December, Where It's At...

The problem with planning is that plans sometimes need to change, and it's tough not to feel a little bad when that happens.  Especially if you're perhaps a bit too much of a planner, like I am; if you are, indeed, slightly OCD in setting yourself targets and sticking to them as if life, the universe and everything depended on it.

I mention this as a roundabout way of saying that until I few days ago I was planning to start my new novel today, and now I'm not.  And I feel a little bad about it. But I probably shouldn't, because not starting it is the right thing to do.  I should, in fact, be feeling pretty good about making the right decision.  So here's a blog post where I get to convince myself of that.

As I've hinted at more than once, but perhaps never explicitly said, I've burned myself out quite badly over the last couple of years; writing full time around full time work took a toll on my health, and by the time I walked away from the day job I was more than ready to drop.  I'm glad to say that things are now much better - as you'd hope they would be after six weeks of relative peace and quiet - but they're still not quite better enough that I feel ready to wade into the demands of a new novel.

And the new novel is going to be demanding.  That's the other thing I've realised over the last few weeks.  The First World War is not a subject you can approach lightly.  My preliminary research, of which I've done a fair bit, has only made me realise how much damn research I'm going to need to do to get anywhere near the level of understanding and technical accuracy I need to do this book justice.  Which turns out to be revelation / difficulty number two: I'm going to need to try and do it justice. There's nothing like reading the diaries of decent men who died horribly to sharpen the mind on that latter score; I really don't want to be the guy who writes a lousy, trivializing book about the First World War.

All of which means that December is now research month the second, and also rest month the second, because I want to be fighting fit when I go at this thing.  It's also the second month of my return to short story writing, which is yet another reason why putting the novel back a little feels like the right thing to do, because getting back into short story writing has been ridiculously fun; short fiction is always going to be my first love as a writer, and I've missed the hell out of it.  I've already written a sequel to the (recently published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies) Ill-Met at Midnight, and I'm currently getting into what was supposed to be a short story but appears to be becoming a novelette titled "War of the Rats", set in ... um ... well, in WW1 actually, because I might not be ready to write a novel yet, but I've been itching to put some of my new-found knowledge to use.  Oh, and I've promised Lavie Tidhar a story.  But the less said about that the better.

So that's December.  January, meanwhile, is absolutely goddamn set in stone as 'starting new novel month.'   So if there's another post here in a month's time explaining why I haven't got down to it then please do me a favour and come find me and kick my arse.

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!

It's Not a Popularity Contest...

...But if it was, Giant Thief would at least be somewhere in the running.  Because there it is, proudly occupying one corner of the "Popular Reads" table in Waterstones Covent Garden.

I got a tip-off from the prodigious Mr Lavie Tidhar that it was there last week, but it was a few days before I could investigate for myself.  When I finally did, though, sure enough, there it was: Giant Thief on display and being recommended, surrounded by some astonishingly fine Fantasy fiction.

A better photographer would have managed to get the "Popular Reads" sign actually in the shot, since you're now having to take it on trust that this isn't the "books that are so unpopular we're giving them away for free" table.  And a better photographer would probably have emphasized the fact that Giant Thief was sitting directly under Good Omens, which was possibly my favourite book as a teenager.  But then, said better photographer would have been organized enough not to rush in carrying two bags and a suitcase, on their way to catching the train home to Leeds ... so all things considered, I think I did okay to at least make sure that the title was readable.  And I surely deserve bonus points for signing all of their stock* and having a brief but pleasant chat with the nearest shop assistant about Good Omens (she didn't understand what the fuss was about) and still managing to catch my train with whole minutes to spare.


* I mean, all of it that I wrote, obviously.**
** Well, and a couple dozen copies of Fifty Shades of Grey.

A Review: Adrift on the Sea of Rains

A few months ago, I misguidedly promised Ian Sales that I'd read his (rather beautifully, it must be said) self-published novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains and that if I enjoyed it I'd say something nice about it in public.  I figured I could get away with reading a page or two, dismissing it and then quietly forgetting about the whole thing, having at least been nice enough to splash out on a copy.

Now, maybe I should have guessed from the fact that so many big name authors have expressed their admiration for Adrift - see, for example, Lavie Tidhar's gushing praise here - that my scheme was flawed.  Probably I'd just assumed Ian had preyed upon the basic weakness of every writer and plied them with free booze.  Needless to say, I wasn't banking on Adrift on the Sea of Rains turning out to be one of my favourite reads of the year.

But it was, and a month on from reading it, with nothing else pressing to talk about, it still is ... so I guess it's time I said something nice.

I won't spoil too much of the story, since Adrift unfolds in such a delicate and careful fashion, in such neatly unfolding layers, that you're better coming to it with minimal foreknowledge.  Our cast are a crew of astronauts - or lunanauts? - trapped in an impossible situation by a cruel yet very plausible twist of geopolitical fate, and then offered a tiny sliver of hope and an ever-diminishing window in which to take advantage of it.  How they go about doing so, along with a parallel back-story that steadily fills in the gaps of why things went so wrong in the first place, is the meat of Ian's tale.  Try and imagine something akin to Clarke's A Fall of Moondust had it been written with some of Gene Wolfe's elusiveness and you'll have a fair idea of what to expect.

I know Ian's proud of the hard science aspects of Adrift, and justifiably so; he's brought a physicality and a richness of detail to his tale that's terrifically hard to get right without falling into nitpicking, and without sacrificing the all-important sense of awe that a story like this needs.  But what makes it that bit more fun (and for something so determined to be scientifically rigorous, Adrift is a whole hell of a lot of fun) is how all that rich scientific realism is coupled to such a basically preposterous plot; that Ian takes his believable characters and their believable setting and hurls them at a concept that include Nazi mad science, inter-dimensional travel and cold war paranoia at its most extreme.

It's preposterous, it has no right to work, and yet it does, with remarkable elegance.  It achieves everything a good story needs to and does all of it well, which is greater praise that it might seem on the surface.  And unless you're a certified expert on the US space program, it will probably even teach you stuff - not to mention igniting your interest to know more, so that you can begin to separate out Ian's carefully woven web of fact and fiction.  In short, it's small wonder of modern science-fiction and, if that sounds at like your thing, you really should go buy a copy.

Friends in Interesting Places

In the rush of crazy that was the build up to Crown Thief coming out, I managed to write an entire blog post and somehow forget to post it.  It went something like this:

It's always nice when one of your mates who also happens to be a famous and well-respected author happens to say something nice (or even just something interesting) about your book in public places.  And recently, to my slight astonishment, it's happened not once but twice.

First up was Adrian Tchaikovsky towards the back end of August, in his post Love the Bright Sword on the Tor blog. Adrian always has something good to say about the Fantasy genre, which, let's face it, he knows better than most of us, having added to it so dramatically with his Shadows of the Apt series.  But this is my favourite of his posts that I've read, and not just because it mentions Giant Thief (although, there's that!)  Adrian talks about one of the great elephants in the room of Fantasy fiction, our overwhelming reliance on violence as a plot device, and wonders if that's really the best we can do as a genre.

The mention of Giant Thief is in relation to the fact that Damasco would rather do just about anything than get his hands bloody, so it should be clear where I stand on this one.  I've a certain soft spot for heroes who solve their every problem with a sword, gun or whatever, probably because I read far too many G. I. Joe comics in my formative years.  More and more though, I'm drawn towards stories that manage to talk about something other than our inate need to beat the crap out of each other over every little thing. I mean, we've been around for a fair old while as a species.  We've walked on the moon.  We have jetpacks (even if we don't use them much) and phones that tell us where the nearest cash machine is.  So just maybe it's time our heroes stopped solving their every problem by headbutting someone?

Osama, of course, is now out.  Here's proof.

[Listening to the audio of Giant Thief, and having always been proud of the fact that Damasco never saw a fight he didn't try to run away from, I was actually a little shocked by how scrappy he is in the first chapter.  In fairness, he's just been hanged, he's half starved and has every reason to be in a lousy mood. Still, he's really agressive for a while there.  It's a good job he meets Saltlick when he does, or he might have done something we'd both have regretted.]

Anyway, barely had I gotten through thinking about that one when Lavie Tidhar - whose astonishing and many-award-nominated novel Osama comes out in paperback directly after Crown Thief - wrote an entire blog article on Giant Thief.  I won't spoil it by preempting it too much, because it's a fascinating piece in its own right, but the gist is that - based on the fact that Easie Damasco does very little to further his own story and in fact spends most of his own novel running away from it - I've inadvertently invented a new subgenre, which Lavie labels "slacker fantasy."

I am deeply in love with that term.  Expect it see it cropping up with preposterous regularity in future posts.

Tales of Damasco: Update 4 (Part 1)

Honestly, you leave it a week or two and suddenly there's so much novel series news that it barely fits into one post.  The only reason I'm not splitting it into two parts is because then it would be Update 4, Part 1 and Update 4, Part 2, and that's just plain stupid.  It's like Rambo movie numbering.  I mean, First Blood, Part 2?  Explain that to me with your science, Sylvester Stallone.

It lives! It breathes! It talks!

Except ... and this is genuinely embarassing ... I'm about halfway through the post now, and it really isn't going to fit into one posticle.  I think Blogger might break.  And think of the catastrophic harm that would do to the fabric of society; think of all those people who wouldn't be able to post cute pictures of their cats falling off things.  So, okay, due to unavoidable circumstances outside of anyone's control, least of all mine, let's just call this Part 1 and pretend the whole horrible incident never happened.

Right.  So.  There's been plenty happening on the Giant Thief front since I last talked about it, a whopping two months ago.  Can it really be that long?  And didn't I say it had only been two weeks a couple of paragraphs ago?  Anyway the most exciting news - out of a lot of exciting news, it has to be said - is that the audio book edition of GT is now out.  I've been looking forward to hearing it ever since I found it would be happening ... and, well, I still am, because I haven't actually been sent a copy yet, but I have listened to the extract on Audible (UK here, US here) and I'm okay with confidently saying that James Langton's done a terrific job on the reading.  Boy ... at the risk of seeming like I'm dropping hints ... I just can't wait to hear the whole thing!

What else?  Well, there've been a couple more interviews up: another text one with Civilian Reader and, fresh from the dank and sinister back rooms of Pontins Prestatyn and the SFX weekender, a live talky one with the Fantasy Faction lads.  Of all the interviews I've done (and let's face it, we're admittedly not talking huge numbers here) this is my favourite, because so much of it boils down to me, Marc and Paul geeking the hell out over our shared love and sci-fi, and I don't get to do that half as often as I'd like to, let alone have it podcast to thousands of people.

I'm the one who's not Ian Whates's left hand.

Lastly, there have been a fair old flood of reviews trickling in (in so much as a flood can trickle, which it probably can't) over the last two months.  I've actually lost track a little of what came in when, but here's a quick round-up of the ones I'm confident I haven't mentioned yet:

Fantasy Book Review described GT as "a very adept debut from an author who has a lot of talent", a sentiment echoed by Ed Fortune, writing for Clockwork Reviews at Nevermet Press, who said, "An excellent debut and I hope to see more from this fresh new talent in the future." TheVillageSmith asked the easily answered question, "Who can go wrong with a book about an incorrigible thief whose rapier wit is stronger than his backbone" (no one, obviously) while firebreathingmonsters cut straight to the blurb with "this is a light, fun read and I enjoyed it."  Meanwhile, Pornokitsch concluded their 30 word review by noting, "...overall, an excellent fantasy debut" and (just in) Bloodsong of Bloodsong's Blog begins, "I loved this book!" and concludes with some fantastic advice: "...try to read it in an Antivan accent. (or Spanish/Hispanic if you like). It makes it richer and even more enjoyable."

I wholeheartedly concur.

Not me.

My absolute favourite, though, is John Hobkinson's, from his blog Clockwork Reviews (a different Clockwork Reviews from the above, oddly.)  John says that "I would be hard pressed to find someone who would not enjoy this book", amongst other nice things, but that isn't why he's my favourite.  It has more to do with John recounting the story of how I (acidentally, it has to be said) talked him into buying a copy of Giant Thief at the SFX weekender, and his getting in touch to send me the above photo - hopefully the last record, by the way, of what that loveable rapscallion Lavie Tidhar described to anyone who'd listen as my Steve Guttenberg hair.

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.

Eastercon 2012: Part 1

So I can't honestly say that I just got back from Eastercon 2012, because I didn't have the stamina for day four, but this is about the first time I've felt properly recovered enough to say anything constructive about it.

A lot of that, obviously, has to do with alcohol consumption, lack of food or sleep and all the other stuff that comes with having too good a time to worry about keeping your body functioning on anything but the most rudimentary levels.  But also, as with just about every Con I've been to now, it takes a day or two for the sheer excitement of being surrounded by hundreds of wonderful, wonderfully like-minded people in an environment shaped specifically with your emotional and intellectual needs in mind, and to get back into the mindset of day-to-day life.  It occurs to me right now that Cons are kind of theme parks for writers and publishing types and genre fans - except that instead of making you slightly nauseous and fractionally more stupid, they leave you brutally hung over but a little happier, a little more aware about what you do and why and who you're doing it for and how it fits into everything else around you.

BSFA award winner Paul Cornell, about to explode with joy.

I think that's been true of every Con I've done so far to a greater or lesser degree, but far more so of this one, when I finally went through with my long-standing intention of actually doing some convention stuff and not just loitering in the bar.  The fact that I managed it has much to do with Lavie Tidhar introducing me to the rather wonderful and lovely Jobeda Ali, who - although she writes and makes films and performs stand-up comedy and does more interesting things than you can count on all three hands - was basically attending as a fan, not to mention a Con newbie.

 Either Jobeda took me under her wing or I took her under mine, or else there was some kind of chimeric mutual undertaking of wings, but the upshot was that I actually went around Eastercon 2012 with my eyes more or less open, attended panels that I wasn't actually on, listened to what people were saying even when I didn't need to, talked to people who weren't (or weren't primarily) writers, and generally felt like I saw a least of little of what the organisers had put what must have been almost unimaginable trouble into organising.

And it was a triumph.  It really was.  A few brief and very random examples:

- There was a room where people only played board and roleplaying games.  I got the impression that some of them may not have left it through the entire four days.  Someone had taken the thought to include them.  They seemed to be having a great time.

- Gender-balanced panels, more or less ... but more more than less, if you know what I mean.  What I mean is, someone somewhere tried damn hard to get it right, and mostly succeeded.

- The fact that we, as an industry, got the Guardian's ear - in a very good way - and deserved it.

- There were families.  Actual families!  With children!  Many of whom were probably scarred for life when Jobeda did her stand-up routine, but hey, if they don't learn about genital surgery at conventions they'll learn it in the playgrounds, right?

Sure, there were some slip-ups, and a couple of them were fairly monumental.  I was less offended by John Meaney's sort-of-comedy routine at the BSFA awards than many people, and found some of it actually pretty funny, but there's no getting around the fact that it was deeply exclusive, in a way that so much of the convention managed not to be.  The Multicultural Steampunk panel, by being pushed to the arse-end of the schedule and then being not even slightly multicultural, became something of a bad joke, one not helped by the panelist who went to great and repeated pains to point out how little the panel topic applied to her.

As an industry, we still have a ways to go.  But how nice to feel like we're on the right track!  A win is a win is a win.

Next: Some actual discussion of what I did at Eastercon 2012.

SFX 2012: Part 2

Saturday I was up early once more, encouraged by the irrepressible Mr Lavie Tidhar.  A good job too, because Saturday was my actual work day, where I did stuff to earn my magic get-into-Pontins-free card.  Saturday, in short, was the day where all the scary stuff piled up like a motorway pile-up of scary.  Partly my fault, of course, for running into the Fantasy Faction lads at the previous night's party and arranging my first ever face to face interview with them for after my first ever panel and my first ever book signing.  I mean, there's an argument for jumping in at the deep-end, right?  What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and all that?  Absolutely.

Less likely to kill you than you might think.

I'm not entirely sure what I did for the first half of the day.  I know I hung around the bar quite a lot, was hugely impressed by Jonathan Green's vast and varied writerly CV and  wandered over to Lavie's signing of his new House of Murky Depths-published picture book Going to the Moon!, which from the flick I had at it while trying to work out if I could afford to buy any more damn books, looked tremendous.  I remember going for lunch and somehow - I really have no clue how - managing almost to be late for the panel and having to peg it back to Pontins amidst some classically welsh weather.

So.  The panel.  It was called It's Not a Story, It's a Map!, and I was there with Gaie Sebold, Sam Sykes, Ian Whates and China soddin' Mievelle, with moderation provided by the terrific, great-blurb-providing Juliet E McKenna.  So no pressure.  None.  Reliable people had assured me that although China is a living legend and looks like some kind of mythical giant-squid-hunting badass, he's really a lovely guy, (he was), and that although Juliet could talk the legs off a giant squid, she would no doubt make a top class moderator (she did.)  All was good.  My cool remained more or less intact - even when, on my third pass through the green room* I realised that the elderly bearded chap regailing all and sundry with some lengthy and bizarre anecdote at enormous volume was Brian bloody Blessed.

The suggestion to sit in name order was my only contribution, but it was a good'un.

None of this, however, dinted my surface calm - mainly because the hangover was kicking in quite hard by that point and I was mainly focused on making sure my body didn't do anything to embarass me.  And as it turned out, despite hopelessly inadequate technology that rendered it impossible for anyone on the panel to actually hear what the others were saying, I fared quite well.  I made a couple of comments that didn't seem too brazenly idiotic, no one tried to laser anyone else's face off with a clockwork heatray and we managed to come to the unanimous conclusion that maps are the ultimate evil in fantasy literature and must be burned upon the altars of our dark gods.

(Personally, I quite like maps in fantasy books, but sometimes you've just got to pick your battles.)

Next came my signing, sitting me once more besides the mighty Mr Ian Whates, and the brilliant-yet-alarming news that Giant Thief had already more or less sold out.  Great on the "wholly crap, Giant Thief has sold out" front, not so hot on the "what am I actually going to do for the next hour?" one.  But it worked out pretty well, since a couple of people came back with previously-bought copies and enough punters arrived that we managed to flog the last few.  (Huge thanks, by the way, to everyone who sought out my illegible squiggle.)

Marc, me, Paul.  Say what you like, but I shined the hell out of those Docs.

With all the really terrifying stuff over with, I was pretty relaxed by the time Marc Aplin and Paul Wiseall arrived to wisk me off for my Fantasy Faction interview.  It was a lot of fun, and I got to burble about a ton a stuff close to my heart, like why short stories are great and what a complete asshat Easie Damasco is.  Of the two live interviews I've done recently, I think this is the one that's less likely to embarass the hell out of me when I hear it.  Cheers to Marc and Paul for being almost unbelievably nice and enthusiastic, and for managing to comandeer a passing spaceship just so that we could all have our photo taken together.

Work done, I retired for dinner and then more drinkage ... and finally, late in the early hours, the delirium tremens-like flailing that must pass for dancing if you happen to have an XY chromosome.  Needless to say, it isn't a sight that needs to be inflicted on rational beings (not that there were many around by that point), so it's a damn good job I managed to switch to pained glaring mode before Jonathan Green unleashed something we'd all regret.

Four thousand people?  No problem, mate!

Sunday I was up bright and early once again, after a refreshing five hours sleep (damn you Tidhar!) and ready to brave the machinations of the British train companies - who, god bless 'em, had completely failed to notice that they'd sold about a thousand times as many tickets out of Prestatyn as they would on a normal Sunday, and had cancelled the train out in favour of shuttling everyone to the nearest city in half-hourly milk floats.  Cue a chain of events that nearly led to us being pumelled by Storm Troopers and a couple of hundred irrate, hungover con'ers. 

But that's a story for another time...

Lastly, while I remember, cheers to old friend, master comics creator and soon-to-be Solaris novelist Al Ewing for keeping my company on the journey home - and indeed to everyone who hung out with and / or and bought me drinks, the Angry Robot gang for a great first signing, and of course the SFX folks for a con par excellence.  Roll on 2013!




* See!  Celebrity terminology!

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.

Road to SFX

Just a note to say that I'll be at the SFX Con in Prestatyn this weekend if anyone feels like saying hello, along with a veritable army of Angry Robot authors - Ian Whates, Andy Remic, Adam Christopher, Gav Thorpe, Anne Lyle and Lavie Tidhar.

Actually, the truth is I'll be a little more than just attending.  I have my first ever signing - at five in the afternoon* on the Saturday, along with Ian - and my first ever panel right before that at four, entitled It's not a story it's a map - does Fantasy set worldbuilding over character? Discuss and featuring such folks as Ian (again!), Gaie Sebold, Sam Sykes and China ("holy crap it's China Mieville") Mieville.  So that's - y'know - terrifying.  But in a good way.

A terrifying good way.

Anyway, while I'm here, why not share a bit of Giant Thief news?   It's coming in thick and fast, after all.  Over on the left there is a copy on the "Classic Fantasy and Sci-fi table" at the Waterstones in Cambridge, a dramatic rise to fame that may have had something to do with my friend Bill S. Brennan.  But hey, it serves them right for misfiling me (since when does TA come after TH, eh, Waterstones Cambridge?)

Then there are a couple more reviews up.  Keith West at Adventures Fantastic says that "With his debut novel, David Tallerman has succeeded in doing what few authors have done.  He has written a story ... that made me laugh out loud," and concludes that "Tallerman is not an author with whom I was familiar before reading this book ... I'd be willing to be his name will become more prominent if he writes more books like this one."  Meanwhile, over at Tor.Com, Stefan Raets impressively thorough review winds up with the heart-warming suggestion that "If you’re in the mood for something fast-paced and entertaining, not too challenging but instead light and, well, simply fun, Giant Thief is a great choice."

Lastly, I've done another interview - this one's with Sally Janin from the Qwillery, and covers such controversial topics as Plotting vs Pantsing and my guaranteed-or-your-money-back cure for writer's block.

Right, then.  I may or may not see you at the SFX weekender.  I'll be the one looking as though he's about to wet his best undercrackers at the thought of attending his first panel.


* Not, as Darren Turpin at AR was good enough to point out, six like I originally said.

Read Giant Thief For Free*

*Well, discluding chapters four from twenty four, that is.

But that's still an entire eight for nothing, right?  Nothing much happens in those last twenty-one chapters anyway.  The big battle, the actual giant-thievery, all the good stuff, that's all there in those first three chapters.  After that it's pretty much just plot and running around and a bit of character interaction that, truth be told, you can probably live without.

No, wait ... I'm joking.  Really.  Joking.  There's lots of fun to be had in chapter four and onwards.  You'll laugh!  You'll cry!  You'll wonder how Easie Damasco gets through each chapter without getting the good hard kicking he so richly deserves!  I'm not actually trying to talk people into just reading the first chunk of Giant Thief and then giving up, convinced it's all downhill from there.  That would be stupid.  I see that now.

Truth was, I figured if I could get you to read those first three chapters, you'd be so caught up that you'd buy Giant Thief without even thinking about it.  You'd be all "what's in the bag?" and "has he seriously just stolen that giant?" and "when is someone going to give this Easie Damasco guy the good hard kicking he so richly deserves?"  And I'd be chuckling all the way to the bank.

So ... I'm sorry.  It was cheap and manipulative, and it demeaned both of us.

D'you know what I do when I feel demeaned?  I read the first three chapters of Giant Thief!

Incidentally, if that awakens your taste for reading just the first three chapters of books then ... well, that's not the effect I was going for, obviously ... but those wonderful fiends at Angry Robot have got you covered nonetheless: here's where I pilfered the Giant Thief sampler from, and you'll find similar previews of the latest from Dan Abnett, Adam Christopher, Lavie Tidhar and Ian Whates.  Good company!

Fantasycon 2011: I Was There and I Even Remember Most Of It

I should probably start by admitting that I saw next to nothing of Fantasycon 2011.  For that reason - and also because it's only the second one I've been to - you might want to take it with a pinch of salt when I say that it was the best Fantasycon EVER.  But, you know what?  You'd be wrong.  Because it really was.

For a start, there was the weather.  A seafront hotel in Brighton, on the hottest weekend of the year?  That's a good start right there.  Compare that with the concrete gulag that was last year's venue and you've already hit the ground running.  But the Royal Albion was a damn fine choice of venue by any definition.  Good food, nice staff, decent rooms, a floor plan that would have given Theseus a seizure, a reasonably priced bar (I'll be returning to this point later) ... I may not know a great deal about conventions or the organisation thereof, but I think those things pretty much speak for themselves.

Then add to that a load of great-sounding events - like those masterclass things I only managed to hear about after they were all booked up - and a ridiculous industry who's-who guest list,with not only famous FCon regulars like Ramsay Campbell, Mark Morris and the lovely Sarah Pinborough, but guests like Joe Abercrombie, John Lindqvist and Brian Aldiss (Brian bloody Aldiss!)

So how come I saw hardly any of the 'Con then?  I mean, if it was so great and there were so many exciting things to do and so many neat authors to be in awe of?  Well, unfortunately, this is where we come back to that reasonably priced bar.  Okay, that and the fact that my friend and Endangered Weapon B artist Bob Molesworth happens to live in Brighton and most of Saturday was taken up by him and his girlfriend taking me to a fantastic pub and introducing me to Dave's Comics, the greatest comic shop I've ever seen.

But ... yeah ... mainly it was the bar.

That said, it seems only right to focus the rest of this post on a handful of the people who kept me company through my Fantasycon 2011 experience:

First up has got to be Lavie Tidhar.  If you don't know Lavie then you almost certainly weren't at Fantasycon; if you do know him, it's probably because he's one of the most reliably fascinating writers (notice how I didn't say genre writers) working today.  To me, though, Lavie's my Zeno and Angry Robot stablemate and the guy who kept me company throughout much of the weekend, shared his encyclopedic knowledge of everyone there and introduced me to most of them, and generally entertained the hell out of me.  My biggest regret of the conference is being too broke (and okay, too cheap) to buy his latest, the fascinating-looking Osama.

Then there's Alison Littlewood, who I've known for a fair old while now and been published besides on more than a few occasions, and who really couldn't deserve her recent deal with Jo Fletcher books more.  A Cold Season is going to be an absolute stunner.  And I'm damn glad we're not working in the same genre, since in the freakiest of coincidences, me and Ali are launching on exactly the same day*, and she would totally steal all my readers.  Ali, if you read this, apologies for missing your reading like I promised not to do.  At that point, I'd been asleep for precisely three and a half hours.  It was a long Saturday night.

But if there was one thing that really made the hell out of my weekend, it was meeting Mike Carey.  And not just meeting him, but getting to hang out with him for about an hour at the Jo Fletcher launch, drinking free wine and anatomising his career in great and minute detail.  Following on from my similar idiocy last year, my way of introducing myself to Mike was by professing my admiration for something he never actually wrote, and the fact that the conversation didn't end right there is testimony to the fact that he's - and I don't say this lightly! - the nicest person who also happens to be one of the top five writers working in the comics industry working today I've ever met.

Of course, I ran into a whole lot of other people, and most of them were completely brilliant.  The fact that I don't know their names has no relation to the merits of their conversation and everything to do with the fact that my memory is crap at the best of times and even worse when drowned in alcohol.  That and the way the name badges had apparently been designed to turn around at the slightest excuse, meaning everyone ended up being called           .  So ...              whoever you were and wherever you may be, thanks for hanging out and listening to whatever alcohol-fuelled ridiculousness I happened to be coming out with.

(Odds were, I was boring the hell out of you about how I met Mike Carey.)

So next year?  Next year I'm going to actually make some events.  And readings.  And signings.  I'm going to do all those things that make a convention a convention and not just a load of industry folks propping up a bar like it's the last bar on earth and if it should ever fall the sun will immediately implode and annihilate all life in the universe.

I will.

I'm not even kidding here.


* (that'd be the 2nd of February 2012, incidentally)

My First Eastercon, the Necessarily Short Version

Because, after all, I was only there for about three hours.  I listened to seventeen seconds of a panel debate, wandered around the art show and the dealers room, got lost a lot, helped steal a table for the Angry Robot signing, sat in the bar with AR editor Marc Gascoigne and friends for a while and then went home (or tried to - we'll come to that.)

So the upshot is that I don't have anything terribly useful or intelligent to say about Eastercon.  As such, my thoughts should probably be taken with a pinch of salt or seven.  They are, in no particular order: 

• I wish I could have stayed a lot longer.  There was a heck of a lot going on that seemed worth investigating, and everything I saw was interesting enough that I wished I could have paid it more attention.
• I met a lot of really cool people in a relatively short space of time.  That has to be a good sign.  Particular note should go to spec-fic artist Jethro Lentle and alt-folk musician Jordan Reyne, two brilliantly talented people who were both willing and able to geek out about obscure movies with a complete stranger at the drop of a hat.
• Dealer passes are awesome.  They're like the con equivalent of the Jedi mind trick.
• You want to secure a conference?  Having a single reception desk at one of the nineteen or so entrances and a couple of people sitting outside particular rooms just doesn't cut it.  Single point of entry, automated gun turrets.  End of story.
• The Birmingham Hilton was not a good choice of venue.  Too big and too crazily expensive.  There just aren't that many genre fans who also happen to be oil barons.
• I hope I get to go again next year.  So long as they don't hold it in a Hilton.  Or in Birmingham.
• Angry Robot are really cool.  I mean, really.  If I pretty much knew how passionate these guys are about what they were doing before, it's absolutely burned into the crevices of my brain now.
• When you actually get to meet your publishers and hold one of their books in your sweaty paws and see how beautifully and carefully put together it is and then realise that that's going to be you in about nine months time ... well, that's worth giving up a day for.

On a slightly more coherent note, I mainly just went to say hello to some people I'd only previously met in the digiverse, so everything else was a bonus.  On that basis, it was great to put a face to such names as Lavie Tidhar, Aliette de Bodard, Andy Remic, Adam Christopher - and last but clearly the opposite of least, Dan Abnett.

I may have geeked out a little when I met Dan Abnett.  It's one thing to have been reading someone's fantastic comics work for years and then to meet them and discover they're incredibly nice.  It's quite another to suddenly get it through your head that you're signed with the same publisher.  Heck, I even bought Dan's new book, Embedded.  How's that for adulation?

Of course, what Dan doesn't know is that while he was signing it, I was secretly stealing a lock of his hair*, which will henceforth be kept under my mattress to imbue me with magical super writing powers.  If you're reading this a year from now, wondering how I managed to write fifteen books and ninety seven comics in twelve months and they all be utterly brilliant - well, there's your answer.

So not a bad day at all ... until the train "service" stranded me in Birmingham, with no money, in the middle of the night.  Want to get a train back from Birmingham to Cheltenham on a main line route after a quarter to eight, on a day that's next to a bank holiday?  Well, that's just crazy talk, mister.  And if you end up spending the night in a fleepit hotel then you've only got yourself to blame.

Let's just call it a lesson learned, eh?


* If you've ever seen Dan, you'll have some idea how hard this was.

Big News, Part 1: Agented!

As I've possibly kind of hinted on a couple of occasions, there have been some big things building at this end over the last three months or so, which I've had to sit on and keep schtum about until they became completely one-hundred percent official.

Did I say big?  I meant, of course, huge.  Gigantic.  Megalithic.  (*Consults dictionary*)  Okay, maybe not that last one.

Anyway ... I'm immensely pleased to announce the first part of that huge-but-maybe-not-precisely-megalithic news.  Henceforward, and beginning with my first completed novel Giant Thief, my writing work will be represented by the Zeno Literary Agency.

Rather than try and explain in my own words just why that's so damn awesome, here's the official blurb from the Zeno site:

Zeno Agency Limited is a partnership between veteran literary agent John Parker and freelance literary consultant and genre critic, John Berlyne. Neither can recall exactly when they first met, but undoubtedly it was at some social occasion – a book launch or more likely a science fiction convention. Over a few years, their association grew, with Berlyne becoming a regular reader and consultant for Parker who was at that time – and had been for many years – a senior agent with MBA. Never one to rest on his laurels, in July 2008 John Parker took the huge step towards agent independence, splitting off from MBA and joining forces with Berlyne whose genre knowledge and Internet savvy quickly proved indispensable. Along with the huge benefits this move offered to existing clients, the start up company was perfectly placed to help develop the careers of new authors and Zeno’s aim of bringing writers of excellence and originality to the attention of both the industry and the public is already paying dividends.

Bottom Line?  These guys know genre publishing as well as anyone around, and they're already representing some of the most exciting up-and-coming authors in Fantasy and Science-Fiction - people like Aliette de Bodard and Lavie Tidhar - and a fair few more established names as well.  Like, oh, say, that Tim Powers guy.

It's my fervent hope that Giant Thief and I can not embarrass ourselves in such prestigious company.  First step?  A decent haircut!

Anyway, here's a link to Zeno's - perhaps a little more concisely worded - version of this prodigious announcement.