My God, It's Raining

Yesterday I got back from Eastercon, which was held at the Birmingham Hilton (next to the NEC).

I’m not what you’d call a seasoned convention attendee.  I had been to two before Eastercon, following my decision in 2010 to actually throw my hat into the fandom ring and actually talk to people instead of just lurking on forums and pretending I was taking part.

So, when I pass comment on the convention, the caveat really is that I’m not an old hand at the convention thing – it’s just my experience of it.

First, the venue.  The Hilton is a nice hotel, I’ll give you that, but it’s super-expensive.  They laid on a special convention restaurant which was mean to sell meals at lower prices, but they were still pretty damn expensive from my perspective.  It was also miles from anywhere and although the NEC and the airport were a short distance, both venues were also quite pricey considering the fare they had on offer.

While you could say that this is the cost of having it in the Hilton, it had a knock-on effect for people at the Con.  I turned up with a pretty tight budget, and although I factored in a serious chunk of it for the purchasing of eats – even going so far as to guess at how many times I’d offer to buy people drinks* – I ended up eating into my dealer room budget to the point that I didn’t much while I was there.

And that annoys me, really, because the whole point of being there is to get to know people and also hopefully to pick up some awesome stuff – and I think more than a few of the dealers were disappointed by the lack of sales.  It’s just one event, but you’ve got to wonder how those sales figures affect the businesses they trickle back to.

Another Hilton thing was the function rooms, which were fitted with insane air conditioning.  Queens room? Roasting hot.  London room? Freezing cold. Normally that wouldn’t bother me too much, but when you spend one panel trying to get warmth back into your hands by sitting on them and the next on the verge of sleep because it’s so cozy, then there are issues.

As to the schedule, I didn’t go to many panels this time round.  I skipped the writing ones because I’ve been to writing ones before and honestly there are only so many times I can be told to write more, write consistently, read lots, and edit ruthlessly.** I went to one on combative female characters that meandered off down some odd paths regarding real-world military attitudes to women, and another on fugitives in fiction that had some nice banter about meddling with story archetypes and form.

The evening events I was a little disappointed with.  I’d always imagined them being a lot more lively and inclusive of the attending cohort, but the ball and ceilidh were pretty quiet affairs and the disco was…well…it was…

It defied description.

Anyway. I’m coming down on the Con a little too hard, perhaps.  Despite, in spite of, and aside from all that, I enjoyed myself massively.  The people that I met – that I already knew, knew through twitter, or had simply never met before and stood next to in the bar – made up for it more than ten times over.  Adam Christopher made a spirited effort to mention all the people he met at Eastercon over on his ‘blog, something I don’t think I can match.  What I can do is say that there are some enormously awesome people out there who consistently made me feel very, very welcome, and they helped make a weekend that was plagued with potentially fun-destroying or fun-limiting issues to be a very great deal of fun instead.

*I overestimated that.  I think people felt bad about taking me up on it because of the prices.

**and not get my hopes up

I never really assign scores to things when I review them. There are a lot of opinions out there, and as far as I can tell there are quite a few that disagree strongly with me, no matter the subject.

So when I say you might not like Andy Remic’s Serial Killers Incorporated, understand that I’m covering all the bases.

Personally, I like it. One of the first books to be released by the author’s own ebook publishing venture, Anarchy Books, SKI is an ice-cold shot of 175-proof hyperbole, that Remic slams down on the bar with a glower. Drink up or get the fuck out is the message.

I think if you sat down and tried to take it seriously, tried to analyse the text, then you’d be setting yourself up for disappointment. From the first few pages, SKI pretty much sets up its stall: Bad men are about their business of doing bad things – Remic doesn’t really play with the form too much once he’s got it duct-taped to a chair. All he does is douse it in bombast and toss lit matches at it until the whole thing goes BOOM.

There are touches of linguistic genius scattered all the way through, simple phrases that sit really nicely in your mind, but for the most part it’s about big, fast images that keep the pages turning. Phrases like “the bike leapt forward, scorpion-stung, and smashed at a million miles an hour towards the line of gangsters who opened fire dark-eye barrels ejaculating blossoms of flame” just erupt out on the page full of energy and pace, and at times I could imagine the actual writing process as being just as energetic – Remic roaring with rage at the limitations of typing, sweeping the keyboard aside and just smashing the words directly into a giant slab of clay* with his fists.

it puts me in mind of Ben Elton’s book Popcorn (which I have previously referenced as the quickest book I have ever read, ever). Naughty people do terrible stuff, and the reader is stuck with an ethically broken but morally stable narrator, delusional and self-aggrandising as fuck, whose POV guides the tale along.

If that’s the sort of poison you think you can handle, then go grab a copy. It’s a fun ride.

*On a side note, the Sumerians have an awesome IP claim against the iPad if they filed their patent for tablet technology.

I woke up this morning wondering about how Kung Fu origin stories come into being. There’s always some sort of legend, or a young, unformed talent who does something or witnesses something that forms the seed of their school of kung fu – like the classic Wing Chun story of the nun Ming Na watching a crane fighting a snake and being impressed by the economy and beauty of their movements.*

These stories all invariably take place in the far distant past, with a hazy lineage of teachers stretching down to the present day, or at least until 1970 when suddenly they branch out faster than a pyramid sales scheme.

It amuses me to think of someone in China opening their first martial arts school back in the days of yore** and trying to sell this kind of story.

“How did you become a master of the wandering bun fist, sifu?”

“One day, I was running across the city with a delivery in my arms when I saw a man being attacked by four cutthroats. I set about them, using only my kicks to strike as my arms were full of packages for the delivery. I defeated them, and seeing the man was okay, I ran as fast as I could to deliver the food. The man who was attacked was a city official, and seeing me defeat those men so easily convinced him that I should be elevated from the level of humble baker to master…that is how Wandering Bun kung fu was born.”

“Come off it, sifu! You tripped over someone’s dog four weeks ago and hit your head – when you came to you’d decided to open this place. The only reason they let you, and the reason everyone comes here, is because your wife is super hot and she can make those dumplings that have dumplings inside the dumpling.”

“Yeah…those are pretty tasty. But can we stick with the mugging story? Sounds a lot better.”

Not sure why all this occurred to me…but it did.

*Personally I always found that odd because birds tend to go apeshit over the slightest threat, so unless economy and beauty is a mistranslation of “start flapping its wings like mad, screaming so loud my dog’s ears started to bleed and jumped up and down on the snake until it was not just dead but flat” then there’s something deeply wrong with the analogy.

**unspecified, like a fantasy novel.

And here’s me trying to get back into the swing of writing stuff.

The competition genre is Paranormal Romance, and the theme, “happily ever after?”

Thomas the Rhymer

Seven years was the price of the fairy Queen’s kiss, and Thomas was glad to pay it.
Over the years, the warmth of his songs thawed her ice-cold heart.

“Wait for my sign,” she said, returning him to Ercildourne.

At midsummer, she sent two messengers to call him to her – a milk-white hart and a milk-white hind.

A forester shot the pair at the forest’s edge;

The Rhymer’s Feast was legend.

This was a conversation I found myself having Friday afternoon after being asked to draw a graph of my week on a sheet of paper, days being the independent variable (time-limited) along the x-axis and my mood being dependent, indicated on the y-axis. Interestingly, on being asked that question, I had to instantly go back and amend my graph because in all honesty it was the best thing that had happened to me all week.

We agreed that “walruses” is boring and shame was poured on one contributor’s head for adding a superfluous apostrophe to make it “walruse’s” on the whiteboard (also prompting the question, “what’s a walruse and what stuff would it possess?“).

Walrice didn’t survive the screening process but walri? That felt closer to the mark.

What if we added an extra vowel? What if we doubled that shit right up?

Walrii. yes, my friends, that feels so much more comfortable on the tongue.

Being Scottish, I staunchly defended the possibility of an ancient, Caledonian flavour – hundreds of walrae, their sleek, heavy-set bodies crowding the rocky shores – but it was summarily rejected by the harsh, Southern tones of my English companions.
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