My God, It's Raining

Odd title I know, but really it just popped into my head. Sneakers was a pretty fun movie.

Anyway. My friend Vicky is celebrating her one year blogoversary over at Vicky Thinks. I’m usually all over the portmanteau action, but I must admit that I’m not a huge fan of “blogoversary”. Mostly it’s because I can’t type it first time (unlike the best portmanteau of all, slorphanage) and for a few minutes there it seemed as though she was celebrating the anniversary of bolognese.

So. as part of the blogoversary, Vicky had a “Find out more about me (but not too much because honestly this is the internet)” post, and at the end of it she was very kind to link here and put up a list of questions for me (among others) to answer. And what kind of person would I be if I didn’t answer them? A monster, that’s what I’d be.

A monster.

So, here goes:
What quality/talent do you admire most in a writer?

I admire the ridiculous levels of motivation and tenacity that other writers demonstrate. I find putting my bum in the seat very hard going sometimes, and I admire anyone who has put the hours into mastering that part of themselves.

If you could pick any character from a film, TV series, book, or game to give a piece of your mind to, who would it be?

Do I have to pick just one? There’s a particular format of tv show – usually sitcom but sometimes in drama, too –  that I just cannot watch because the entire premise hinges on a main character jumping to a ridiculous conclusion and I find myself switching the tv off in disgust. Ooh, you know what? Ross from Friends. That’s my choice. Ross. He is the epitome of television’s disdain for cleverness – a paleontologist who is by turns whining, self-aggrandising, awful, and just generally the butt of everything.

What’s your favourite sandwich filling?

I don’t eat many sandwiches, really, but I do like a nice classic cheese. Salt and vinegar crisps are good, too, as is corned beef and salt and vinegar crisps. Food of the Gods, my friends. Food of the Gods.

Mary Sues… just misunderstood or really annoying?

Annoying. Just…I can’t even crack the spine of the Belgariad without steam boiling out of my ears these days.

If you could live in any country besides your own, where would you live?

Sweden! It’s a nice place to be.

What’s the most meaningful thing that’s ever happened to you?

In about a month’s time I’ll be a dad, so I guess that’s going to be up there at the top of the list. Other than that, sitting down in a consultant’s office late 2008 to be told that I have advanced, chronic kidney disease and that there is nothing I can do about it was pretty damn big. It was the push I needed to get me writing things.

Present tense in fiction… like it or loathe it?

It’s…fine? Like any choice you make in writing, it can either turn out awesome or fall flat on its arse. I’m not a massive fan of second person, although again it depends on the author – If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller is brilliant, although I suspect unique in that if someone tried to do the same thing it wouldn’t be half as good.

An author is going to write the story of your life. Who would you like it to be?

Stephen King. I’d like to think he’d get bored ten pages in and write a much better version.

Think of your favourite book. Got one? Now, what would that book be if it were an animal?

A cuttlefish.

Flame powers or water powers?

Water powers. I’d be able to summon water and that would be an enormous boon to the human race. I would stand in a special box to summon it. I would call it my powers booth.

Recommend me a favourite song!

I have two for you! An instrumental piece from The Fullmetal Alchemist movie OST – Requiem by Michiru Oshima - and the acoustic version of Beast by Nico Vega (which – along with the full version – was used on one of the trailers for Bioshock infinite).

So, Dark Fiction Magazine Issue 14 is out now! For those of you not in the know, it’s an audio magazine that normally re-issues work but this time was looking for submissions with a folklore-themed twist. DFM was the home of my first story to ever actually do anything (The Rise of the Huntress) and I thought that writing a story with a remit that encompassed essentially ALL OF FOLKLORE, EVER would be a fun thing to do.

Certainly, it was a challenge working out what I wanted to write about. The one thing that guided my hand, really, was the fact that it would be an audio-only story, and the imp of the perverse struck. Why not write about the Hunting of Twrch Trwyth?

It turned out I’m not that cruel, although my story does revolve around that tale. I couldn’t resist using Bediwyr of the Perfect-Sinew, mind, because I think he’s had a rough time of things ever since Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I wanted to write about something small and personal, but influential for all that it hinges on how two people come to know one another. Basically the sort of fantasy that I love.

Also in DFM there are stories from Den Patrick, Gollancz author and all-round top chap; Caren Gussoff , a Seattle-based spec fic writer who I have just become aware of; and David Hartley, who (likewise) I hadn’t come across before but he does a lot of Flash Fiction stuff. Their stories are good craic – they go to much darker places than mine does (although I suspect I’m the only person who instantly connects King Arthur with a hesitant love story about two damaged people) and are well worth your time.

Anyway. Have a listen, and I hope you enjoy!

So I was talking to a workmate today and she was asking a lot of questions about writing – about research and editing and so on and so forth – which prompted me to ask if she was writing anything. She wasn’t. Her twelve-year-old daughter, though…it turns out that she writes virtually non-stop, and when she’s not writing she’s reading or talking to anyone within earshot that will listen about it.

That’s the spirit, I thought.

I was kind of at a loss when she asked me if I could recommend resources or events that would be suitable for encouraging her, though. They had been to an Anthony Horowitz event and really enjoyed that, but author events in the North East tend to be notable for their scarcity. She asked if there were any workshops or groups that would be suitable, but all I could think was, at twelve? Needless to say there weren’t many things I could think of off the top of my head that would be age appropriate or successful in helping her interest along. The local theatre does a young playwright’s workshop but that was it as far as I could recall. If anyone has any suggestions, they would be gratefully received.

Anyway. So I’ve been thinking about ways to a) up my writing tempo and b) get better at it. I’ve been sitting in a kind of limbo state tinkering with Gunslinger… since I finished editing the Fantasy novel and other than that just jotting down the odd idea as they come to me I’m not doing that much else. I’ve been reading where I can, but it feels like I’m not pushing myself forward. I need to do more things, and challenging things at that if I want to improve.

On the news front, I’ve got a story coming out soon in Dark Fiction Magazine, and another in Fox Spirit’s Tales of Eve anthology. I’ve been thinking of doing some more short fiction and my notebook is slowly filling with scribbles as I toss ideas around. I’m still toying with the idea of trying to hunt out a local writing group, if only to keep myself from spamming my Twitter friends every time I have a neurotic outburst, but it’s still the case of finding one. I would have liked to have kept up with the York Nanowrimo group, but it clashes with my other half’s knitting group and it’s a bit of a trek.

So, um, yeah. Things. Stuff. Less procrastination required. More words. Better words.

But first, tea.

As I write this Eightsquaredcon is still ongoing. Officially it ends tomorrow, but I headed back early. I don’t think I’ve ever lasted past the Sunday at a convention – two evenings is just about my limit for “con time” and then I start to doze off randomly as my body tries to catch up on lost sleep.

This was quite an unusual Eastercon, as it is the first convention I’ve been to since signing with an agent. Having news makes the experience slightly different, and it was an odd experience finding that I was being asked about what I’ve written and how things are going with it. It was a lot of fun, but BY GOD was it scary. On the one hand you want to sound positive and enthusiastic and – not to put too fine a point on it – sell the idea of yourself as a writer, but on the other you don’t want to sound massively self-aggrandising. What I found myself doing more often than not was saying exactly that, and the conversation was steered into much safer territory of how British we all are about these things. Self-effacement? Embarrassment? Much easier ground to tread on.

Speaking of Britishness, I achieved one of my meta goals in UK genre circles by offering Emma Newman tea.

Anyway. It was a really good convention. I did my usual thing of arriving way too early and then standing in the bar looking round and thinking, “I know no-one here. I’ve been coming to conventions since 2009 and I know no-one here.” Luckily Ian Whates was on hand to rescue me (as ever) and introduced me to the excellent Simon Morden, Colin Tate, and David Towsey.

I talked and talked, and then survived the con food, and then saw the opening ceremony, and went to a couple of panels. Mostly, though, I just talked to people. Someone commented at one point that the more cons you come to, the less time you spend in the programming, and while I think that’s not strictly true I do find myself gravitating towards just meeting people and having little hey what do you think of this? chats over going to panels. Part of it is the person I am (I like talking to people) and part of it is where I’m based. It feels like the dead zone of the UK genre scene up here, really, and for the most part I live vicariously through the adventures of my friends on Twitter. It’s as though I store up my entire quota of chat for six months and every so often I get a weekend away to spend it.

While I was sad to miss some of the panels (many of which were – apparently – excellent) I wasn’t sad to spend the time catching up with and/or getting to know people. I so rarely get to have back-to-back conversations about German World War II flying aces, witch hangings, and the sheer insanity of space flight that I grab every opportunity with both hands. Or one hand if I’m holding a drink at the time.

So yes. It was good fun. Great to see people. I will now crawl back into my fairy light bedecked writing hole and pound words out until the next time money and schedule freedom coincide and let me out, blinking, into the light.

I gathered there was no bid for 2015, but I’m not sure how the whole bid/organisation thing works. Will there now not be a Eastercon 2015, or will the lack of bid provide impetus for people to start putting together a proposal to be ready for the one in Glasgow next year?

*True. Paul’s pen ran out during the Flash Fiction panel and he threw it away in a panic. At me.

Been a while since I posted. Sorry. January was kind of a down month, really. The weather sucked, going back to work was a bit of a shock to the system, and I’ve started to wake up to the idea that by the time June rolls round there will be a baby in the house. This worries me far more than it did when it was just the concept of a baby, and amazingly more than when I saw the ultrasound scans. There’s something very real about being kicked in the back at four in the morning by a third person who’s just hiding inside your partner’s belly. You wake up to the responsibility very quickly after that.

Anyway. Now that January is out of the way, things are going well. I put my fantasy novel out on submission at the very start of the year and tried my best to forget about it. I had a draft of Gunslinger Symphony done that needed editing, and a different fantasy novel outlined to start writing.

This is what I looked like trying to write and edit:

Essentially, I was priming myself for what felt like the inevitable. To date, my writing has been defined by a series of positive failures, and in all seriousness I was anticipating another knock back. I had even thought of what I would do to cheer myself up when it happened, and what the next step was after that.

So when I got an offer of representation I was a bit:

Obviously, I accepted. I accepted so damn fast I think my email might have jumped clear of the internet and tried to bite my agent (sorry). So I am now represented by Juliet Mushens, who you can find as @mushenska on Twitter and you should. She’s very funny, super friendly, and in all honesty is far, far cooler than I am.

So, the next step is to put Gunslinger and The Ironwood back in their boxes and return to the fantasy novel for editing.

In all seriousness, though, I would not have got this far without the awesome support and feedback of my excellent friends. Without that, my manuscript would have been much poorer (if complete) and I likely would have given up sometime around the middle of 2011. Cheers guys. Onward!

So, Christmas has come and gone. I am still recovering from the two (TWO) Christmas dinners and drinking far too much coffee for it to be strictly healthy.

It’s been an okay year. Financially a very hard one, but we’ve struggled through it with some help from our families and a canny eye on buying veg from the markets. There have been ups and downs, as there always are, but on balance I think the ups count for more.

I’ve made more friends online and in real life, meeting more and more awesome people through primarily Twitter and – when I could afford it – conventions. I feel ridiculously lucky in that respect as I’ve had enough online friendships go sour over the years (damn you, World of Warcraft) and while I can attribute it partially to a shift in how I present myself online, it’s also largely due to the very open, forgiving, and good-humoured people I meet.

I haven’t read nearly as many books as I want to, but that never changes. I could read all day every day and never catch up, it seems.

Health-wise, things are pretty good. Last year was awful for hospital trips and constant vigilance over my blood results, so it’s been nice to get that onto an even keel. I am so unfit, though, and I need to get on that in the New Year.

Writing is going well. I got my first short story in print, with three more coming in 2013 – the last of which is possibly the most personal and difficult thing I’ve written. I wrote the first novel in a epic fantasy series which is currently out on submission because I think any more edits will just be second-guessing myself at this point. I wrote the first draft of an alt-history adventure that started humble and got progressively more insane.

Next year I will be editing a collection of recipes (all desserts) and short stories for Fox Spirit books, which I am both dreading and looking forward to. It’s a lot of responsibility so I’m pretty desperate to get it right. I’m sure Adele will keep me on the straight and narrow.

I’m also planning to write another two novels in 2013. I was tempted to start a whole new Fantasy world, but I can’t leave the other one unfinished. I’ll crack on with the second volume and see how it goes. The other novel is kind of linked to Gunslinger Symphony but isn’t. It’s another alt-history novel, set in roughly the same time period, but with a different fantastical twist driving the narrative: this time about pocket watches, and a fashionable obsession with the dead. The idea is to create a trio of stories that link thematically but are not set in the same versions of the world.

And that’s my plan. Not quite a resolution, but better than nothing.

What have you got planned for next year?

There are lots of pretentious things on the internet. One of my favourites is the line,

Edinburgh is the thing I am a poem about and do not name.

It’s from a ‘blog by an author who is both respected and award-winning, and yet every time I read it I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. There’s a ridiculous quantity of self-involvement packed into thirteen words there, and my brain automatically looks for the punchline because it just can’t handle the thought that someone out there in the world sat down and typed them without a shred of irony in their soul.

Edinburgh’s not bad. There’s some cracking history around the place, the festival is great if you’re into that sort of thing, and if you are willing to ignore the occasional bit of scaffolding it really is quite pretty to look at.

The fandom associated with cities is something that just passes me by. I lived in Glasgow for a long time, and any magic that the city might have held for me was dissolved by the sight of someone taking the time to cross a busy street in order to smash a rival football supporter over the head with a glass bottle.

The one that I fail to appreciate, though, is London. It’s a very anonymous place, full of forbidding, crowding buildings, angles and nooks, the ways and paths given their own fabled mythology in the Knowledge. I can see how people fall in love with it: the faceless press pulsing along a gnarled circulatory network of streets and tubes; the sudden, incongruous clash of old and new, ancient influence meeting modern innovation head-on and neither willing to give an inch. The city is a crossing-point, where all roads meet, and it doesn’t take a massive leap of the imagination to include all the hidden paths as well.

Maybe I’m just awkward that way. Walking through London, I find myself too distracted to let that thought sink in. The London “way” of walking – straight on, no eye contact, through the oncoming pedestrians if necessary – anything other than dodging the flow and wondering what the fuck? is just too much for me. To find magic you need to concentrate, and it’s hard to do that when you’re being elbowed every other second.

I suspect I would not get on well with New York.

So where is your favourite city? What makes it magical for you?

I finally finished a draft of Gunslinger Symphony. I had written the larger portion of a slightly weird Western novel set in an alt-history America  when I woke up one morning to discover that I absolutely hated it. It was a bloated, tired re-tread of pretty much every Western trope that I could lever into a manuscript, and – to make matters worse – the main character was zero fun to write.

So, I deleted it.

Instead, I took the central alt-history concept and re-worked it. I thought to myself, what would be fun? I ended up writing something completely different. What if, in the wake of the civil war, America tried to regenerate the enthusiasm of a Gold-rush boom by taking part in a radiation rush? What if Curie had lived earlier, and made her discoveries in the US and not France? What if someone else had profited off it?

It’s nowhere near finished. The rough shape is there, hidden throughout just under 80,000 words that I hammered out across the span of October to about five minutes ago. It’ll be a touch longer in the finished edit – there’s a section missing from the middle that I’m not happy with even as a first draft yet – but otherwise the story is done. It takes a mad premise – the relocation of all 19th century (and a bit of 20th) science to a West that has broached the physical frontiers and is expanding into the intellectual – and runs away, screaming and laughing like a mad thing. I love it. I’m not sure anyone else will.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

On a side note, this marks the achievement of the goal I set myself at the end of January this year. I said – wrote, even – in my Moleskine that I would write two novels in the space of 2012. Kingdom’s Fall is done – drafted, edited, beta-ed, subbed, rejected, re-worked, and due out for another round of subs. Gunslinger Symphony is just a draft, but I’m pleased that I managed to get that far.

What’s next? Well…I have some ideas.

It is said that children born amongst the Ironwood are born touched by magic. A child that takes their first sip of milk from a raven’s skull is gifted with the speech of the birds; a child given the milk of the thistle is gifted with herb-wise and the power to heal. There are many gifts that can be granted. Some are known, most forgotten, or simply lie unknown, waiting to be discovered.

So, 25 days into NaNoWriMo. I’m a little behind due to two days off during it, but unless something terrible happens between now and the end of the month, I should sail across the line.

One thing I’ve noticed from Twitter is that a small number of people really hate NaNoWriMo. There have been quite a few tweets RT’d into my timeline, especially at the start of the month, that have all had the same flavour to them. “Hey NaNoWriMo peeps! I do what you’re doing every day of the year!” “Oh, look! It’s NaNoWriMo! When everyone decides they can write a novel and then gives up in the third week!”

These tweets seem to raise a chuckle among the genre set, but I find myself at a loss to see why. They are suggesting that by taking part in NaNoWriMo that I am labouring under the misapprehension that writing a novel is easy. I’m not. They are suggesting that the idea that I can use the time to motivate myself to reach a target by a set date – that I can get my arse in the chair and work to a self-imposed deadline – makes me some sort of an idiot. Again, I’m not.

While everyone is entitled to an opinion, these kind of tweets feel like less than that. They feel like a cheap crack, a shot of self-validation at the expense of someone else’s endeavour.

Hey loser, they say, I am published. You are not. Why not just stop kidding yourself? You will never be greater than I.

Here’s my response: whatever. You’ve just lost a customer.

I started getting involved in the genre scene because I was interested in finding books to read – new voices, exciting voices – and even though I am constantly trying to improve my own writing, the fact that I love reading books will never go away. Ever. That said, I don’t care how good a book is, how flat-out brilliant it is – if the author can’t keep from slapping people down in order to validate themselves, I’m not even going to pick it up off the shelf.

And that’s the long and short of it. I could justify at length why I participate in NaNoWriMo and I reckon I could make a very convincing case for the value of the exercise. However, in this case I don’t need to. When someone drops a condescending tweet about another person’s hobby in order to make themselves feel better, then there’s only one thing to say:

Why bother with a tweet when what you really want is a wank? Your hand is right there.

Last year, I went to Thought Bubble for the first time. I’m not a massive comics person, really. I think the most regular comic event in my childhood was the Oor Wullie and The Broons annuals and in spite of the regular endorsement of my friends I could never quite settle into the serial format. In fact, there’s only one comic book arc that I have read in its entirety, and that is Mr Hero, The Newmatic Man. 

Still, Leeds was close by, and as the number and quality of webcomics has increased over the years, I’ve found myself making more time for comics and cool art. Plus, genre is a small place and you never quite know who you are going to run into. I met the rather excellent Alasdair Stuart in the flesh at the last Thought Bubble, which by itself made the trip to Leeds worth it. I also picked up some lovely prints, some of which I still haven’t found frames for, and generally had a very good time.

Fast forward to 2012, and when Thought Bubble rolled round I decided that it would be worth going. That decided, I discovered that work (or lack thereof) had left me fairly skint, so I shelved the idea. In the end, my brother and his wife stepped in and sent me the money for a ticket and rail costs, and I was able to go again.

The first thing you notice about the con is how young it is. Their enthusiastic embrace of the cosplay community means that the average age is a lot lower than I’ve seen at the other UK cons I attend. I don’t know how this translates into business for the stalls around the show, but I did see a lot of the cosplayers clutching bags of stuff, and there seemed to be a much swifter trade in things like badges and accessories than I would have expected. The upshot is, though, that they were welcome, and they were having a great time. Granted, I did roll my eyes when someone started putting a Gangnam Style parody video together, but that was about as cynical as I managed to get.

Jennie Gyllblad. Please note, these are not actually her feathers. It’s just a fascinator. Again – not a bird-person

I spent a lot of time with the Clockwork Watch gang. I’ve known Jennie Gyllblad for a while from a SFF forum and Twitter, and had her do a commission for me earlier in the year. She’s really lovely and enthusiastic, terrifyingly energetic, and always fun to talk to. Also she makes great art! Buy her stuff. She introduced me to Serena Obhrai, who is collaborating with her on a comic that should be coming out in 2013, Elysia, and Yomi, the relentlessly charming collaborator on the Clockwork Watch who was sporting the waistcoat of the event. It was also good catching up with Corey “Every Molecule in the Universe will Meet Eventually” Brotherson, who I would have talked to longer but he seemed to vanished without trace around two, and meeting Peter Thompson, who seemed to have the same idea as me (hanging around the Clockwork Watch stand stealing chocolates).

I met Kate Ashwin and Robin Pierce, who write Widdershins and Curia Regis respectively (see links), and they were lovely to meet and talk to. Both write historical adventure stories set in the 19th (Widdershins) and 18th (Curia Regis) centuries and I’ll be catching up on their stories so far online.

I also saw Emma Vieceli, who I met at Alt.Fiction earlier in the year, and picked up a copy of Dragon Heir: Reborn (buy stuff). I didn’t have much money this year, but I thought it was a good investment. Her art is amazing – I was watching her draw as she was talking to people, selling books, etc; considering she was being constantly interrupted it was mind-bogglingly clean and precise – and the Dragon Heir book looks great. Lisa doesn’t read as much manga as she used to, but she seemed pleased with it as well.

Another thing I bought was Forgotten Muse, by Tanya Roberts. She’s worked on the Star Wars comics and has a lovely art style. I also commissioned a sketch from her, a slightly cheeky request for a sketch of the main character from my own work-in-progress – I’ve been using a folder full of art from the Gunslinger Born as inspiration while I write, but it’s proving to be a bit darker than what I’m writing. I thought it’d be interesting to give a very vague description of Symphony and then see what an artist would come up with. Thankfully she didn’t think it was cheeky in the slightest.

Sadly, I couldn’t stick around for the evening do or today’s events (including the launch of Adam Christopher’s first comic), but I thoroughly enjoyed what I did see. It’s a really fun event, with lots of things to see, an insane number of pretty shinies to buy, and everyone seems to be having a great time. One to mark in the calendar for next year.