Patchwerk Sold to Tor.com

As is the way of publishing, I've been dancing around some big news for the last few weeks, until stars were sufficiently in alignment and ducks were appropriately in rows; but now the official announcement has been made, and I'm in the clear to say that Tor.com have picked up my debut novella, Patchwerk.  Which is all sorts of brilliant news, because - well, because Tor.com, for crying out loud.  Another one of my dream publishers ticked off the list, is what I'm saying.

It also means I get to work with my Angry Robot editor Lee Harris again, and to be part of a line-up that includes - as you would expect from Tor.com - some of the best authors writing today.  I'm particularly geeking out to have my name in a list that also includes Mr Paul Cornell, one of my absolutely favourite creators, not to mention writer of brilliant graphic novel introductions.  And on a personal level, it means a lot to me for a whole host of other reasons too.  It's my first sale of a longer work since the Damasco novels, and since I went full time; in that sense, it's huge reassurance for the future.  By the same measure, Patchwerk was the fruit of a tough year, and as such absorbed that bit more blood, sweat and tears than it's slender thirty thousand words might suggest.  Writing Patchwerk also pushed me well outside my comfort zone, and I had to up my game accordingly; so that it's been picked up by my first choice of publisher feels like a vindication.  Once I invent time travel I now know that I can go back to my self of two years ago and let me know that it will all be worth it - whilst at the same time, of course, passing on a few choice lottery numbers and the secret of time travel, so that I can share it will all of my earlier selves too...

Oh, and speaking of irresponsibly mad science, Patchwerk has a whole lot of that going on.  My protagonist Dran Florrian is exactly the kind of guy who would invent a time machine to tip himself off about his own future, with all the inevitable awfulness that would involve.  Only what he's actually done is to create a reality-emulating machine called Palimpsest, which as it turns out is probably that bit worse.  Creating a device that copies aspects of other multiversal realities onto your own is, in fact, about as bad as an idea can be, however many safety checks you might build into it.  At least it is if said device has a mind of its own, and especially so if you let it fall into the wrong hands...

Which, I should mention, is only the beginning of Patchwerk, and from there things get much, much stranger.  And that's all I'm going to say for the moment, because spoilers of course, but also because it's tentatively due out some time early in 2016 and I'll no doubt be talking about it a whole lot more between now and then.

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!

Nine Worlds 2013

I didn't see half as much of Nine Worlds as I would have liked.

I think the only way I could have would have time travel, or perhaps the ability to create little homunculi of myself.  Nine Worlds had a lot of programming.  And the more the weekend wore on, the more I realized that even the bits of it that at a first glance hadn't looked even remotely interesting probably were.  I wish I'd hung around the Steampunk track a little more.  Jobeda spent much of Saturday telling me how good the Geek Feminism stuff was, and I caught the end of a panel on Joss Whedon and sure enough, it was tremendous; I've been to entire Cons that contained less enthusiasm and intelligent debate than that one small, overheated room.  I completely missed the Science track, and pretty much all of that looked interesting.  I did a little better with the All the Books track, since I was in it, but I still felt like I'd barely scratched the surface.  We never even got a look in at the Board Gaming, despite that being one of the things we'd specifically planned to do.  And what I've listed there is only scratching the surface of what was on offer at Nine Worlds.

Readers!

On top of the basic impossibility of doing more than scratching that surface, I quickly discovered I wasn't feeling too well.  It turned out to be a chest infection, but over the weekend it was just a sore throat and a general feeling of crapiness, which did a good job of keeping me out of the bar and stopping me talking to a lot of the people I'd have liked to talk to - which was a lot of people.  I did manage a bit of socializing, particularly on the Sunday, and I got to give Paul Cornell a copy of Endangered Weapon B as a thank you for his brilliant introduction, which was high on my 'to do' list, but all told I spent a lot of time being frustrated that conversation equaled pain.

Francis, Benedict, Me, Den, Emma.

Then last up, and if anything even more distracting, there was the fact that I seemed to spend a large chunk of the weekend working.  Okay, doing a signing was no biggie, and I got stuck with a slot when no one was in the dealer's room, so I mainly spent that chatting with the lovely Forbidden Planet people and my old friend Flick (Hi Flick, good to see you!)  And the panel I was attending on Saturday, Gender and Sexuality in SFF, went smoothly - if unspectacularly - enough.  But those were things I've done before and are just about comfortable these days.  No, what kept me in a perpetual state of Serious Work Mode was the knowledge that I was moderating my first panel on the Sunday, and my being determined to make a decent job of it.

In truth, I perhaps got a bit carried away with my preparation.  I went in with twenty-some questions (many of which had sub-questions!), a separate page of questions for the audience and notes on my panelists, which I'd prepped during a frantic ten minutes spent at the Forbidden Planet stall.  Then I nearly lost all my notes.  Then I found out at the last minute that Benedict Jacka was ill, wasn't coming and had been replaced by someone I'd never heard of.  Then Benedict turned up, and was befuddled to discover that he wasn't expected. 

A scale model of the Nine Worlds hotel, possibly.

But minor, slightly surreal hiccups aside, it went well.  I think, possibly, that it went really well.  Certainly, I had a good time - which frankly was about the least likely outcome I expected.  I felt like we gave out a lot of valuable information, and everyone got their say.  I was fortunate enough to have four intelligent, witty and unusually polite panelists* in the shape of Benedict, Emma Newman, Den Patrick and Francis Knight.  We had some great audience questions, and one in particular that really touched me: it was something along the lines of, "say you were really shy and didn't feel up to mugging editors in the bar at Cons and all of the other things you've been advising us to?  Would it still be possible to get published?"**  That was about the only question I took myself, because - as I explained - I consider myself a basically shy person, who used to be a very shy person indeed, and yet somehow I've ended up doing things like moderating panels in front of dozens of people.  And while of course it is possible to get published without ever so much as speaking to an editor face to face, I think it's also true that confidence is a skill that can be learned like any other, and that Cons are tremendously good places to do that learning.

Which, I guess, is also my conclusion when it comes to Nine Worlds: it did what only the very best of Cons can do and created a hugely inclusive space where everyone seemed comfortable regardless of race, creed or My Little Pony costume.  It wasn't perfect***, but in its first year it was better than many established Cons, it raised the bar in a lot of ways that I hope get taken on board by the wider community, and I'm already looking forward to next year - when hopefully I'll actually get to do and see a bit more stuff.

* Seriously, this was the most polite panel ever.

** Wait, we didn't say that.  Buy drinks for, not mug.

*** Main imperfection being the extraordinarily pricy bar.  No pint of Coke on earth should cost six pounds.

Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science Lives!

That's all there is to say, really: Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science is finally out.

I've been talking about this project for so long now - since October 2009, to be precise - that it's hard to know what to say now that people actually get to see it.  (Okay, quite a lot of people have already seen bits of it, thanks to Free Comic Book Day and the Myebook preview, currently at an astonishing 50'000 views, but you know what I mean.)

I guess I could say what's actually in the book?  I mean, I've possibly been a bit cryptic in the past, rattling on about mechanically enhanced grizzly bears battling Nazi dolphins on the moon and whatnot.  Although in fairness, that's actually a fairly concise summary of the introductory story.  Then there's issue one, The Tentacles of Doom, which was partially included in the FCBD issue and which covers the origins of our protagonist the Professor, his chief engineer and unwilling prospective child bride Tilly, his ursine factotum Banjo and his ninja butler, the redoubtable Wiffles ... along with some stuff about psychic squid and giant killer carp and, oh, Mothra, possibly.  As for issue two, The Monsters of Monster Island, that sees the Professor encountering Dracula, the Wolfman and the Invisible Man, and discovering what really happened to Frankenstein and his monster.  And then there are some Endangered Weapon-themed games, (because what comic book is complete without at least a couple of games?), and an introduction by the wonderful Mr Paul Cornell.

So that's Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science.  Ain't it Cool News described it as "...a MONTY PYTHON / Mike Mignola love child," and they were more right than they'll ever know.  You can pick it up from Amazon here, in Kindle or in print direct from publisher Markosia.

And in the meantime, here's a picture of an airship disguised as a bumble bee approaching Dr Frankenstein's castle:

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 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.