My God, It's Raining

At the start of the month I literally ran out of excuses not to write. No-one wanted to play Starcraft 2 or HoN, there weren’t any movies out that I desperately wanted to see, and we had pretty much caught up on all of our tv box sets over the winter. After SFX, Lisa laid down the law regarding my terrible, indeed near-absolute, lack of progress since NaNoWriMo.

“I’m going to fit you with a shock collar,” she said. “If you stop writing, I’m going to zap your ass.”

I tried to point out that wasn’t normally where you’d fit a shock collar, but she was adamant. And, once we’d had a quick chorus of “Stand and Deliver”, I fired up Scrivener and got to work.

How has it gone so far?

So, not bad really. 1100 words a day (on average) is definitely better than zero.

Is any of it any good, though? Hard to say. It’s first draft stuff and I’ve deliberately avoided going back to fix a few sentences that don’t quite adhere to the rules of grammar (I know what I meant, I’ll fix them later), which has given Lisa some laughs when she’s read them. Her new hobby is running round the house quoting my idiosyncratic errors in a very loud voice. You’ve never regretted sharing your work more than when your significant other yomps through the kitchen cheerfully yelling “THERE WAS CLANK!” for the neighbours to hear.

I’ve also not quite thought of a title yet. I have a title, but a quick Google confirms that it – and variants of it – are fairly common and therefore I need to think of something else. It’s okay, though, I still have about 75,000 words (and edits thereof) to think of one.

Anyway. Back to writing.

It’s funny being on the periphery of things when they happen. Over the past day or so of Twitter, I’ve been following the very rapid development of a plan to encourage gender parity on panels at conventions, in particular SF/F ones. This was precipitated by Paul Cornell in a ‘blog post and has been picked up by others (such as debut author and boss of the dancefloor, Tom Pollock). There is, as I understand from Twitter-grapevine, an official 50/50 brand being developed, which would encourage awareness at a con-organisation level.

As someone who doesn’t really have a role in the SFF community aside from being a guy who turns up at a couple of conventions every year, I think it’s great. One of the things I’ve noticed about Paul Cornell is that he’s a nice guy. Super-nice, in fact. I can well imagine the headache he has caused for convention organisers this year, but I can’t help but think that a year or two from now we’ll be looking back and thinking his sudden impulse, that little flash of inspiration that made him go right, here’s how *I’m* going to play my part was worth the headaches and the inevitable ten-minute muddles that are going to crop up in panels across conventions for the rest of 2012.

As a con attendee, I like the idea of parity. I think there are a lot of interesting female creators and critics out there who would come across very well on panels. I think female creators deserve as much right to exposure as men – while I don’t think authors should be sat on a panel simply to plug their books, I will freely admit to having picked up books on the sole basis of an interesting performance by the author on a panel.

I can well understand that it is a mind-buggeringly difficult task to organise a convention, and to organise panels within that convention, and to match the topic to the guests to the moderators, and then have to schedule it all so it fits into a weekend with as few conceptual overlaps as possible. But I think that while this is the case, introducing gender parity is a great step forward towards reducing the bias that the SF/F community struggles to shed itself of.

I can accept there are going to be problems – and some blinding arguments – on the way there, but as Mr Cornell puts it,  there is only one moral unit I am in control of.

Me.

So what I’m going to do is simple. I’m going to turn up to the conventions I can afford and find time for, as I usually do. If I go to a panel and a guest drops out to achieve parity, I’m not going to grumble. I’m not going to complain, or moan on Twitter, even if it’s a guest I really, really wanted to see. Instead, I’m going to applaud.

Even if it takes up half the time slot with seat changes and introductions and arguments and wrangling, I’m going to applaud. Because at the very heart of it, people are making an effort.

I begin with a caveat. Should I forget at some point to mention someone who I met, or indeed had a long conversation with and have temporarily forgotten, I apologise. I did toy with the brief notion of agonising over a list before I started writing this but decided against it. Let the chips fall where they may and if I do miss someone they are welcome to snub me at a future event by way of reparation.

So. The SFX Weekender was held in Prestatyn, in North Wales. I was labouring under the false misapprehension that I had never been to Wales before, which got me all excited until I remembered that Llanberis isn’t an especially English name and I’ve been there climbing and walking quite a few times in my misspent youth.

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