Eastercon 2013

This year's Eastercon had a lot to live up to.

Last year's was possibly the best of the conventions I've been to, with a comfy, modern venue and something not far off the perfect balance between entertainment, edutainment and providing a suitable venue in which to drink too much with friends and complete strangers.  Not to mention George R R Martin chillin' in the bar, the Iron Throne sitting in the lobby and, oh yeah, the fact that I met my partner Jobeda there.

No idea who these two are.

Meanwhile, Eastercon 2013 (henceforward, EightSquared) was set for a major weekend anyway, what with it coinciding with the deadline for me handing in Prince Thief - and with two novels plus a chapbook behind me, it felt like it might just be my first 'Con as something other than a newbie author.

With all that baggage, it shouldn't be taken as too much of a criticism to say that EightSquared was good rather than great.  In fact, given that it was organized in half the time of last year's, it's actually a fairly large compliment.  The only things that really let it down were the venue, (nice enough, but sorely in need of a larger bar space and some food that hadn't been brought in from the local school canteen) and a lack in the sort of ambition that's needed to shake up the UK Con template and drag in bigger, wider crowds.

Which isn't to say there was no ambition on display; only that, where it was most noticeable, it seemed to have gone into getting the nuts and bolts stuff right.  The Eightsquared committee made no bones about their commitment to gender parity and from what I saw they pulled it off, thereby setting the example that everyone else will be expected to follow.  I was also pleased to see a serious attempt to cut down on the staggering paper wastage that tends to go on at these things, (and hey, I say this as someone whose book would have been a freebie if they hadn't wisely steered away from that whole big bag o' books thing.)

"TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE"

As far as content went, most of what I made it to ranged from solid to excellent, and the events that I was in on all seemed to be well received.  Of my two panels, the one of superhero movies got a bit bogged down in fandom nitpicking (as such subjects will) while the one on older female characters in Fantasy and why there are so few of them, which I'd worried might be under-attended due to an early slot on the day the clocks sprang forward, turned out to a real success; I felt that by the end we'd made some good, important points.  For sheer fun, though, my favourite commitment of the weekend was the Graphic Novels Selection I did on the Friday night with Stephen Aryan, C E Murphy and Alys Sterling, wherein we basically rattled on about some of our favourite comics to a small but obviously enthusiastic audience.  I was definitely heading towards sloshedness by that point, and there are few more enjoyable things that prattling on tipsily about things you love to a group of people who seem genuinely interested.

Who would be fool enough to give Ian Sales a raygun?

As usual, though, the choicest pleasures of the weekend were to be found in the bar.  It was great to catch up with some old friends, to get to know people I've only met in passing before, and to meet a whole load of people who will hopefully become friends down the line.  One thing that Eastercon gets right more than any other Con - and I have no clue how they do this, something in the water maybe? - is that everyone is amazingly friendly, cheerful and eager to get into an in-depth conversation at even the slightest opportunity.

Oh, and speaking of friends, let's close with a huge well done to Ian Sales, whose novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains - which I heaped praise upon a few weeks ago - picked up the BSFA award for Best Short Fiction.  The full results can be found here.

Eastercon 2012: Part 2

So last time I talked very vaguely about my Eastercon experience ... which made sense because I was very vague throughout most of it, thanks partly to alcohol consumption of course, but mainly due to meeting lots of wonderful new people (and plenty of wonderful ... er, old people too) and because, let's face it, it's a damn good day when I'm not looking at least a little dazed.

But here, for whatever they're worth, are my more concrete impressions, as reconstructed by going through the programme and working out what the hell it was I actually did for three days:


Friday

Arrived in Heathrow around four, panic-finished the chapter of Prince Thief I was working on and then wandered over to the Eastercon hotel.  Or where Google Maps said it was - which was nowhere near where it actually was.  Wandered for an hour or so through the grim environs of Heathrow airport and eventually managed to find the convention using internet research and house numbering.  Entered the foyer, got slightly scared - could this vast and milling crowd in a posh hotel foyer really by Eastercon? - and rang Lavie Tidhar.  Assured that, yes, this was the place and I wasn't hallucinating.  Led through check-in and escorted safely to the bar, at which point normality began to resume.

Normality in this context, of course, meaning drinking and hanging out with writerly and publishering folks, with a brief diversion for one of my two proper meals through the weekend at a curry house down the road.  Watched Nir Yaniv suffer, thanks to Lavie's blasé ordering of some fairly virulent curries.  Back in the bar, introduced by Lavie to his friend Jobeda; somewhere along the line we decided to hang out at some panels the next day, not to mention her proposed stand up comedy act.  Left for my distant B & B somewhere past three, leaving George R R Martin damn near the only person left in the bar.  No wonder the man's a living legend!



Saturday

Arrived back at the convention somewhere around lunchtime, feeling oddly guilty for missing Lavie's Non-Anglophone SF panel.  Wandered for an hour, trying to get the lay of the land ... not easy in a hotel designed to obfuscate the unwary.  Got lost.  Got found.  Got lost.  Ran into Jobeda on the landing between the first and the third floors.  (There was no second floor that I could find.  On the map it was marked mysteriously as the Non-Smoking Floor.)  Affirmed that we were both going to the How To Get Published panel, which we promptly did.  Felt a little sneaky being there, and very glad to have that particular hurdle behind me, at least for a little while.

Milled for a couple of hours, ate delicious apple crumble in the bar and went to Lavie's The War on Terror panel - which was interesting up to a point, but the politics / literature balance got a bit askew, until one irate fan pulled the panel up on it in no uncertain terms.  Killed time until the Masquerade and Cabaret, and Jobeda's stand-up act. So this is what people do at Cons when they're not in the bar! My eyes were opened to a brave new world ... as were those of the children left in the audience for Jobeda's hilarious but somewhat explicit stand-up, despite the compere's warnings, who got a crash course in male anatomy that probably saved their parents hours of muddled bird / bee analogies.

Back, inevitably, to the bar, with a brief diversion to watch a bit of A Tale of Two Sisters in the video room.  Discovered that Korean horror isn't necessarily to everyone's tastes.  (The room was empty.)  Briefly understood the plot for the first time, in one of those startling moments of drink-fuelled clarity.  Back to the bar for one last stretch.

I'm the one, sadly, who isn't Joe Abercrombie.

Sunday

Suffering mightily from drinking from far too many pints of scrumpy.  Surely anything that's 7.2% and comes in a pint glass should come with a goverment health warning, or at the very least a free stomach pump?  My one and only panel, Wench, Fetch Yon Tankard Here, was at 12.00, which hadn't seemed so unreasonable two days ago.  Fortunately, I was far from the most hungover person there; at least I wasn't reduced to wearing sunglasses.  Somehow, it seemed to go very, very well.  Bella Pagan had actually prepared questions - lots of them! - and my fellow panelateers, Joe Abercrombie and Jaine Fenn, were in sparkly form.  (Even the one of them in sunglasses.  All I'll say is, it wasn't Joe.)  We had a good crowd, there were lots of questions, and I got to plug Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series for its cracking fight scenes, little realising that he was actually in the audience (and also Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David, who wasn't.) 

Next came the marvellously titled You Got Your Robot Elf Sex in my SF, which turned out to be possibly the best panel I saw, and one of the most well attended ... obviously we genre folks need to talk about (and possibly write about) sex a hell of a lot more than we're currently doing.  After that was the BSFA awards, which I mentioned a little in the previous post; all I'll say here is that it was another reminder that these things work best when they're open to the widest of audiences.  Eastercon, for me, was a success precisely because it nailed that so well, and jokes about writers aimed at their writer mates fell too wide of that bar.  Still, it was all worth it for the look on Paul Cornell's face when he won for Best Short Story. Sadly, even Paul Cornell couldn't save the last panel of the Con, Multicultural Steampunk - mainly because he wasn't on it.  With at least two authors openly not interested in the topic at hand and only Lavie making any real attempt to talk about it, not to mention a startling lack of multiculturalism and that wacky 9PM time slot, it probably wasn't the best panel to close out on.

 I had good intentions of an early night, mainly because I was fading fast, but interesting people kept appearing and talking about interesting things, and the upstairs bar was serving cheap - by Heathrow standards - wine.  Finally drifted B & B-wards around half one, leaving behind a crowd that was showing no signs of flagging after three days of hard-but-literate partying.

Tortoro does not condone T-shirt murder.

Had I realised how much was going on on the Monday I might have stayed on - my one very small criticism (apart from the other very small criticisms I've made, obviously) was that the final programme was released a bit late for those of us making long journeys to plan around ... but then I can only guess at the last-minute crises that were going on in the background.  As it was, I had no choice but to bid farewell to the Radisson Edwardian and to Eastercon ... at least for a few months.  Next year I'm doing the whole damn thing, I swear it!

If there's one thing I learned over the course of the three days it was that it's worth taking at least a little time to savour the wonders the organisers have slaved for months to put together.  And if there's another thing it's that while writers and editors are generally great people to talk to, there are other great people out there too, and some of them will cheerfully discuss Studio Ghibli films for hours when accosted by a random stranger who threatens to murder them for their Tortoro T-shirt.

Obviously, these are both valuable lessons.