Catling, Emma Newman, Labyrinth, my favourite Nine Worlds photo.

For the first of the afternoon slots there was nothing I was terribly excited about, so I took a stab at If A Woman Was Cast As the Doctor from the Doctor Who thread, mostly because Adrian Tchaikovsky was a panelist.  Having quite enjoyed it for forty-five minutes I began to realise that I'm not that interested in Doctor Who, and since everyone on the panel agreed on every front - yes we need a female Doctor, yes the sooner the better, yes a female Doctor would be best served by a female show-runner - I felt it lost focus a bit in the last half hour.  (I'm not entirely sold on seventy-five minute panel slots.)

By this point I was eager for fresh air and food.  So I wandered back to the nearby pub and ordered lunch, which led to me somehow getting embroiled in a plot by the bar staff to clingfilm the chef's car and after that to a half hour's reading about feral children.   Fortunately at that point Dan came to join me and together we wandered back to catch the Bechdel Test panel - which turned out to be full.  This time at least we were allowed to sit in the corridor and listen, and it proved to be a solid debate, not to mention one I really wished I'd been a part of.

Fortunately I was on the Blurred Lines: Boycotting and Buying In panel that followed, with Dan Hart, Melissa T and my good friend and one-time comics dealer Alasdair Stuart, and, like all my panels really, it turned out to be a lot of fun.  Perhaps in subconscious response to the lack of vitriol on the Doctor Who panel I decided to play devil's advocate, and then quickly found myself questioning my own ethical stance; but it all ended up okay because I got to plug Kathryn Immonen's entirely marvelous Journey into Mystery run.

My plan from that point onward had basically involved passing the remainder of the night and a good proportion of the morning in the bar, something I felt I'd earned after being so sensible the night before.  However I'd run into my friend Flick in the Bechdel Test panel and she'd persuaded me that we should team up and ace the film quiz later than night.  Sadly the quiz turned out not to be a quiz at all but some sort of ... thing ... full of squeeing and shouting and throwing of stuff.  I managed about ten minutes and then made my excuses (which I seem to remember were, "this is my idea of hell"), and fled to - you guessed it! - the bar.  Fortunately Flick chose to follow and we hurriedly invented our own film quiz, which mostly revolved around Disney movies.

Having finally drifted back to my guest house sometime after three in the morning, I didn't do quite so well at getting up the next morning and missed the first slot, but that was okay because there was nothing I'd wanted to go to anyway.  There were a few things I fancied in the late morning slot but nothing that quite managed to outweigh my hangover, so in the end it was half one and the Gamification of Everything lecture that turned out to be the proper beginning of my last day.  It was interesting in that gamification's a fascinating topic, but disappointing in that it seemed to be geared towards a corporate audience that Nine Worlds clearly wasn't.

At any rate it did a good job of passing the time until quarter past three and my last panel, More Than Mild Peril, a discussion on young adults and children in comics with (deep breath) Louie Stowell, Kate McAlpine, Emma Vieceli, Malin Ryden, Melissa T, Heather Wickson, Nat Wilkinson and Charlotte Geater.  Of everything I was doing this was the one I'd been most nervous about, because there were nine of us on there and I couldn't imagine how a panel could work with that many people.  But it did, and it did really well, and in fact it turned out to be one of the best panels I've ever been on; the presence of a couple of young adults in the debate on what's interesting or appropriate for young adults was a stroke of brilliance.  All told it was a great note to end my Nine Worlds experience on.

Now, reading over what I've written I'm aware that it sounds like I didn't have such a great time and that I wasn't overwhelmed by the content I experienced, and thinking about it, I guess both of those things are true.  But they're not really a criticism of Nine Worlds, for two reasons: first, as I said in part 1, I had some personal stuff going that somewhat dampened my enjoyment, and second because, more than any other UK convention out there, Nine Worlds is what you make of it.  It offers an abundance, even an overabundance of content, and then challenges you to do with it what you will.  And not all of it's brilliant, and definitely not all of it's for everyone, but that's okay, because there's just so damn much.  Nine Worlds takes effort, but it also rewards it.

So I guess what I'm saying is, it wasn't Nine Worlds that failed but me.  I definitely wish I'd devoted more time to the Comics strand; looking back over the program there are a few others things I can't believe I didn't manage to find time for.

Oh well!  Next year I'll do better.

Thought Bubble 2013

It was tempting to come up with some rubbish pun title, "Thoughts on Thought Bubble" or something like that, and I might even have done it if it weren't for the realization that I'd then have to come up with an even more rubbish pun title if I go next year, and on and on, until I either went mad with the effort or had to stop attending altogether.  And that would be a shame, because I enjoyed my one afternoon of Thought Bubble, and would very much like to go again next year, and actually make an effort to attend a few things and do more than wander around being slightly distracted.

Lavie's I Dream of Ants: Odd.

But now that I think about it, haven't all of my Con reports gone that way of late?  The truth is that, more even more so than World Fantasy, Thought Bubble had the distinction of being my One Con Too Many this year, the one where Con exhaustion really kicked in with a vengeance.  Unfortunately, the same went for Lavie Tidhar, who'd come to stay with me over the weekend and have his own first look at TB*, and who has done even more of these things than me this year, and the net result was that between us we had just about enough energy and enthusiasm for one mildly energetic and enthusiastic Con goer, which frankly was never going to cut it.

And like I said, that turned out to be a shame, because Thought Bubble was interesting and intriguing, and actually very different from anything I've been to before; more, in fact, what I'd (perhaps ignorantly) consider an Expo than a Convention, with a quite staggering number of stalls spread over three very large rooms.  It was a bit overwhelming, really, and most of the three or four hours we spent there on Saturday were eaten up with wandering around and randomly chatting to people and feeling a bit bewildered by the whole thing.

My Princess Mononoke print: Awesome.

Which doesn't sound like a great deal of fun, now that I read it back, but it was. I ran into some of my favourite industry friends and acquaintances, including such kind souls as Adrian Tchaikovsky, Paul Cornell and Alasdair Stuart, got to hang out with superstar artist Mr Bob Molesworth and to meet our Endangered Weapon B publisher Harry Markos; Lavie bought me a copy of his Murky Depths Press book I Dream of Ants, (which is, frankly, downright odd); I picked up a gorgeous Princess Mononoke** poster by the excitingly talented Cristian Ortiz, and ... well, I can't remember what else.  This is what happens when you post about events half a week after they happened.

Anyway, in retrospect, we should probably have left before the bizarre school disco-style party that followed the main event on the Saturday night, and I should definitely not have let Lavie talk me into going clubbing after that, because frankly I'm just too damn old, or at the very least too damn tired.  But stupid is as stupid does, as a wise man once said, and what doesn't kill you gives you a hell of a headache the next day, and all in all it was a good day so, in the end, who's complaining? 




* Wow, that's a really unfortunate abbreviation.
** Possibly my favourite film of all time.  There, I've said it!

Fishfinger in the Abyss

I see no shame in admitting that I only submitted to 01 Publishing's Whispers From the Abyss anthology because I loved the hell out of Josh Finney's cover art.  I mean, look at it!  It's hard to mess up painting Cthulhu at the best of times, but sticking him in a trench coat is genius.  In fact, Cthulhu in a trench coat may actually be my new definition of that word.  But then there's the deeply weird and creepy way that his head and tentacles remind me of a first world war gas mask, which makes no sense on any remotely logical level but absolutely perfect sense on a twitchy, nightmarish, "Jesus, Cthulhu's head looks like a freaking world war one gas mask!" level.  And are those shadows in the bottom right kinda forming into monster shapes, or have I just been staring at this thing too long?

Point being, I like that cover a whole lot.

And that's really all I have to say, except that Whispers From the Abyss is now out to buy on Kindle for a wholly reasonable amount, and that it has my story My Friend Fishfinger, by Daisy Aged 7 in it, which I'm glad to see getting another airing because it's both the most adorable and the most twisted thing I've written, which is no mean feat when you stop to think about it, and oh hey, there's an introduction by Alasdair Stuart, who I go way back with, and who says some nice things about my horrid little tale and some particularly intelligent things about horror in general (albeit lifted a little from Bill Friedkin), and it's probably worth mentioning as well that I'm about half way through Whispers already and that there are a few really excellent stories contained therein. 

But mostly ... hey, look, it's Cthulhu in a damn trenchcoat, with a freaky gas mask head!

Prisoner of Peace up at Pseudopod

I should probably be saying something about Nine Worlds here, but I'm still recovering, so let's come back to that one when my Con fatigue has settled down and instead I'll mention my short horror story Prisoner of Peace, which went up in podcast at Pseudopod on Friday.

There was a very good reason that it went live on that particular date, the 9th of August; it's the anniversary of the US Atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki, an event which - without giving too much away - Prisoner of Peace is greatly informed by.  It's a subject that I have strong feelings about, a subject that it should be impossible not to have strong feelings about, and I hope I've done it some sort of justice, in however small a way.

Every time I've gone back to Prisoner, I've been surprised by how much effect it has on me: how much it creeps me out, and how wrenching I find certain scenes.  Listening to Caith Donovan's reading last night with the lights off didn't make things any better.  Caith does a great job in bringing out both the horror and the sadness of the story, and nailing the many points where the two entwine.  I'm grateful too to Al Stuart for his astute endtro, giving his own thoughts on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and their repercussions and explicitly discussing a lot that I could only nudge at in the story.

While we're on the subject, I should mention again that Prisoner is also available in Eric Guignard's terrific After Death anthology.  It's one of the best, most unusual, most lavishly illustrated anthologies I've been lucky enough to be a part of, and plenty more people should be reading it.

SFX 2012: Part 1

Yes, that's Lavie Tidhar with Monkey.

Honestly, I have no idea how to make sense of the SFX Weekender.  Just mentally sifting through the haze of drink and fried breakfasts and steampunks and crazy welsh weather is a feat in itself.  It's tempting to just pull a lazy Best. Con.  Ever gag and leave it at that.  Which, after all, it was - because however great last year's Fantasycon was, at no point did it include a Storm Trooper fighting with a Dalek or Bananaman in crime-fighting conference with Spiderman or ... er ... Lavie Tidhar with Monkey.  And from here on in, such things will be my measure of Con greatness.  Because it turns out that everything in life is better with cosplay.

I got in at about half three on Thursday, and was kept company by the station cat while I waited for my hotel-roommate-to-be, the aforementioned Mr Tidhar.  Then we trooped over to our hotel, the Beaches, which it was abundantly obvious even from a distance would be much nicer than the rundown holiday council estate that was Pontins Prestatyn.  (This would turn out to be a generous assessment in favour of Pontins, which by all accounts was a dire hellhole - whereas the Beaches was all-round lovely.  Good call on leaving booking too late to get a chalet, Tidhar!)

Yes, that's Stormtroopers doing car checks.

We made our way around the barbwire-topped fences, snuck past the Stormtroopers doing car checks on the gates (I kid not!) and somehow blagged our way inside to hunt down Angry Robot co-editor Lee Harris, who had our passes, slyly smuggling in Ian Sales on the way.  If the Stormtroopers hadn't been a giveaway of what was to come, the fact that the lobby had been turned into a spaceship interior - complete with Aliens - sure was.  Then we tracked down Lee in the bar-cum-cinema that was the Screening Zone, and I was pleased to find him and the other Angry Robot-ers sitting with Alasdair Stuart and Ro Smith, old friends from my York writing group that I don't see nearly often enough.

Then Lee opened the celebratory book-launch champagne. Then Paul Cornell turned up.  Then, apropos of nothing, they started showing Labyrinth.  And truly all was right in the world.

The rest of the night is a bit of a blur - of the catastrophically drunken kind - so jump forward to Friday morning.  Friday morning began bright and early with Lavie forcing me to get up for breakfast at some ungodly hour, after about a fifteenth of the sleep my body would have needed to break down all the alcohol in it - an event that, against all reason or mercy, would be repeated over the next couple of days.

Yes, that's Robert Rankin about to heatray Lavie Tidhar's face off.

Still, it meant I got to attend the Elf Preservation panel - starring Joe Abercrombie, Juliet E McKenna, Graham McNeill, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Gav Thorpe - and then promptly almost nod off in it.  No representation of how interesting it was, I promise, just sheer sleep deprivation ... it would have taken the guests attacking each other with ray guns to keep me awake after the previous night.  Which, fortunately, was exactly what (okay, very nearly) happened when Lavie was contentious enough to suggest that the Victorians may not have been the loveliest people in history to Robert Rankin during the Steampunk panel.

After a brief diversion to attend the Kitschies ceremony (Lavie's Osama being deservingly up for Best Novel), we resumed our acquantance with the pub.  As evening settled in, reasoned debate and polite ultraviolence were abandoned once again in face of good, honest liquor.  But things took an unexpected turn when we got invited to / possibly inadvertently gatecrashed a party held by one of the big publishers at their big-publisher author chalet (I think it was Pan Macmillan, but the answer seemed to vary on who you asked.) Under the firm supervision of our agent John Berlyne, Lavie and me soon found ourselves somewhere that looked a lot like nowhere in the Welsh countryside - only to be rescued from likely death by our taxi driver coming back to admit that the address we'd given him probably wasn't that of the cat sanctuary he'd dropped us off outside.

And yes, that's Benedict Jacka's first non-YA novel

The party started well.  My particular highpoint was being a colossal geek by helping Adrian Tchaikovsky explain the apt / inapt concept from his Shadows of the Apt series to Benedict Jacka*, despite his quite obviously not needing my help because he, you know, invented it.  But it quickly became apparent that there were dangers lurking beneath the still party waters.  Because, where was all the booze?  By the time we arrived, there were two boxes of beer, half a dozen bottles of wine and a dangerous amount of rum between fifty or so people.  Lavie had had the good fortune to discover a hidden stash of lager, but it soon became apparent that even that wasn't going to save us.  Left with no choice - unless you consider sobriety a choice, I suppose - we set out back to the internment-camp horrors of Pontins, where there was at least fizzy alcohol-water on tap.

TBC...


* Whose first non-YA book comes out next month, and looked good enough that I picked up a copy despite my famous cheapness.

You Can Never Go Home, But Occasionally You Get to Attend a BFS Event There

I've done a standup job of missing out on recent British Fantasy Society events since I left York a few years ago, what with always being stuck in places that are nowhere near anywhere else, so when one came up that I could just about possibly make I jumped at the chance.  As it turned out, the complex reasons I had for being in the North had mostly evaporated by the time the date came round, but I figured, what the hell?  Chances to catch up with old friends and ramble on about genre gubbins aren't exactly ten-a-penny these days.

I'm glad I did, because it was a fun night.  I got to catch up with all the people I hoped to catch up with, notably the seemingly-everywhere-these-days Lee Harris, of Angry Robot and Hub magazine fame, and a number of folks I remember fondly from my old writing group.  I also got to spend my saturday evening drinking beer in a hotel lounge again, producing the confused expectation in my somewhat frazzled brain that that's just what happens on a saturday.  (It'll be interesting to see if the next one proves me right.)

Asides from that, there's not a great deal to report.  Things were pretty chilled and informal, with the only organised occurrence a reading from a new non-profit anthology, Voices From the Past, that Lee - with his Hub editor hat on - has put together for Great Ormond Street hospital.  Actually, non-profit is a bit of an undestatement, since neither Lee nor any of the writers involved are making one penny, ruble or dubloon off the one.  Given the fact that it only costs 99 pennies (or £2.99 if you fancy donating a bit more) and that it's all going to a really good cause and that there's a tremendous line-up of writers involved - some of the more obviously famous include Bill Willingham, Mur Lafferty and Paul Cornell - it's kind of a no-brainer.

I got to hear three of the stories; it would have been four but for a combination of my having a pea-sized bladder and the fact that the woman manning the hotel bar also appeared to be running the coffee shop and, judging by the amount of time she was around for, possibly performing a one-woman Broadway adaptation of "Hello Dolly" and piloting a 747 as well.  Anyway, the three I got to listen to were Alasdair Stuart's Another Kind of Lightning, Lee's own Twisted and Andrew Smith's The Lab Gang.

And what do you know, they were all really good.  But I'll come out and say that my personal highlight was Al's tale of personal apocalypse and mad-as-mad science.  I've missed getting regular doses of Al's ingeniously demented fiction since I left York and he reads wonderfully well, even when it comes to outlandish Eastern-European accents.

More details of the Voices From the Past antho can be found at the H & H website ... and cheers to Lee and company for an entirely pleasant and more or less civilised night.

Some Theories out in Encounters #4

I just got word that the new issue of Encounters is out from Black Matrix Publishing, with my story Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis nestled somewhere in its nether-pages.

Normally at this point I'd say that I can't actually comment on the magazine because I haven't seen a print copy, and while that second bit is true - I believe it literally just came out today - the first bit isn't.  That's because Black Matrix make canny use of some neat technology to let readers sample the first few pages on their site.  (This tool, by the way, is something I've seen nowhere else, and I'm bewildered that more magazines haven't adopted it.)  So I can say with confidence that Encounters is one of the best-presented small press 'zines out there, with an emphasis on clarity and readability (something else I'm often puzzled by the lack of, even in the professional publishing world) and some nice, eye-catching artwork.  I was also impressed by Guy Kenyon's editorial, the gist of which is that he wants to put out a magazine full of good fiction and get it read by as many people as possible.  Needless to say, that's pretty much exactly what I want to hear from an editor who publishes my work.

Of course, these are all things that Guy's been getting right since day one, and pretty much the reasons I submitted to him in the first place.  I've mentioned many of them before, but I figure they warrant repeating - one of the reasons why being a discussion that I touch on at the end of this post.

Before that, though, a few notes about Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis.  I've mentioned the gist before, I believe, (think atmosphere-driven sci-fi with an emphasis on spooky weirdness), but it occurred to me a few days again that I've never credited Alasdair Stuart's considerable input.  Some Theories was actually written for a planned shared-world antho that Al was cooking up with the York writing group he hosts, and much of the background (as well as a fair share of the weird) is his contribution.  After I left York I rewrote it to help it stand on its own two snow-shoe'd feet, and of course I'm far too mean to consider giving Al a co-author credit or anything like that, so I'll settle for pointing out what an excellent writer (and human being) he is, that he has more good ideas in the tip of his pinky than I do in my whole damn head, and that some of them went towards making Some Theories what it is today.

That being, spookily weird.  I said that, right?


Lastly, something that readers may possibly find interesting: In the early days of Black Matrix Press, author John Scalzi wrote a blog post castigating them for their low pay rates and Guy Kenyon responded on his own blog.  This is a subject that I've written on quite extensively myself here, and one I find both interesting and under-discussed within the industry.  I've been thinking a lot about the small press lately, and what I'd like to see it doing in a perfect world, and I plan to put some of those thoughts down here when I get a spare few minutes.  In the meantime, I find John and Guy's comments interesting because they sum up so well the fors and againsts of what Duotrope's Digest calls token-paying markets.

My First Fantasycon, Part 2: All the Stuff That Is About Trying to Sell My Novel

For Fantasycon this year, I decided to try something a little different.

In fact, I decided to try plenty of different things, I guess - actually attending being the main one - but for this post I'm just going to focus on one, since I covered the rest in the first part (Buying art!  Spending £20 on a book!  Staying in a hotel that had clearly been designed by Stalinists!)

For a variety of reasons, most of them to do with my day job, I ended up going almost directly from finishing my first novel, Giant Thief, to beginning my second, currently known as Funland.  That meant I didn't have much time or energy with which to submit or promote Giant Thief - and the more time passed, the more my enthusiasm waned.  With novel number two out of the way, I knew I had to turn that around, but even when I started tentatively submitting my heart wasn't entirely in the process.

I'd been telling myself for months that if I made it to Fantasycon, one of the justifications for the expense would be trying to sell Giant Thief.  I had a few ideas, but one in particular stood out, something Rafe McGregor had suggested.  Rafe's idea - perhaps influenced by the decidedly unconventional theories of self-promotion ninja J. A. Konrath - was to print up a promotional sampler via a print-on-demand service like Lulu, and to hand that out in place of the leaflets, bookmarks and such that authors tend traditionally to go in for.

Now, before Rafe accuses me of trying to pass the blame for my dumb ideas, it's worth mentioning at this point that I'd completely misremembered the conversation.  In fact, Rafe had been considering the samplers as a method to promote an existing novel, not as an alternative to the traditional submissions process. This, of course, makes far more sense than my version, which possesses very little logic at all.  Unfortunately, by the time Rafe reminded me of this, and pointed out what a potentially terrible idea it was, I'd already decided to go ahead.  I figured that the risk - of alienating publishers by appearing to buck the traditional submissions process - was worth the potential gains.  It wasn't that it seemed like a particularly great idea any more, or that I thought for a second it might lead to a sale.  But thinking about my samplers had done far more to rekindle my passion for Giant Thief than cobbling together synopses and sending out sample chapters had.  For the first time in months, I felt excited about it, and could remember why it had consumed me for the better part of two years.


So, at great expense, and with much screaming and throwing of furniture at Lulu's bewilderingly obtuse cover-designing software, I put my samplers together.  I compiled three chapters, my bio, and a short story - Imaginary Prisons, as published in issue #29 of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction - the latter partly because I was still hanging onto my misremembered version of Rafe's theory, and more rationally, because I thought I might conceivably peak the interest of anthology-only publishers.

The end results, pictured left, weren't exactly mind-blowing, and were a million miles away from what I had in mind, but at least they looked half decent.  I was particularly lucky to discover that Francisco Goya had been decent enough to illustrate an image from my first chapter in his 1818 painting "The Giant".  Unfortunately, neither of us banked on Lulu's deciding to reproduce it approximately thirty-seven shades darker than it had originally appeared, but it still looked just about okay.  I was armed and ready.

Now, it's worth pointing out at this point that I'm not the most naturally gregarious of people, and even if I was, I doubt that attending a conference on my own and then harassing complete strangers with samples of my novel would have been an entirely pleasant or relaxing process.  Despite encouragement and interest from the likes of Alisdair Stuart, Alison Littlewood and Geoff Nelder, the Saturday proved less than productive, and most of the samples I got rid of ended up with friends and acquaintances.  By five o'clock, I was a little despondent, not to say exhausted, and I'd barely shifted one in three of my Giant Thief booklets.

Sunday, however, went a little better.   Perhaps I was still drunk from the previous night - it's physiologically unlikely that I could have sobered up much from four hours sleep - and it definitely helped that the seller's room was much quieter.  Maybe more importantly, I was a little clearer on what I wanted to do ... that being, get rid of samplers, say 'hi' to complete strangers and learn a little about the publishing scene.  With my expectations realigned, I found that I was actually enjoying myself.  The highpoint of the whole experiment came from Nicky Crowther of P S Publishing, who was kind enough to actually be impressed, and to point out that my pamphlets would be much easier to read in bed than normal submissions.

So would I recommend this approach to other writers?  Not hardly.  It was expensive, time consuming, stressful and probably won't be in the least productive -certainly no one's expressed any interest yet, despite me including my contact details not once but twice!  But it did open my eyes to a lot of things that as a writer I can and perhaps have to be doing.  I can see now that it's vital to take the opportunity to talk to publishers - too often the only communication between our two camps is submissions and rejection letters, which gives each side a false impression of the other.  It's no bad thing to look at my work with fresh eyes, and failing that, in a fresh form.  I don't think anyone was grossly offended by my unusual take on submitting, so I guess it's okay to push the envelope a little.

Anyway, thanks for everyone at Fantasycon who encouraged and took interest in my mad endeavour, and especial thanks to the publishers who accepted my samplers.  It would have been a much, much less fun weekend without you.

Now to think of a crazy scheme that actually succeeds in getting Giant Thief published...

My First Fantasycon, Part 1: All the Stuff That's Not About Trying to Sell My Novel

So I not only went to but survived, and not only survived but enjoyed my first Fantasycon - that being, for anyone who doesn't know, the annual conference organised by the British Fantasy Society - and it seems only right that I say a few words about it.

I went to Fantasycon with a few ulterior motives - to be discussed in part 2 - but I mainly went because it seems to be the UK event that people consistently rave about.  I had no idea what to expect, but as a miserable cynic, that didn't stop me expecting the worst: perhaps me and and two other people in a room slightly smaller than the average broom cupboard, forced to debate the relative merits of the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings for thirty two hours straight.

That didn't happen, (believe me, I wouldn't be taking the time to post about it), but tons of other stuff did.  That said, because I missed the first day and it took me a few hours to tune into the whole thing I suspect I missed more than I saw.  I completely failed to go to any readings, for example, and I only made one panel, though at least it was thoroughly interesting - Robert E. Howard discussed by folks including the prodigious Ramsay Campbell and Stephen Jones, who edited the excellent Gollancz volumes of Conan that really got me interested in Howard.  Similarly, although I only went to one signing, I picked a good one: the Never Again anthology from Gray Friar Press, including too many great writers to name but specifically from my point of view my friend Alison Littlewood, whose work never fails to impress me.

Apart from that and the stuff I'm going to talk about in part 2, I mostly spent my time browsing stalls, mingling, drinking (oh, so much drinking) and catching up with people.  Some of these were old friends that I haven't seen in ages like the multi-talented Alasdair Stuart and Angry Robot and Hub editor and all-round nice bloke Lee Harris.  Others were well-known names that I finally got to put a face to, like Stephen Theaker (who between Dark Horizons and Theaker's Quarterly Fiction has accepted more of my work than any other editor, and is every bit as nice in reality as he seems in the digiworld) and author-editor Geoff Nelder, who I hope I run into again so we can finish the conversation I rudely rushed out of.  A few were complete strangers - and I realise that isn't catching up, exactly, but it's a way of mentioning just how damn friendly most people were, and how willing and eager to share their knowledge and experience of the industry.  Of these, BFS Publicity and Events Co-Ordinator Martin Roberts particularly stands out, since I only approached him in a muddled attempt to sell my novel to PS Publishing and we ended up chatting for about half an hour.

I was determined not to spend too much money, or at least only spend it on absolute necessities like food and alcohol, but in the last couple of hours I went a little mad, and I still think I got off lightly given how much awesome stuff I could have splashed out on.  Most expensive single purchase was PS's sci-fi movie essay antho Cinema Futura (pictured left), and I also picked up The Places Between by Terry Grimwood, (right), because I was bothering Pendragon Press's editor Christopher Teague and that lovely cover kept catching my eye.  But my biggest purchase was five art prints by the astonishingly talented Les Edwards - four of these, a series based on Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, can be found in the bottom right of this page.  I nearly split them up to save a few quid and I've never been so glad to have defeated my cheapskate Yorkshireman instincts.  Now if only I had some frames and wall space!

Were there any low points?  Well, having to point out to Terry Martin which issue and then which page of Murky Depths he'd published me in before he remembered who I was was a sobering moment, though completely understandable in retrospect (and congrats, by the way, to Murky Depths for picking up the Best Magazine / Periodical award, it was well deserved.)  Complimenting Lisa Tuttle on a story actually written by Sarah Pinborough wasn't my finest moment, (and then I completely failed to tell Sarah I liked it either - Sarah, if you should happen to read this, Snow Angels blew me away).  There was the point where I realised that all the less miserly and antisocial people had all gone off for the banquet and that I'd have to find somewhere to eat alone amidst the sinister and alarming surrounds of Nottingham - although that ended up in fantastic take away pizza, so all was more than well.

Apart from that, the two days ranged from relaxing and interesting to flat-out great, and I know that I'll have a better time next year for knowing the ropes.  The really great bit was seeing, with my own eyes, that the British genre scene is truly healthy - definitely struggling, who or what the hell isn't these days? - but definitely alive and definitely kicking.  And the best bit?  That'd have to be getting to feel like a part of that scene for a couple of days.