My God, It's Raining

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.

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.

I have a special place in my heart for Alt.Fiction. It was the first con I ever went to when I decided that I was a) sick to the back teeth of simply walking into bookshops and trying to psychically divine what books I should buy and b) sorely confused about what the hell I was doing with regards to the desire to write things and have people other than my brother read them.

It was very hard going, that first con. I don’t think I talked to a single soul for the first three hours after arrival until I finally recognised someone from an internet forum and then trailed in her very understanding wake for the rest of the event.* I did, as hard as it was to get started, enjoy myself immensely and resolved to keep coming along to events like it.

My con experience had changed somewhat in the two years since.

I think Alt.Fiction has been the first con I’ve been to where I have managed to miss every single panel. I did make a determined effort to attend the New Writer’s panel, but due to space issues it was not to be. Other than that, almost every single moment of my weekend was spent talking to people and having a great time doing it. This is not a criticism of the con and the content of the programme; it just turns out that’s the kind of person I am. I perpetually found myself either catching up with people I knew, getting to know better people I had kind of met before, and meeting entirely new people altogether. Since it’s a fairly small convention and a fairly small space, the event and the venue were perfect for doing just that.

I made a resolution a while back to deliberately not talk about my own writing at cons, if only to avoid the “please don’t pitch at me” look that crosses the faces of other con-goers (particularly industry professionals), although I’m now beginning to think that it may need some revision. One of the high points of my convention was being introduced to Ken MacLeod, who I am an enormous fan of and was struggling to think of things to say to for fear of going “you know what, I read Learning the World so many times that the book fell to bits and I had to buy another copy”. Having overheard me talking to Anne Lyle about writing, he asked what I was working on. Lacking anyone else nearby to high five about this, I found myself blathering through the world concept for Gunslinger Symphony without ever getting to the point of the story. Way to go, I thought, but no damage seemed done.  I think there’s something exciting enough about the words “frontier scientist” that it can survive two minutes of ill-thought blather.

I would like to say I improved after that, but really I didn’t. Anyone who asked about my writing rode out the ensuing blast of interesting but not entirely necessary guff about science communications on a wave of their own patience and goodwill towards me. It occurred to me later I should really take a leaf out of Tom Pollock’s book – not literally, of course – as he was able to talk in a very engaging, passionate, and direct way about his book (and the one after) that made me a) want to read it immediately and b) grind my teeth into dust out of sheer envy. Ironically, he did go on to talk about the Long Price Quartet, and asked if I knew the feeling you get when you read or talk to another author and their ideas just make you feel insanely inadequate and jealous at the same time. “It’s not just you,” I said.

I took part in a lunchtime flash fiction reading, which I thought went rather well. I came up with the title back at the SFX Weekender, where I suggested to Lou Morgan that three minutes is not enough time to tell a full story, and that the build of tension could be faked by frontloading a scene with a squick-inducing title that doesn’t pay off until the very, very end. Thus, Mister Ipkiss and the monkey who poops pomegranates, was born – a tale in which everyone is waiting with bated breath for the moment when a primate shits fruit. It worked, kind of, and I was glad I chose it over the other, more meta effort that was a bank robbery told in real time called, unsurprisingly, Three-minute bank job blues.**

Adele and the rest of the team behind the convention deserve massive congratulations for the event. I think they pulled off pretty much exactly the right mixture of space to event to attendance that meant as an attendee I always felt busy and never felt as though I was missing out. I spent the weekend with some incredibly enthusiastic and interesting people, and have come away from it feeling charged up and even more excited about the world of SF/F than ever before.***

I would love to mention people specifically, but I just can’t. I’d be at this keyboard until Wednesday. Please, go to my twitter feed @mygoditsraining, go into my “following” tab and just start following people. They are all there, they are all genuine, excellent people, they are all worth talking to and getting to know and if you ever find yourself at a table with one or more of them you will never be disappointed in the conversation.

*There is a Swedish phrase for people like this. It translates to “goldfish poop”. Apt, if you’ve ever seen a goldfish poop.

**I blame Cowboy Bebop for the repeated occurrence of (NOUN) (MUSICAL TERM) titles.

***Although after two late, late nights on the trot I now have a sinus headache that has put me on the couch with a duvet and the curtains drawn. Enthusiasm has its limits.

For Lisa’s birthday, I bought her – amongst other things – a half day’s owl handling at the Falconry Centre near Thirsk. Lisa likes owls, which means that every birthday or Christmas she gets at least one owl-themed thing from someone in her immediate family. Obviously I had to get in on the action.

Warning: extremely picture-heavy post follows. Mobile internet users beware!

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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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Around April last year, I kind of lost my mojo for doing anything other than work.  I didn’t burn out exactly, but I was feeling the pressure quite badly with all my spare time devoted to writing things up so that I would be prepared for the next working day.

As a result, a lot of things suffered.  My fitness nose-dived precipitously, and my writing ground to a sputtering halt.  The novel I was working on at the time still sits unfinished, partially because every time I go back to it I remember the experience of sitting looking at it and just not wanting to write anything.

Towards the latter half of 2011, I changed tack and started writing shorts, which worked a bit better for me…and was paradoxically worse because my short stories don’t turn out quite as strong as I hope.  Quit e a lot of attempts get binned off because they are chapters of much longer pieces than self-contained stories when I go back to them and look.  Still, I was getting stuff done again which was a step up from nothing at all.

it took NaNoWriMo to get me back onto the novel path.  My NaNo novel was, sadly, absolute guff after the first ten thousand words, an almost stream-of-consciousness mash of conflicts that went from back-street stabbings in one chapter to a bake-off challenge in the next. It was fun – I was actually quite proud of the bake-off –  but also very very hard going because every shred of common sense wanted to bin off the larger part of it and start again.  Only the goal of buying Scrivener for Windows (with the winner’s discount) kept me going.*

Now, I’m working on a new novel. I’ve got a couple of stories in the works, but mostly I’m focussing on the big project, chosen from a conflicting list of four similar-stage projects simply because I like the title (working) the best.

We’ll see how it goes. Lisa has noted that sometimes my writing is like her knitting – she gets new-project-itis and has no corresponding cases of get-it-finished-itis.  Hopefully in 2012 I can buck that trend.

*I’m not that much of a cheapskate, by the way.  I made a reasonable donation to the Office of Letters and Light to redress the balance

So, I turned 31 yesterday. Was it as climactic as you anticipated, as all 31st birthdays should be?, I hear you all ask and in return I answer:

Yes, yes it was.

Lisa bought me a Kindle, one of the 3G-enabled ones that allows you to buy books as long as you have a signal, and before I’d had breakfast I had already spent £15 on books for it.  It’s disgustingly easy to shop with.  Having played with a Sony PRS-505 before, I already know what it’s like reading an e-ink book – the only issue I still have with it is the formatting issues files have – some books are better set on the Kindle than others, and clumsily laid-out text is a big no-no for me.

While we’re on the topic, BIT-101 takes a nice microscopic look at text on the Kindle versus the ipad, versus various types of print.

My brother chipped in on the purchase of a new Xbox 360, one of the 250 Gb models.  It’s exactly what the Xbox 360 should have been on original release: a lot quieter (still noisy compared to my PC and PS3 though), a lot smaller, and generally just more attractive.  It comes with wireless connectivity built in, but for some confusing reason there’s no HDMI cable – and after a trial with the SCART cable out of sheer morbid curiosity I can tell you quite firmly that 480p looks like shit on a 1080p television.

I transferred my HD contents using the needlessly expensive cable I also had to buy (simply because I can’t bear the thought of losing my Mass Effect saves) and started downloading the Shadow Broker content for ME2.  I hooked up with Liara in the first game and stayed true through the second, so I reckoned it worth the 800 MS point purchase to keep that story going.

While unable to play, I bought one of the Mass Effect books to see what it was like, because I thought the fact that the lead writer from the game was also the author was an encouraging fact.

How wrong I was.  It made the HALO books seem refreshing and lively.  someday there’s going to be a post about novelisations of films and why The Abyss is an important exception to the general rule, but I can’t bring myself to read enough dire books to make my point robust enough.

I also picked up a set of Rock Band drums new for £10. Bonus.

Lisa’s parents bought me a lovely t-shirt, which includes both books *and* owls and is therefore perfect for me (the logic is undeniable), and have put aside some money for me to buy a nice watch.  I have a nice watch already (Lisa bought it for me a few years back, and it alternately tells me how fast my heart is beating and exhorts me to exercise more) but it’s not “dressy” and apparently responsible adults need “dressy” watches.

Finally, I got some flowers and chocolates.  well, I was going to get flowers and chocolates but they got delivered to the place that I wasn’t.  Two weeks ago.  Lisa was understandably upset over the cock-up, so the florist gave her a refund, and we got a free bunch of flowers and a box of Terry’s All Gold out of it.  The flowers are a half-dozen red Naomi roses, which are now esconced in our Kosta Boda crystal vase on the living room table.

So a warning to start with.  This will be a pretty long post, and I’m probably going to namecheck a lot of people in it (mostly so that if they google themselves then they find and remember me – insert evil laughter here).

Also, Lisa has lost her voice.  When I got home last night she had literally written out a short vocab on the back of an envelope so that she wouldn’t have to talk.  Here are the phrases she thought both essential and sufficient:

Hello!

Love/Kisses!

Sadnessfruit!

Happinessfruit!

Sorenessfruit! (because of the sore throat, obviously)

It’s amazing how much she can say just pointing to bits of that.

She also drew a pie chart indicating how much of the bed space had been allocated to me in my absence.  About 5 % from the looks of it.

So yeah – Alt.Fiction.

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I am being productive.  I promise.  However, the story I’m working on took a bit of a dark turn and I needed a break for some light relief.

Where do I turn?  The internets, of course.

Following my previous call for a “see who can find the most disturbing search term that leads to this site”, I had a browse through the recent searches to see if there were any significant entries.  No such luck.  Apparently there’s a new and improved version of Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook and every single cheating bastard in the universe has apparently clicked on a link to this site off a variation on Googling for “Bejeweled Blitz Cheat”.

The winner has to be “can bejeweld make u ill”, though.  To give that one worried browser an answer: yes, yes it can.  I don’t play it and I’m fucking sick of it already.

What else?  I continue to be bombarded with spam comments, although not so much since I banned a whole bundle of Russian IP addresses.  Also, I’m not sure if it’s just sloppy advertising or they’re peddling fake drugs but it’s spelt V-I-A-G-R-A.  Come on, guys, show some nous at least.  It’s just tiresome and from the general experience of dealing with spammers, if I was made King of the World tomorrow I’d spend a serious chunk of energy hunting them down and having them spayed as an example to everyone.

So, what else.  I read a bunch of Charlaine Harris novels; Grave Sight, Grave Surprise and Ice Cold Grave.  They’re pretty enjoyable for stuff in the mystery thriller genre, much better than the Lee Child book I read.  It covers the same sort of plot points – there is a murder in Hicksville, the outsider with unusual talents can’t leave until it’s solved – but I much preferred Harris’s style to the clipped, macho, trying-too-hard tone of Killing Floor (“He was a cop.  A tall one.  He looked tough but I could take him.  I can take anyone. ” – I’m paraphrasing, of course).

That said, whoever is doing the proofreading for Gollancz needs a slap.  I really don’t mind spelling mistakes, but when things like attribution errors (early on in Grave Sight, the waitress appears to drink Harper’s coffee), gender shifts (Detective Young turns into a man at least once in Grave Surprise) and just general continuity breaks (Mariella, Harper’s younger sister, is eleven in the first book and nine in the second) creep in it really starts to niggle at me.

In a similar vein, I was willing to let slide the Swiss-cheese nature of the Malazan Empire until Steven Erikson started wittering in the preface to Ian C. Esselmont’s shared-universe novel Night of Knives about how scrupulously they had maintained  a complete history of the world, which is, in the face of the overwhelming contrary evidence of his novels, complete bunkum.

Granted, Harris makes no such similar claim, but with an author as successful as she is I would have expected someone at the publishing house to flag some really basic and obvious copy errors before they started the paperback run.