Fantasycon 2019: A non-Review

So I won't be reviewing Fantasycon this year.  Its virtues were the same as always - good company, the marvelous efforts of the red coats to keep no end of plates spinning - and its flaws were, well, just about everything else.  I suspect my own experiences are a fairly good summary: for my first panel, the moderator didn't know they were moderating until we began; for my second, we were a person short and the moderator also didn't know they were moderating; for my third, the panel topic was so incomprehensible that we wandered from it and never went back; my reading saw three of us rushed into a thirty minute slot, which the room supervisor who'd been interrupting us throughout saw fit to cancel five minutes early so that a nonexistent crowd could come in; and the glorious silliness that is Dungeons and Disorderly played to a tiny audience compared with last year thanks to a bizarrely late time slot.

At least Dungeons and Disorderly always makes for weird fun.

But, no, I'm straying into reviewing, and that I said I wouldn't do!  The thing is, for me there was one outstanding problem that eclipsed everything else, which after all was largely patched up by good improvisation on the ground.  Really, so long as there's a decent bar at a Fantasycon, it's always possible to muddle through.  Though, that said, the bar closed at one o'clock even on the Saturday ... damn it, this finding positives business is tough!

Look, here's the one issue that's not so easy to ignore: international events aside, I've never been to a conference where so many people flew to be there, and in 2019, the year when just about everyone woke up to the fact that we're in the midst of a catastrophic environmental crisis, that's not a thing that ought to be happening.  Flying is environmentally horrific; flying domestically is a fundamentally horrible idea and ought to be avoided at all reasonable costs.  But the location of this year's Fantasycon made it really hard to avoid for a great many people.  I discussed this a lot, and not one person who'd flown felt comfortable with doing so, but their reasons were invariably the same: getting there by any other means was prohibitive, either because of absurd rail costs or impossible travel times.  And let's not forget that, for many, Fantasycon very much counts as work: if you're a writer, editor, or publisher, it's a major date on the calendar.  A great many people felt they had to be there and that the only way they could do so was to fly domestically, and that's not okay.

Am I saying that national conferences shouldn't be held in Scotland?  Well, it's important to note that had the venue actually been in Glasgow, rather than its remote outskirts, that alone would have shaved an hour and more off the journey time for many, me included.  But that aside ... yeah, I guess I am.  But that's nothing against Scotland!  Do you remember when Fantasycon always seemed to be in Brighton?  That was an equally lousy location from a travel point of view.  And Heathrow?  Nearly as bad.  Surely it's common sense to favour locations that are as accessible as possible from both north and south, but that accessibility can't mean "there's an airport nearby," because that attitude is well past its sell-by date.

I feel bad using Fantasycon as a whipping post for this issue.  Yet, at the same time, I feel it's justified, because the location was misjudged, and you only need to look at the drop in attendance to see that.  But that aside, this is something I fully intend to raise more in future, and Fantasycon just happens to be first in the line of fire.  If conference organisers give the impression that they haven't considered the environmental impact of their events, that's something I believe we as an industry need to be discussing, as those in all lines of work should be.  Indeed, it's long past time that every conference had an environmental policy to go along with its harassment and other policies, one that was clearly published and treated it as a benchmark by which to judge every decision that gets made, but location most of all.  Because let's face it, if there's one thing that's bound to really bugger up the conference scene, it's not having a planet to hold them on.

My Fantasycon 2019 Schedule

I've been largely skiving from the convention scene this year, and 2019 might even have proved to be the first year in goodness knows how long that I didn't go to any at all, but a recent bit of (as yet undisclosed!) good news spurred me to take the leap and, as the kids say, get me some Fantasycon.  And at time of writing, I'm glad I did, since I've managed to blag my way onto a lot of fun, interesting stuff over the course of the weekend.  Here's what that looks like:

Friday 7pm - Scotland on Screen (with Allen Stroud, Shona Kinsella & Heather Valentine)

Highlanders, Outlanders, Trainspotters, Scots! The best of Genre film that draws on Scotland for inspiration, direct or otherwise.

Honestly, I'm not sure there's forty-five minutes of subject matter here, and yet, of all my three panels, this is the one I'm most excited for, partly because I love talking movies and partly because I love even more talking about obscure movies, and this has the scope to get pretty damn obscure!

Sat 1pm - YA genre fiction (with AK Faulkner & Ian Hunter)

Writing it, reading it, what works, what doesn’t, and how it overlaps with fiction marketed towards older and younger readers. What do you want to see more of? What gives it a sustained home in our hearts?

Whereas this is theoretically safe territory, except that my approach to writing for young adults is just to write for adults and hope no-one ever calls me out on it.

Sat 3pm - Person or Pet? (with RJ Barker Katherine Inskip & Jacey Bedford )

Sentient non-humans, nonsentient pets, soulbonds and free will in fantasy stories. The panel explore the muddy waters of how we treat non-human characters, and the problematic issues of consent tied into these tropes

In which I'll be talking a lot about a certain floating eyeball companion who, as up-to-date Black River Chronicles readers will know, is steadily getting that series' weirdest plot line.  Yes, it's the Pootle panel!

Sat 5.45pm - Reading

Though actually, due to an apparent programming snafu, my slot amounts to eight minutes or so somewhere between half five and six o'clock, since there are three of us crammed in there.  Then again, I have Pete Sutton and Ramsey Campbell as more than respectable company, and I'm sure that if I talk fast I can get through a page or three.  It'll almost certainly be from the newly out A Savage Generation, assuming I don't forget to bring a copy.

Sat 10pm - Dungeons & Disorderly D3: Vault of the Cow (with David Thomas Moore, Mike Brooks, Ali Nouraei, Stewart Hotston & Jonathan Oliver)

The Terrifying Sorcerer of Terrifying Evil has been defeated, the Sheep on the Borderlands sheared and penned, and the Temple of Elemental Weevils properly fumigated. It is time to venture in the Underdork! In module D3, Vault of the Cow, the players will clash with the sinister, mysterious race known only as The Cow of the Underdark...

Very likely to be the highlight of my event weekend, this, since David Thomas Moore's surreal, audience-interactive role-playing pastiche proved great fun last year, when my barbarian accountant managed to save the day (or possibly undermine the entire quest, I can't exactly remember) by realising at the last minute that our party had gone over budget.  Incidentally, gang, I'm still waiting on your expenses claim forms, and no, Lembas bread is not tax deductible.

-oOo-

So that's me.  I'll be around from around six on the Friday, assuming that by some rare miracle the British transport system doesn't fail me, and ducking out at banquet-time on the Sunday, since banquets are a tool of the wealthy oppressor and not for us impoverished writer types.  (Okay, it's mainly because I want to get home in time for tea.)  Do find me and say hello if you're there, and assuming I genuinely don't forget, I might have a few budget copies of A Savage Generation to sell to anyone who's interested.

Fantasycon 2018

The British Fantasy Awards

It's much harder to say anything useful about conventions you've enjoyed than ones you spent seething in rage at the dreadful inadequacy and incompetence of everything and anything, which leaves me with little to say indeed.  I had a brilliant time at this year's Fantasycon, as good as any I can remember.  And while you can put a lot of that down to a marvelous hotel with genuinely helpful staff and a reasonably big bar space all contained within a rather nice city with a bunch of good restaurants, that's obviously unfair on the organisers.  I've seen enough conventions to realise that these things don't run themselves, let alone run themselves smoothly, and I've learned to appreciate the extent to which those that appear to do so are precisely the ones receiving the most massaging behind the scenes.*  Also, let's face it, great venues in nice cities don't simply choose themselves.

Befriending the hotel cat

With all of that said, I have a little-known medical condition that means if I don't grumble in a blog post about at least something then I'll burst into flames, so I suppose there's going to have to be a dash of negativity.  The past complaints I've had about panels were all pretty much true here, and if this absolutely has to be the main form of programming at conventions then I strongly believe that a lot more thought should be going into it.  We had a great time on the Griminal Criminals panel, for example, my panelists did sterling work and it seemed like the audience were enjoying themselves, but I still don't really have the faintest notion of what it was meant to be about.  Elsewhere, I heard complaints about the Women in Genre Fiction panel - along the lines of, "a Women in Genre Fiction panel in 2018, what the holy hell?"- and agreed that was certainly one of the more cringe-worthy examples.  But there were a lot of topics that were either done to death or hopelessly vague or ghettoising or just not very interesting, and not many at all that were genuinely new or fresh.

Er...

Also, frankly, I'm coming to think that the issues run a little deeper than a lack of inspiration.  I don't altogether get the widespread refusal to acknowledge that conventions, and therefore panel debates, are a form of entertainment that people are paying good money for.  For me, appearing on panels, and especially moderating them, has always felt like an exciting privilege and a responsibility rather than any sort of a right.  But others appear to view things differently, and I'm coming to wonder why they're allowed, year after year, to get away with it.  Naming no names because I can't be bothered to get into a public row, but the person on one of my panels who refused to use the microphone even after a member of the audience pointed out that they couldn't hear, and indeed make a point of leaning back as far as they could and mumbling into their shirt collar, does not in my opinion deserve to be invited back for more.

Um...

But it feels meaner than ever to moan at a Fantasycon for getting the things wrong that damn near every Fantasycon, and the bulk of conventions, tend to get wrong, and especially so when so much went very right indeed.  More than that, it was more evident than ever that the convention has grown in real and meaningful ways in recent years.  What when I first started going was famously cliquey and insular and blatantly a horror convention despite its name is much less of any of those things these days, and there were even odd moments when the bar's shifting currents randomly threw up what felt to me like a genuinely varied mix of human beings.  Funnily enough, those moments were also when all the most interesting conversations happened.  It would be amazing if this was a glimpse of the future and Fantasycon could grow into something truly inclusive and broad and forward-looking - and putting more thought into panels would be, I think, a major step toward that.  In the meantime, what we got this year seemed to me a positive lunge in a number of right directions.

Lastly, I won't try and remember everyone I spoke to because a week's gone by and my memory sucks at the best of times, but huge thanks to everyone who kept me amused, even when that meant staying up long after the bar had kicked us out.  And thanks too to everyone who was part of the events I was in on, with an extra special mention to David Thomas Moore for whatever the heck that Dungeons & Dragons thing was.  After that and last year's one-minute flash insanity, the bar is set awfully high for whatever terrifying weirdness I manage to talk myself into in 2019...




* Although the lack of programmes, lanyards, and goodie bags on the first day was, it has to be said, something that could have done with a bit more massaging!

My Fantasycon 2018 Schedule

Is it really Fantasycon time already?  I guess it must be, since I keep getting e-mails about panels and stuff I'm supposed to be attending.  Here's everywhere I'll be that's not the bar:

FRIDAY

Dungeons & Disorderly Module B2: The Sheep on the Borderlands - Friday 9pm (Panel Room 1)

Dave Moore (Moderator), Nate Crowley (Moderator), Eliza Chan, Anna Smith Spark, Helen Armfield, Phil Lunt, David Tallerman, Ed Fortune

Dungeons and Disorderly is back! Join another troupe of hapless adventurers in a rambling, incoherent mess of a pseudo-roleplaying game. The Terrifying Sorcerer of Terrifying Evil is finally slain, but our heroes have no time to rest on their laurels! At the edges of the Empire, in the wilderness beyond civilisation, hushed rumours speak of a new threat: a sheep of vast size and power, consuming all in its path…

[I don't entirely know what this is.  I think I volunteered for it while drunk.  Or possibly while sober, which come to think of it is when I make most of my worst decisions.  After last year's misadventures at the hands of Lee Harris, it would seem that my new Fantasycon tradition is to publicly humiliate myself in the company of Anna Smith Spark.]

SATURDAY

Saturday Noon - Fantasy Readings (3)

 David Tallerman, R J Barker, Joel Cornah

[At which I guess I'll be reading from the soon-to-be-released third Black River book, since I can't very well pass The Bad Neighbour off as fantasy.

Or ... can I?

No, I can't.]

- Saturday 5 PM - NewCon Press Book Launch

Ian Whates and Co 

Launching: 

Best British Horror 2018 - Various
The Scent of Tears - Adrian Tchaikovsky & Friends
Assassins' Endgame - Ian Watson & Andy West
Novella Set 4 or The Land of Somewhere Safe - Hal Duncan

[I'm one of the "& Friends", with my Shadows of the Apt short story The Promise of a Threat, which I'll no doubt be talking about more here sometime soon, because, hey, I wrote a story set in my favourite fantasy universe and now it's canon!]

- Saturday 9pm (Panel Room 1) - Up, Up and Away! Superheroes in Genre Fiction

Eric Ian Steele (Moderator), Allanah Hunt, Ginger Lee Thomason, Mike Chinn, David Tallerman

Once solely the preserve of the comic book stand, superhero fiction now dominates our cinemas, permeates our television screens and commands a sizable computer gaming fan base. With the franchise dominance of the DC and Marvel universes, in these mediums, is there room for new heroes to emerge? Has the superhero novel lagged behind, and if so, why? Our panel explore the place of superheroes in genre fiction and examines the possibilities for new takes, new stories and new ideas in new mediums.

[Well, look, there was a panel that I really wanted to be on to discuss the new Black River book, and then I thought that just in case I got turned down for that, I might as well volunteer for this one, since I have a superhero novel all written and ready to send out, even if no-one but me has actually read it.  Anyway, here we are!]

SUNDAY

Sunday 1.30pm (Panel Room 2) - Griminal Criminals!

David Tallerman (Moderator), Tom Johnstone, Kit Power, Rob Boffard

There are villains and villains. Some of the worst self serving ruffians are pretty endearing in their way. These rogues have a strange charm to them. Maybe they can be redeemed, maybe they can’t. Join our panel to discuss the best down and dirty characters who breathe new life into their stories.

[Yeah, I'm moderating this one, which is awkward since I really don't know what the question is.  I mean, that's more of a series of statements, right?  But I'm sure it'll be fine, I've got me some awesome panelists, and in any case, anyone who's anyone will be at the banquet, so we'll probably just end up playing Cards Against Humanity or something.]

 And there we have it!  My Fantasycon 2018 schedule.  Man, I really did want to be on that panel about when magic goes horribly wrong, since that's literally the entire plot of Black River 3.  Maybe I could be that guy who sits on the front row, asking questions that are really just lengthy, rambling statements and annoying the hell out of everyone?  Anyway, I really ought to be prepping Griminal Criminals.  It'll be great, I promise!  Come watch us, eating is overrated and potentially fatal.

Five Minute Flashes, Part 2

The short version: Fantasycon 2017, Ready Steady Flash, Lee Harris, writing stories in five minutes in front of a live audience, myself, Guy Adams, Anna Smith Spark and Jeanette Ng.  A darkening spot upon the surface of the sun.  A hot wind with the odour of fresh blood.  Elder gods stirring in their sunken graves.  Death ... death ... death!

Alternatively, the long version is here.

So, story number three was on the topic The Night of the Kittens, which is certainly the kind of subject that someone might come up with if a lunatic jabbed a microphone in their face and demanded that they give them a short story topic.  I bet Tolstoy never had to deal with situations like this!  I bet no-one ever told Voltaire that he had a write a story about kittens in five minutes!  I bet Joyce wasn't such an attention whore that he'd have agreed to something like this in the first place!*

This one's called The Night of the Kittens, presumably because I'd briefly recovered my ability to write obvious titles at this point...

Bill knew when he bought the house that it shouldn't have been half so cheap as it was.  There was the nuclear power plant next door, for a start; nothing ought to glow like that.  And there was the fact that the estate agent kept trying to downplay the fact that the foundations were built on an ancient Indian burial ground.  And then there was the secret government facility at the end of the road, with the armed guards in dark glasses and the weird smog hovering over it.  But what were they to do?  They had to move the cat sanctuary somewhere, especially now that Bopsy, Mrs Whiskers, Purditer and Snuggles were all of them pregnant. 

In retrospect, though, Bill thought, as he nailed another plank over the cellar door and tried to ignore the weirdly shrill, distorted mewling from the other side, the decision was certainly a mistake.

Honestly, the only thing I'm remotely proud of in that one is that I managed to come up with four different silly cat names.  And one of the four was the actual name that I actually called my actual cat when I was nine, so even that's a stretch.

But for the final round I had a back-up plan, and I was just about exhausted enough by then to run with it.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I sort of had the idea for this one in mind already, as a kind of mental bomb-shelter for in case things got really bad, and it was a case of cheat a little or forfeit by hurling myself out of the nearest window.  For this final, apocalyptic round, we had a choice of three topics, which were Inside Out, Shakespeare's Brain and Interdimensional Toilets.  And the result is called, for reasons that I don't remember and probably never existed in the first place, Aristotle's Last Dance...

It was a dark and stormy night.  Three writers sat on a bench.  The first turned to the other two and said, "You know what, I was recently invited to be on a flash fiction writing contest by that bastard Lee Harris.  You had to write short stories in five minutes.  It was terrifying!"

"That sounds like the worst thing ever," said the second writer.

The third writer, who was mute, just nodded their agreement.

"So how did it go?" the second writer asked.

"Well, the first three rounds were merely hellish.  But the fourth, on the topic of Inside Out, Shakespeare's Brain or Interdimensional Toilets ... Christ, that was just impossible!"

"But you came up with something in the end, right?"

"Well, yes, in the end I did.  But it was a close run thing."

"You have to share it with us, after all this tedious build-up.  Otherwise, what are we even doing here, sitting on this bench in this middle of this dark, stormy night?"

"No," the first writer said, "I'd rather not."

One final thought, because I don't want to leave you with that awful, awful joke.  I said that the above was my mental bomb-shelter, but in fact, I had a backup plan for my backup plan.  If all else failed, I was planning to read the limerick that I'd written a couple of days before and try and pass it off as in some way a response to the actual topic.  So here, by way of dropping the curtain on the tragic drama that was my Ready, Steady Flash experience, is said limerick...

There was a young porpoise named Maurice,

Whose skin was excessively porous,

He shouldn't have ought to

Gone under the water,

That tragic, unfortunate porpoise.

I'm convinced that if I'd got to read my limerick I would totally have won.




* I'm kidding, of course.  James Joyce would have lapped up Ready, Steady Flash and come back for seconds.  Yeah, Joyce, you heard me right!

Five Minute Flashes, Part 1

So I may have mentioned that I took part in the Ready Steady Flash challenge at this year's Fantasycon, in which myself, Guy Adams, Anne Smith Spark and Jeanette Ng were challenged by the nefarious mister Lee Harris to write flash fiction stories on previously unannounced topics, in a whoppingly tiny five minutes, and the winner was whoever managed to last the full hour without throwing up, passing out, running screaming from the room or some combination of the three.  Or, wait, maybe it had something to do with how loud the audience were clapping?  Honestly, my memories are a blur; I remember sitting down and I remember being in the bar afterwards downing medicinal glasses of wine, but the gap in between is - well, it's just darkness.  And it's best not to probe that darkness too deeply.  Already the shakes are starting again...

Fortunately I don't have to relive the traumas of those long, long minutes to share the stories that I wrote!  Because I have them saved on my desktop.  And since previous participants chose to share their efforts, presumably in the hope of stressing out future participants even more than they were already stressed out, I've decided to do the same.  Unfortunately these are the sole surviving record of that night, as I was the only one who'd brought a laptop; I should stress that, since I didn't win, these are certainly not the catastrophically low standard that Guy, Anne and Jeanette should be judged by.

That said, I did manage to win the first round!  The subject was Fairies in Space, and my story, funnily enough, was also called Fairies in Space...

"So here's what I'm thinking," Commander Vladovitch said, "the dog went pretty well.  We know we can send a dog into space, right?  And it seemed quite happy." 

"Well," co-commander Turganov said, "the dog died." 

"That's true.  But until it died, it seemed happy enough." 

"This is true." 

"And the monkey went well, yes?  We know that a monkey can survive in space."  

"The monkey did die as well, though."  

"This is also true.  But until then..."  

"Yes," co-commander Turganov agreed, "the monkey did seem happy until it's last agonised moments."  

"But," Commander Vladovitch said, "I'm not sure that we're quite ready to send a human into space.  What with all the dying and everything.  So, what I was thinking..."  

"Yes, commander?"

"What I was thinking was fairies.  They're a lot like people, only more little.  So we'd only need a small spaceship." 

"That's true.  They are a lot like people.  And the spaceship could be very small indeed.  But commander... I can foresee just one problem..."

If I'm honest, it's probably more of a one act play than a flash fiction story, but what the heck?  I wrote it in five minutes.  You try writing anything that's not a shopping list in five minutes, in front of an audience of ravening, bloodthirsty ghouls.  (I mean, I remember them as ravening, bloodthirsty  ghouls; I guess, in retrospect, that they were just normal people, and not terrifying at all.  Actually, that even makes more sense.)

Story two!  Well, story two isn't even a story, now that I go back to it.  It also doesn't make much sense, unless you know that the topic was Porcine Love and Lee misheard that as Paul Simon Love, and that stuck more than the actual subject did.  Oh, and this one's called Untitled, perhaps because I was already pretty confused by this point...

Everyone blamed Garfunkel for what happened.  Everyone said that he was the one with no talent.  Heck, he didn't even write any of their songs!  And that singing voice ... the phrase "like a castrated cat" got trotted out more than once.  And certainly, if you were to look at their solo careers after that tragic day when the pair finally decided they would never work together again, it would be hard not to say that, yes, Garfunkel was indeed the weak link in one of the greatest musical partnerships ever to produce the soundtrack to a Mike Nichols film.  

But only Garfunkel would ever know the truth, and it burned in his heart and soul then he could never, ever share it.  For would have believed him?  Who would have listened?  Who could have accepted the dreadful truth?  

How could he ever reveal that Paul Simon's true song-writing partner was his secret lover?  And that his secret lover was a pig?

Porcine!  Paul Simon!  D'you see?  Yeah, okay, maybe not my finest moment, and I'm not sure that anyone got the Mike Nichols gag either.

But it's okay!  Because there are still a whole two more stories to go, and they're - gasp! - even worse.  I'm not even kidding!  I'm literally only splitting this post in two because having all four of these things together would probably have caused my laptop to spontaneously combust or something...

Fantasycon 2017

In jest, I expressed to one or two people at Fantasycon this past weekend that having nothing to moan about would take a lot of fun out of this write-up.  But in truth, I'm not altogether the cynical git that I may come over as on occasions, and you know what?  It's really nice to be able to say that a convention was flat out excellent, as Fantasycon 2017 was flat out excellent.

It also leaves me wondering at the fine lines that separate a good convention from a bad one, since most of what was going right was not stuff that was innately exceptional as such; you could have looked at the programming, for example, and expected a Fantasycon very much like every other.  I guess for the most part it just came down to a little (or maybe a lot) of extra thought and effort being sunk in behind the scenes.  Some proper attention seemed to have gone into who was doing what and when; the red coats were on absolutely top form, and there was always someone around to ask daft questions of; and the venue, The Bull Hotel in Peterborough, was ideal in so many ways, with a huge bar space that made it really easy to find people and a separate convention centre to keep all that non-drinking stuff nicely clustered in one place.  For that matter, Peterborough itself turned out to be a rather inspired choice of setting, what with being easy to get to from both north and south and a nice enough place to warrant stepping outside for an hour or two.

On a personal note, having arrived as a bit of a stress-filled mess, (I've been fairly poorly for the last couple of months, in fairness), I was totally astonished both by how much fun I had and how relaxed everything turned out to be.  I mean, not the Ready Steady Flash, obviously, that was a literally nightmarish bungee jump into the pits of Hell - though, and I will absolutely deny this if you ask me, it was also sort of entertaining, and I may even be a little bit glad that I did it.  But on top of that, my three panels went very well indeed, thanks largely to having excellent panelists for the two I moderated: deep and heartfelt thanks to Anna Smith Spark, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Simon Bestwick, Stewart Hotston, Gary Couzens, Gavin Williams and Nina Allan for making my job so effortless.  And my reading was pretty fun too; The Black River Chronicles: The Ursvaal Exchange fared well in its first public outing.  (It helped that I had good reading company in the shape of Mr. Bestwick again and Joely Black, both of whose books I now want to read.)

If I had a single gripe, and bloody hell, of course I do, it's me writing about a convention, it was the same one I almost always have about these things, and Fantasycon especially: not enough to do that wasn't panels and too many panels with generic or done-to-death topics.  And an illustration of how splendidly right these things can go was provided by the Fantasy Economy! panel on the Sunday afternoon, which was a stellar example of four knowledgeable people talking clearly and fascinatingly about a subject that they clearly knew an inordinate amount about.   (Frustratingly, the program is out of date and I can't remember everyone's names, but I imagine they know who they were, and I'm pretty sure I told them all individually or collectively what a brilliant job they'd done.)

But, in the grand scheme of things, a few imperfect panel topics weren't that big a deal.  At least there was a good variety, and like I said above, there was a definite sense that people hadn't just been thrown at subjects for no reason.  And in the end, the best thing a Fantasycon can accomplish is to put you in a suitable space with all of the great people who go to Fantasycons, make sure that alcohol is at hand and not too insanely overpriced, and leave you to get on with things until a suitably preposterous early hour.  And this year's event did that as well as any of the however many of these things I've been to now.

And only as I get to the end of this do I realise that I haven't once mentioned the Room of Death!  But then, I guess we don't talk about the Room of Death...

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.

First Steps As a Writer, Panel Notes

Obviously I meant to post this last week and forgot!  Ah well, better late than never.  

So, my Fantasycon 2016 panel was All About You, First Steps as a Writer - How Do You Go About Launching Your Career?, and it seemed to go pretty well all told.  At any rate, it was fun to be part of a bunch of bitter, hard-living, battle-scarred professional writers for an hour!  It's always impossible to judge how the audience are receiving things, but I hope that we managed to generate some good advice amid the horror stories and the baring of old wounds.

Anyway, Iain Grant was so thoroughly on the ball that he got three of us discussing the panel topic before it had even happened, with a few pertinent questions that get straight to the heart of this whole professional writer lark.  Here, then, for your potential delectation, are mine, Iain and moderator Sue Moorcroft's answers:

Do you have a writing career?

David:  I write for a living, but I know plenty of writers more successful than me who don't, so it's hard to say precisely what constitutes a career.  I'd say that if a meaningful portion of your income is consistently coming from writing then you're probably safe in thinking that you have a career.

Iain: I’m not sure I have a career as a writer. I make money as a writer and if I quit the day job I would still be earning more than what the government terms a ‘living wage’. But a career is different to a job, isn’t it? A career, for me, implies a path, a vocation, a calling. And, in that sense, I definitely currently consider myself to have a writing career because I can actually see where my writing’s taking me. It wasn’t always like that; I’m not sure when I moved from being a dabbler to a ‘career’ writer.

Sue: I suppose the meaning of the term ‘writing career’ varies according to its context. When I first began getting published in weekly magazines I felt I had a career but I had three part-time jobs, too. I may now be more what people mean when they speak of ‘a career writer’ because I work 50 or 60 hours a week and get all my income is writing related.

Do you write for money or for the love of writing?

David: I write because I'm passionate about it, but it also needs to pay the bills, since otherwise the bills don't get paid.  For me, being a writer who can make a living from writing has always been the end goal, with the proviso that I'd like to do so by producing work that I feel genuinely enthused about.  If that went away then I'd like to hope I'd stop; after all, there are plenty of easier ways to make money.

Sue: I’m compelled to write. I was writing for a long time before I began to make money at it and it was even longer before I made enough to live on (it’s just over 20 years since I sold my first short story). I consider myself lucky to be able to do the job I love but the harder I work, the luckier I get. Until the last couple of years I took writing-related work that wasn’t exactly what I wanted but the earnings from it meant I didn’t have to go out and get a ‘proper job’. I wrote courses, judged writing competitions, wrote writing ‘how to’, appraised manuscripts and spent too much of my week with my writing tutor’s hat on rather than my writer’s hat. Then I narrowed my focus to what I really want to do - write novels - got a fab agent and moved to a big publisher and feel more fulfilled and less stressed.

Iain: I think the vast majority of writers do so because they have an unholy fixation on writing. I can’t remember who originally said it but I write because it’s the only way to get these damned ideas out of my head. However, in the past year or so, I’ve realised that money is now a consideration in what I write. Not a huge one, but it’s there. For example, if I came to the sudden epiphany that I didn’t want to write another comic fantasy book and instead wanted to write a children’s book about mischievous kittens, part of my brain would now definitely wave a little flag and point out that the mischievous kitten story will sell fewer copies than the next book in the series I’m currently working on. Writing remains a joy in and of itself but it serves a more mercenary purpose as well.

What mistakes have you made in your career?

Sue: Although I’ve only learned this retrospectively, I was ignoring opportunities! I assumed that ‘You should meet …’ conversations were friendly but not meant to be taken literally. Turns out that some were actually opportunities! But mostly I have been more guilty of seeing opportunities where there were none than missing them. Nowadays, I’m better at dodging the snakes and getting up the ladders. 

David: I suspect that one's unanswerable!  Things I considered mistakes at the time have paid off in the long run and things that seemed just great have turned round and bitten me in the ass.  I regret letting some work out in the early days that might have been better buried, and the time spent in editing those stories to a point where I could sell them for a few dollars could probably have been better used elsewhere.  I certainly should have started attending conferences and developing contacts sooner than I did.

Iain: I wasted too much time in my twenties trying to get a literary agent and a traditional publishing deal. Literary agents are great things to have and a trad publishing contract has obvious perks. However, the publishing industry isn’t just changing – it has changed and is continuing to change. If I had mentally adapted to new markets, particularly electronic markets, even twelve months earlier than I did, I think my total readership would be much greater than it currently is. I now listen to the mad little voice that suggests a new format or new publishing opportunity (she’s called Heide, by the way).

Given your experience, are there any tips you can offer?

Sue: My top tip is to educate yourself - and that means about publishing and the market as well as writing. Probably the best piece of advice ever given to me was ‘Don’t make enemies’. Though I don’t pretend to have been able to observe it as immaculately as I would have liked, it has stood me in good stead and I try to be professional. Even when others act unprofessionally towards me, I manage to keep my thoughts to myself.

Iain: Two distinct and separate things that I’ve always believed in and haven’t had to learn the hard way. First up, writers write. They don’t just talk about writing or think about writing. Writers write all the time. Secondly, be nice. Be nice. That’s it. It pays back in spades.

David: My golden rule changes daily, but for the moment let's say: write regularly, accept that it might take you years to be as good as you want to be, but always aim for that goal of being the best writer you can be.

Which is better, traditional publishing, self-publishing or being an in-house writer?

David: I've leaned towards traditional publishing, but I wouldn't rule anything out.  Different problems require different solutions, and what works for one book isn't necessarily right for another.  Increasingly I think that most successful writers are making all three approaches work for them, and other avenues as well.

Sue: I like to be published traditionally but some of my out of print stuff is self-published, which makes me a ‘hybrid writer’. Being with HarperCollins, a publishing giant, is suiting me very well so far. I love their support and professionalism. I’ve never been an in-house salaried writer - I tend to think that applies to writers of non-fiction rather than fiction - but I’m conscious that copyright belongs to the employer rather than the employee in that situation. I almost never sell my copyright.

Iain: I am self-published and currently very happy with that. In terms of personal control and percentage royalties, it appears to trump all other models. Having said that, if the right trad deal comes along, I would be very tempted. Not having to employ my own artists, designers, editors, proofers, printers, not having to seek my own marketing opportunities or distribution deals… There are some limitations to being self-published. One day, it might be nice to spend all my writing time actually writing.

What other professionals do you work with in your career?

Sue: I love working with publishing professionals. Currently, I work most with Helen, my editor (Avon Books UK, the imprint of HarperCollins publishing my next two books), and my agent (Juliet Pickering, Blake Friedmann), and with their teams: copyeditors, digital marketing manager, rights manager and various others. Then there’s the PR company Avon employs, which is working on a national PR campaign around the publication of The Christmas Promise and do their job admirably. Although I support my publisher and the PR company in all their endeavours to sell my book and get it noticed, I recognise that they’re the ones with the talent, knowledge, experience and contacts and rely on them to do their job. If I were self-publishing I would employ a professional editor and cover designer, without question.

Iain: As a self-published author, the initial temptation is to assume you can do everything yourself. In my experience (and it had to be learned), this assumption is deeply wrong. We work with two great editors – Keith Lindsay has decades of experience as a script writer and writes more of our jokes for us than I’d care to admit; Mike Chinn has done excellent work on editing both novels and short story collections for us. We’ve used multiple artists/designers but work most closely with Mike Watts (www.bigbeano.co.uk) who has done nearly every one of our covers over the last four years. We’ve worked with three or four proofers over the years and they are, of course, invaluable – you can’t proof your own work. And, over the past year, it’s been a pleasure to work with Cal at Wonderland Management who has been busy striking deals for us in Hollywood.

David: If you find a good copy editor, treasure them.  Since I work partly in comics, I try and cultivate good artists, especially ones who can be relied on to meet a deadline.  There are no aspects of the writing process that I don't involve myself with, and I'd feel a little negligent if I did.  On the publishing side, I tend to get involved as much as a particular publisher wants me to be; at the least, I try and make sure to understand what's going on.

What are your current goals as a writer?

David: My next goal at any given point tends to be to sell the next book.  On a wider front, I'd like to think that I'm always getting a little better at what I do, and seeking out fresh challenges.  I like to try out subgenres I haven't dabbled in before, and there are a couple I want to try out for size next year.

Sue: My current goal is to make the biggest success I can of the two novels in my contract, The Christmas Promise and Just for the Holidays (the latter’s title subject to change), to be central to Avon’s list and expand my sales in other territories.

Iain: I’m currently working on writing more books in the two series we have going. We’re also working on two more original titles. But what’s the next step in the career plan? I think a screen adaptation of one of our books would be the next thing to tick off the list. I don’t think that would change the fact that I’m happiest when writing novels. I just want to keep doing that as long as possible.

The contributors

Award-winning author Sue Moorcroft writes contemporary women’s fiction with occasionally unexpected themes. A past vice chair of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and editor of its two anthologies, Sue also writes short stories, serials, articles, writing ‘how to’ and is a creative writing tutor. She’s won a Readers’ Best Romantic Read Award and the Katie Fforde Bursary.

Sue’s latest book: The Christmas Promise (Avon) 

Iain Grant is a self-published writer of fantasy and horror novels. With Heide Goody, he is the author of the 'Clovenhoof' comedy fantasy series (in which Satan loses his job and has to move to suburban Birmingham). Iain and Heide's most recent book is Oddjobs, a comedy about the end of the world and the paperwork it creates.

David Tallerman is the author of the comic fantasy novel series The Tales of Easie Damasco, which began with Giant Thief and ended with Prince Thief, graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science, the Tor.com novella Patchwerk and the recently released The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, a collection of pulp-styled horror and dark fantasy fiction.

David's short fantasy, science fiction, horror and crime stories have appeared or are due in around eighty markets, including Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He can be found online at davidtallerman.co.uk, and blogs regularly, though far too often about nineties anime movies rather than anything writing-related.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back by the Sea

Reviewing Fantasycons often feels like dancing about architecture: silly, pointless and probably against the entire spirit of the thing.  More and more I suspect that no one even really cares whether any given Fantasycon is good as such; heck, I'm not even sure that I do.  Every year I find myself drifting a little bit nearer to what I take to be the consensus among hardened F'con punters, that the nation's most cheap and cheerful genre conference is best considered as an excuse for a get-together with old friends, because if you go in expecting much more than that then you're likely to be disappointed.

Irony.

Still.  I was a little disappointed.

That comes down largely, I think, to the fact that the last two years have been uncharacteristically great, and there was a small part of me hoping that somehow that might stick.  So for 2016's Fantasycon to be such a retrenching stung that bit more than it really needed to.  With the seedy seaside hotel location, the vague but constant sense of disorganization and the lackluster panel topics, there were literally points where I forgot that I wasn't somehow back in Brighton in the not-so-good old days.

Reading.

And I'm conscious, already, that I'm grumbling about something that was a great deal of fun, having had a great weekend, and that makes this feel all the more futile.  But I can't really point to any of that fun as a result of Fantasycon itself, except in the very loosest sense of, I wouldn't have seen any of the people whose company I so enjoyed if we hadn't all been gathered for the same occasion.  By the same measure, so many others were saying similar things that it seems unreasonable to pretend it couldn't have been quite a lot better.  A decent program pamphlet maybe, with a map to make up for the lack of signage?  A number of microphones that equated in any way to the number of panelists?  More than a couple of panel topics that weren't done to death years or decades ago?  A slightly less smelly venue, with drinks closer to the right side of drinkable and food a bit nearer the correct end of edible?

Shove penny!!!!!!

Ah well.  Goodness knows, it wasn't a disaster, and it really was a lot of fun, and I guess that if this were the baseline for Fantasycons of the future then I could live with that.  Certainly I liked Scarborough more than any other F'con location I can think of, and that fact alone made up for the aspects that didn't work quite so well; going paddling and playing on the shove penny machines and visiting Scarborough castle and drinking free mead were all highlights.  And as always at F'con, the nights were great - though even then, at least one bar space devoted to the convention would have been nice.  On both nights, it really only began to feel like an event after about eleven o'clock, when the other guests had gone to bed and you could tell the convention goers from the normal folks.

Anyway, next year sounds hopeful, so long as the already contentious travel arrangements get sorted out, as I'm sure they will.  And having griped so much, I should add that I'm genuinely grateful for all the hard work and thought that went into this year's event, which was always apparent, even when things weren't quite coming together.  Fantasycon is never not enjoyable, it attracts one of the most varied and interesting crowds of any UK convention, and I'm grateful that it exists.  I just find myself wishing, sometimes, that it could keep a little closer to the bar that other conventions have set without losing its distinctive charm.

Where I'll be at Fantasycon by the Sea

Hey, that rhymes!  I'm a poet and I never knew it to be the case.

Well, I'm not doing a great deal at Fantasycon this year, which perhaps is for the best since I had a piece cut out of me by trained medical professionals on Monday and I'm still feeling rather sore and sorry for myself.  Never fear though, I'm sure I'll be my usual random and garrulous self by the time it comes to my panel, which is:

All About You

Saturday, September 24 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Palm Court Ballroom – The Grand

First Steps as a Writer – How Do You Go About Launching Your Career? Rob Power, Sue Moorcroft (Chair), Helen Armfield, Iain Grant, David Tallerman

(You may be shocked to discover that I just copied that straight off the official program.)

Also, I will be reading, though what I have as yet no idea; probably something from The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, I'd imagine:

Reading – Mark De Jager and David Tallerman

Saturday, September 24 @ 10:30 am - 11:00 am

Reading Café (Royal Hotel)

Mark, by the way, is the author of debut novel Infernal, which came out from Del Rey just last month.

And, wow, I have literally two things scheduled and I still couldn't manage to get them in chronological order, that's quite the achievement.  Hey, let's blame it on the fact that for medical reasons I'm ever so slightly lighter than I was this time last week.  I suspect I'll be blaming a lot of things on that over the weekend, so if I happen to see you there and I seem at all inebriated then just assume that it's down to diminished body mass, okay?  

Upcoming Appearances

I haven't been out and about quite as much as I'd have liked this year, because money basically, and I'm sad to be missing my first Nine Worlds this weekend - everyone have fun without me, and please spare no thought for me slaving away at a hot word processor! - but I do have a couple of things coming up that are worth a mention.

First up, I'll apparently be on a panel at Fantasycon-by-the-Sea.  It's called Wanted: Dead or Alive and the topic is "Is the anti-hero the new hero in fiction?"  To which the answer is, of course, no, and so I suspect that myself, Adrian Faulkner, Carrie Buchanan, Neil Williamson and Georgia Duffy will just use the question as a springboard to discuss how neat anti-heroes are, because anti-heroes are definitely neat.  I should probably talk about Easie Damasco, but I suspect I'll get distracted by Dime, the protagonist of my current edit-in-progress, a glorious son of a bitch who makes poor old Easie look like a good Samaritan by comparison.

But Fantasycon isn't for a couple of months, and my other event is a whole lot sooner: two weeks away, in fact.  That would be the inaugural meet of Humber SFF, which I'm honoured to be one of the two guest speakers at, along with Daniel Godfrey, whose debut New Pompeii came out just a couple of months ago.  There aren't many things that would lure me so close to the city of my birth, but I'm looking forward to this: Shellie Horst has been organising with a deal of enthusiasm and I'm a fan of the template set for these things by the similar events in York and Sheffield (and isn't it time for another one of those?)  I'm supposed to be reading from my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, but I did that at Edgelit, and now I have a longing to go instead with something from my unannounced next novel and then swearing everyone to secrecy afterwards.  So that's one more reason to come along, together with the fact that the Hull area is long overdue a group like this and it's in a pub - a really good pub, from what I hear - and that Daniel's book sounds particularly interesting: you might get to hear a chapter from a work in progress that doesn't officially exist yet, unless I chicken out and just go with a story from Sign in the Moonlight like I'm meant to.

Anyway, the details are here - wait, is that a real deer's head? - but basically it's a case of being at The Monks Walk pub in Beverley at 4pm on Saturday the 27th of August and then drinking alcoholic beverages and listening to writer words, followed by more drinking alcoholic beverages and hanging out with like-minded folks.  Hopefully I'll see you there.

FantasyCon 2015

My first thought about this year's FantasyCon is that it was a whole 'nother experience going with friends - and, I've got to say, a wholly better one.  Last year at FantasyCon I met Andy Knighton and Charlotte Bond for the first time and this time around we all went together, and if nothing else I say here conveys a useful sense of what makes this particular convention stand out then that alone should do it: one year I made new friends, the next they were good enough friends that we were all comfortable with the idea of hanging out together for large portions of a weekend.  FantasyCon is a hit and miss affair, there's no doubt about that, but at its best, its somewhat smaller scale and more intimate vibe achieve great things that the bigger conventions frequently lack.

Me, John Connolly, Matthew Blakstad, A K Benedict, Guy Haley, Debbie Bennett

2015, it's fair to say, was FantasyCon at its best.  Not the perfect venue, by any means - the horror stories regarding food and drink were almost Nine Worlds-worthy! - but other than that, it's hard to pick on anything that wasn't either good or very good or really kind of marvelous.  And before I go any further, a shout-out to Richard Webb who did ninja work putting this stuff together well in advance.  And also, while I'm thinking, to those redcoats folks, who never once responded to my befuddled queries with "why the holy hell are you asking where room X is when you're standing right outside of room X and there's a big sign that says room X?"*

Soooooo ... even though we were there pretty much from the start, I only made the one panel on the Friday, and then it was mostly because I had friends on it, but Fae-Fi, Folk-Fum: Faerie & Folktale turned out to be an hour well spent, with a broad range of opinions bringing some new perspective to a rather well-worn subject.  (This, by the way, sums up all the panels I attended nicely: no mind-blowingly original topics, but an interesting range of panelists and some productive debates.  In my ideal world, panels would be a lot more like Tarantino movies, but I realise that's not likely to happen any time soon.)

With the remainder of Friday largely taken up by being lazy and hanging out with friends and listening to karoake - no, that wasn't me singing along to Let it Go, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar - I managed to get to bed at an only slightly stupid time.  Saturday was the closest I had to a work day, which as it turned out, wasn't that close at all.  I'd been quite chilled about my panel Is It Legit? Crime in Fantasy, Horror and SF until I realised that I was moderating in the largest (by quite a margin) of the three rooms and that THERE WAS NO COFFEE TO BE HAD ANYWHERE IN THE CONFERENCE CENTRE.  There wasn't much anyone could do about the former, but at least I was saved on the latter front by the magnificent Peter Newman, who basically made it his mission to save my coffee-starved life.  (He must never know that immediately afterwards I discovered that there was free coffee in the green room, and that it was much better than the slush the hotel were selling for ohsomuch money.)  Anyway, once I was suitably caffeinated, my panel seemed to go well enough.  And by the end I was particularly grateful to superstar guest of honour John Connolly, who can talk the legs off any quadruped mammal you could possibly throw his way but is also polite enough to let other people have their say, which from a moderating point of view basically makes him the perfect panelist.  (Though everyone, it has to be said, did sterling work.)

Having spent a large part of the remainder of the day loitering in the bar recovering from the very mild trauma of persuading authors to talk about author-stuff, I braved some more panels in the afternoon - YA: Why, eh? and Robots, Beasts & Humanimals: Writing Non-Human Characters, in close succession.  They were both solid, but two panels in a row turned out to be my limit for sitting in a room listening to people who aren't me talking, so I took a fresh air break, which frustratingly meant missing Tea and Jeopardy for about the thousand time running.  (One day I will experience Tea and Jeopardy.  This I swear upon the bones of someone or other's ancestors!)  Instead I ducked out to hunt up some food that wasn't microwaved by apathetic bar staff and then wandered back in time for my reading - which nearly no one turned up for, despite my copious hinting.  (Needless to say, thanks to the little circle who did.)  From there I moved on to the Undertow Publications book launch to celebrate the launch of Skein and Bone, the debut collection by V H Leslie, who I'd met over breakfast that morning.  This turned out to be an unexpected highlight, since not only was everyone involved really nice, there was free sangria.  That done, I drank an unwise amount and hung out with many more tremendous people, some of whom I knew and some I didn't, and finally staggered off bedwards.

Sunday morning saw me torn between Andy Knighton on the Chained to the Desk? The Writer’s Life Under the Microscope panel and Ian Sales on The Future of the Future, and in the end I opted for the former because it was Andy's first F'Con panel.  Then I decided to ask the question I'd prepped for Ian on Andy's panel, despite how it wouldn't have made a damn bit of sense.  Then I wimped out and asked a sensible question instead - well, one about juggling, at any rate.  Still, it was a good discussion, and no one mentioned going to work in a dressing gown, so perhaps we're progressing as a society.

And that was about the end of it.  If I were to grumble about one thing, and this is me so of course I am, it's that Sunday at a FantasyCon always feels like a bit of a wash-out.  It occurred to me for the first time that there's something slightly horrid and divisive about the notion of ending a conference with a banquet that half the attendees can't afford to go to, and I live in hope that that whole thing will die a death in the not too distant future.  But in this case it was a small deal indeed, because we wanted to get off early and the fact that the programming had finished and almost no one was around by one in the afternoon made that inordinately easy.  Which in turn meant getting back at a sensible time, which in turn seems to have alleviated the usual Con' lag and left me - after two days of considerably too much alcohol, too little proper food and definitely too little sleep - with much more energy than I had before.  Weird but true.

Meanwhile, next year brings FantasyCon back to the hallowed fields of Yorkshire, in the shape of FantasyCon by the Sea, and this of course is an immeasurably good thing.  I'll hope to see you there.




* There wasn't actually a room X.  I would have forgiven the venue everything, even their weird notions of what to put on pizza, if there had been.

My FantasyCon 2015 Schedule

FantasyCon 2015 is less than two days away.  How did this happen?  I'm looking at you, the linear progression of time!  And I'm scowling in a fashion that should make you deeply ashamed of your behaviour.  Anyway, needless to say, I'm wholly unprepared - largely due to the necessity of having to work like a nutter for the last two weeks to buy myself a whole two days in a row off, which weirdly becomes a lot more complicated when you're setting your own schedule.

But now it's time to get my act together!  Which means a lot of planning, a bit of printing off, a dash of stapling, (apparently I own a stapler!) and also writing this here blog post telling anyone who might curious what it is I'm going to be doing.  Which, as it turns out, wouldn't have taken that long at all if I'd just got on with it.  After all, I'm on precisely one panel - which is more than enough because I'm moderating the thing.  It is...

Sat 24 Oct 11.00 am  Is It Legit? Crime in Fantasy, Horror and SF

Room:  Conference Theatre

Crime has proved fertile ground for fantasy writers and vice versa and the evidence of increasing crossover into the crime-scene is more than circumstantial. Our identity parade of suspects considers some of the issues around depicting crime, criminals and the law in genre fiction.

And my interrogatees - um, fellow panelists - are Alexandra Benedict, Debbie Bennett, Matthew Blakstad, Guy Haley, and a certain Guest of Honour whom you might have heard of, the prodigious Mr John Connolly.  So no pressure there not to ask ridiculous questions then.

Also, I have a reading slot booked, on the Saturday, at 7.40 pm.  Since it's literally inconceivable that anyone could have anything better to do at a conference at twenty to eight on a Saturday night, I shall expect droves on people; in fact, probably best to turn up at least fifteen minutes early.  And as a little added incentive, I'm planning to read the strangest story I've ever written.  I mean, it's really strange.  Even by my standards.

You should totally come.

Theaker's Turns Fifty

I have been writing, now, for oodles of years, he says, being purposefully vague because he can't be bothered to stop and figure out how long he's been writing for and also possibly because if he did then it would make him sound kind of old.  The point is, I've been at this writing thing for a while now, I've been selling short fiction for almost as long as I've been writing, and in that time I've seen a lot of markets come and go.  I mean, a lot.

Goddammit, now I am sounding old.  Maybe not that many.  But more than just a few, okay?  Enough, at any rate, that I've gained some insight into just how hard it is to keep a magazine going, month after month, year after year.

For this reason, I have much admiration for Stephen Theaker for getting Theaker's Quarterly Fiction to its fiftieth issue.  That's no mean feat.  Then again, nor can it be easy making a magazine as reliably good as Theaker's tends to be; and I'd imagine it's hardly a piece of cake to imbue that magazine with its own distinct character, something Theaker's has almost an overabundance of.  But I think that what's impressed me most over the years is how every time I return to it, Theaker's has grown that bit more polished, to the point where this "most amateur of magazines" (Stephen's words, not mine!) has been looking awfully professional for a long while now.  It's a hell of an achievement to produce fifty issues; it's an even bigger one for every one of those issues to be a little better than the last. 

As such, I got quite excitable when I ran into Stephen at last year's FantasyCon and he mentioned that issue #50 was on its way; so much so that I started immediately trying to force a story on him. Eventually we settled on a piece called The House That Cordone Built.  It's old work, but it's a personal favourite that I was always sad not to have found a home for, and I gave it a hefty overhaul before I felt happy letting it out.  It owes a lot to my possible all-time favourite short science fiction story, Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House", a lot to M C Escher, and there's a bit of stuff in there about interregnum religious cults too, because I don't know why but there is.


Anyway, here's Mr Theaker himself with some talk about what's going on in the rest of his momentous, half-century issue:

"This three hundred and twenty-four page issue – our longest ever! – features fiction from many of our previous contributors, who have returned to help us celebrate fifty issues and ten years of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction: Antonella Coriander, David Tallerman, Douglas J. Ogurek, Howard Phillips, Howard Watts, John Greenwood, Matthew Amundsen, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Mitchell Edgeworth, Rafe McGregor and Walt Brunston!

Plus reviews from Douglas J. Ogurek, Howard Watts, Jacob Edwards and Stephen Theaker. Stephen and members of the reviews team answer your questions in “Ask Theaker’s”! Cover artist Howard Watts takes us through his process in “Artful Theakering”! And there’s a round-up of everything Stephen Theaker read last year but didn’t have time to review! Happy fiftieth to us!"

Yes indeed.  If that's piqued your interest then you can go here to find a free copy in your format of choice.