Aftercon

So, Newcon went well. Three days of chat, drink, chat, drink, the occasional panel (I was on one, but wasn’t able to offer much of a contribution) and lovely books.

Top five moments:

• Meeting up with friends – Gary, Andrew, Michaela, Sam, Paul, Al, Heather, Debbie, Tiffany, Chaz, John (of course), Chris, Tony (but no Eric, sadly) and actually getting time to talk to them for a change as a result of the membership being so petite, and making many new ones too
• Understanding why Resurrection Cola is so named, and being glad to see the restorative effects of the convention experience taking effect too
• Getting that old inspiration rush once again, boosted by – rather than dampened – public humiliation by certain well kent faces in the business. I shall never watch Family Guy in the same way again.
• Holding the marvellous Subterfuge anthology in my sticky little hands
• Una McCormack’s story “The Great Gig In The Sky” in said book, read on the long journey homeward.

Newcon was well timed for me in a multitude of ways, and I’ve rolled out the other side of it in great creative shape. And that – as they say in the hokey-cokey – is what it’s all about.

Roll on Eastercon.

In with the New/Ain’t no lie

Conventions. I love them. They come at just the right times to wrench you out of the workaday and let you just hang out with your friends in a bar, for three or four days. Usually, I do two a year. Eastercon at, well, Easter, and Fantasycon in September. Occasionally, if I’m feeling flush I might fly over to World Fantasy, but those two are my routine. This year, for various and banal reasons, I had to miss Fcon, but I’m making up for it this coming weekend with Newcon in Northampton. Guests of honour are Iain M Banks, Ken McLeod and Storm Constantine, and there will be a whole bunch of other writery types in attendance too. So, if you’re in the area, I can recommend it.

Also, at Newcon, will be the launch of the Newcon Press anthology (yes, they’re related – there’s two incredibly hard working and enthusiastic men called Ian behind the whole thing).  The Newcon Press anthology series has now reached its 4th volume (5th if you count the BSFA 50th anniversary book, Celebration), and they have all carried a great mix of well known names and newcomers in the UK SF scene. The new volume, titled Subterfuge, looks like it will be no exception. There are new stories by John Meaney, Neal Asher, Pat Cadigan, Tanith Lee, Tony Ballantine, Juliet McKenna and Gary Couzens (and I was delighted to contribute a little something too).

So, if you make it to Northampton – see you at the launch.

It’s a Farrago, I tell you

In the world of online fiction zines, Farrago’s Wainscot has established itself as among the most chic, oblique and unique. Their regular selection of literary short stories is always worth dipping into, and if that weren’t enough they have this little bundle of extras that goes by the name of Behind The Wainscot. In the words of the editors, BtW is: “is, in a literal sense, interstitial. An irregular blogozine, it features work that slips between the quarterly releases of Farrago’s Wainscot. Behind the Wainscot is a collection of short forms, of experiments, studies, and the fragments between.“

The latest issue of BtW has been handed over to Hal Duncan who was tasked with bringing in a Scottish flavour to the proceedings. Hal has answered the call with enormous enthusiasm, and collected a fistful of highly entertaining and deeply strange snippets from members of GSFWC and the East Coast SF Writers.

I enjoyed my little foray into that dark and mysterious space between wood and wall immensely. Hope you guys do too.

A moment of praise…

…for Keith Brooke’s Infinity Plus.

Over the last ten years Keith has grown IP into a colossal repository for great, free, short genre fiction, and that’s not counting the fine selection of reviews, interviews and other bits and bobs. Sadly, the site has become too much work to keep going now, so Keith’s calling it a day. It will remain available for folks to read, but it won’t be updated from now on.

Go on over and have a rummage, there’s some great stuff in there. And if you enjoy what you find you might want to pledge a little cash to sponsor Keith’s efforts in the Great North Run. He’s raising cash for the homeless.

Thanks Keith – for everything.

And the winner is…

Having been fortunate enough to have both of my books shortlisted for awards, I’d have to say that I’m generally in favour of them. Sales aside, it’s nice to know that people thought well enough of your work to want to mark it as worthy in some way. It’s not only gratifying, it gives a new writer or editor confidence that they’re moving in the right general direction. Now the problem (or *one* problem, there are doubtless many) with the SF and Fantasy field is that it is chock full of awards for this, that and the next thing, and the methods used to determine the most worthy of the nominated works varies wildly. And this of course leads to discussion, controversy and dubiety about the relative value of each of them.

This of course is the nature of awards. No award will ever please everyone, and that’s as true of the Nobel Prize For Literature and the Man Booker as it is for any of the genre awards, but there’s been a deal of (angsty) discussion about awards this year, so clearly people aren’t content to settle on the fact that when it comes down to it an award is just a Goddam Popularity Contest. Clearly we want them to mean something.

If I had to express a preference, I’d say I’m generally more in favour of the juried awards – like the Clarke and the World Fantasy – than publicly voted ones like the Hugos. It’s not that I value the opinion of someone appointed to a jury any more than I do that of my peers, but with a jury they do make an effort to read widely across the material that has been published that year. No normal person without that obligation can hope to do that, so the publicly voted awards are limited by the relative conservatism employed in the reading choices of the voters. And doesn’t that then skew the voting in the direction of authors who are already popular?

Take this year’s BFS nomination list for Collection – not because it’s personal to me, but because it’s a good example (honest). The shortlist is very strong indeed and features writers I admire in different ways. I’ve been enjoying Joel Lane and Mike O’Driscoll since I first got into the small press in the early 90s, and Kim Newman even earlier than that when I first read Interzone, but the Newman and the Lane are both published by (very fine!) American independents (seriously check out the catalogues of Monkeybrain (bringing us the next Hal Duncan novella) and NightShade (who deserve medals galore for publishing Liz Williams’ Detective Inspector Chen books)), and O’Driscoll’s Unbecoming and my The Ephemera are both published by the equally excellent Elastic Press. But can any of those really be expected to compete with the global appeal of Gaiman? Now, I’ve not read all of the other contenders, and I’m not even going to set one toe down the path of mental cruelty that is being objective about my own work – and I’m prepared to be surprised by the result, the BFS membership are a widely read lot after all – but it really *would* be a surprise if they’ve all gone to the trouble of amazoning off for the other books. If it doesn’t in the end come down to just being a popularity contest.

This isn’t me being bitter about my lot (It’s not FAIR! Why, oh why did I have to get shorlisted against Gaiman!!!! (and Newman, and Lane, and O’Driscoll – although personally I can’t believe Jeffrey Ford’s Empire Of Ice Cream didn’t make it too, so it could have been even tougher!). This is me leading up to something, honest.

So my complaint, generally, if I really have one, is that when it comes down to a public show of hands, the public involved could try a bit harder, get more involved, read outside of their comfort zones just a little. But say you’re Joe Blogs and you decide that to vote with a nod towards conscience in the Hugos this year you’re going to read two more novels than you normally would, but have absolutely no idea which two to choose. How do you decide?

Well, a good way is to find a recommendation site. There have over the years been a few out there that invite people to recommend books and stories that they enjoy throughout the year, and one of the best featured on Cheryl Morgan’s late and lamented Emerald City review site. Well, Cheryl clearly believes that that was a worthwhile exercise, because now she’s back with a new venture called Science Fiction Awards Watch. I believe this will quickly become the place to go to post your award recommendations and catch up on hot books you missed.

Hopefully all of the awards will benefit from more connected, more informed voters. But the real advantage is that it gives those of us who look at the great, teetering, daunting mass of reading material that is published every month a chance of not missing the gems that might otherwise pass us by.

Word, Dog

A date for yer diary, should you be interested in this sort of thing.Wednesday 24th January, 8.30pm
13th Note, King Street, Glasgow
Word Dogs : Cry Havoc! An explosive evening of high-octane fiction readings on the subject of conflict, war, ruckuses, barneys and gentlemen’s boxing brought to you by Word Dogs, the exhibitionist arm of GSFWC.

The format will be something like:
1/ grab a seat and a beer
2/ listen to two or three entertaining stories
3/ grab another beer and have a chat
4/ more stories
5/ more beer… and so on until closing time.

Easy, fun and quieter than Murnie. Come on down.

If noise is more your thing, however, I should also take the opportunity to point out that Murnie are rolling out the loudness guns the following night for Pin-up’s Ambulance Station at the Admiral in Waterloo Street.

Aye well, at least it’s never dull round here.

Pirate Memory Games

Warning: this post contains half-baked and undigested ideas. Feel free to argue with or ignore as you will.

So, it seems the whole world is writing Pirate stories. I know of at least five GSFWC members who claim to have signed up for passage (Mr Duncan has of course already completed his, plus landed a leviathan of a sea shanty into the bargain; and I’ve read one other which is just brilliant), and of plenty of others further afield who are in the process of finding their sea legs and heaving to as well. So, it’s probably a good job that the world and his wife are getting ready to publish all these pirate stories that are going to be floating around pretty soon like so much storm-wrecked flotsam…well, I know of at least two or three publishing venues dedicating themselves to nefarious sea-going adventures, and that seems like a lot – they won’t be enough, and pirate stories will be washing ashore in all sorts of strange places over the next couple of years, but that’s the nature of capturing the general writerly imagination.

Which is all good, because, of course, I too have a pirate tale to tell, and I think I have a pretty unique angle on it. But it’s got me wondering: what do people really want from a pirate story? I’m sure I’m not going to be the only one who’s first reaction to the brief: “Write a story with pirates in…” was, “Great! What can I do with this? How can I make it different?” Not by a long chalk. Because, yes, it’s great that pirates are “in” right now. Pirates are fun (we have annual talk-like-a-pirate day fer chrissakes!), they’re cool, they’re rock and roll, and we have a lot to thank Mr Depp and his shipmates for in raising their profile. And I, like everyone else I know probably, amn’t going to settle for a run of the mill seafaring adventure story. I mean how many opportunities to you get to write something like this? No, it has to be special…

I’m really looking forward to what variations all these cool writers will inevitably come up with on the theme, but I just hope that people are not going to be disappointed when they a buy a book of Pirate Stories and they find all this neat, out-there stuff instead of twenty-two Pirates of The Caribbean rip-offs. Are they, in the words of Little Britain’s Mr Mann, going to be looking for something “a bit more piratey”?

See, I enjoyed the PoTC movies (yea, even in their disneyfication), and their antecedent, the marvelous Burt Lancaster vehicle, The Crimson Pirate is one of my favourite movies, but the more I think about this, what interests me is the yawning gulf that lies between the colourful, wisecracking, slightly-dangerous-but-that-just-makes-them-more-sexually-attractive jack tars of popular conception and Real Uncompromising Bastard Pirates.

You can tell I’ve not really thought this through, so I’ll give it a rest for now, but it’ll likely form the basis of my story, which otherwise is going to be clothed in the guise of an MGM Pirate musical.

Because when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, Pirates are fun after all.

Munchies

This week I allowed myself to read fiction. Just a little bit, cos even though I’m on the wagon for the duration of the nov, the urge is sometimes too much. Just a short story, maybe a magazine, but nothing stronger. Nae books or nuthin‘, gov.

You know what’s the ideal size for the fiction munchies? A chapbook. Good job then that the great chaps of the East Coast SF Writers and their militant spoken word wing, Writers Bloc, have just produced their newest chapbook titles. I joined some of the GSFWC through in Edburg for the launch of Andrew J Wilson’s “The Terminal Zone” and Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Words of Birth and Death”, and came away clutching a copy of each.

They’re only wee, why should I have resisted the temptation to read just the first wee bit of each?

I tell you, I’m glad I didn’t. Wilson’s chapbook is an engrossing two act play that delves into the life and career of Twighlight Zone creator, Rod Serling. The exchanges between Rod and the version of himself he created to front the programme are at times witty and at times bitter, and reveal much about the man who practically invented genre television.

Rajaniemi’s volume is an entire different proposition, being a collection of three short stories set in his native Finland, and influenced by Finnish mythology. My favourite piece was “Barley Child”, a story as bleak as a January morning, that reveals itself to have a warm heart in the end.

Both highly recommended, and certainly satisfying enough to defer my reading munchies.

Back to the nov now and dreaming of the veritable orgy of literature gluttony that awaits.

Submission Angst

Something has always puzzled me about the business of writing short stories. It’s a phenomenon that seems mostly to strike newer writers, but it seems that more experienced authors aren’t immune either from the way it has consumed enormous amounts of energy on writing related blogs, forums and discussion boards ever since writers discovered the internet.

I call it “submission angst”, and it goes something like this:

1/ Writer sits down at keyboard armed with a new, fresh, exciting idea for a story.

2/ Over a period of days/weeks/months the story takes shape. It is finely shaped, honed and crafted. It might just be the best story the author has written. It’s certainly the most recent, and therefore it is the one he is most excited about.

3/ Writer scours the market lists for the perfect venue for his story. Then he prints it out, straightens the paper clip, slips it carefully into an envelope and rushes it off to the post office. Watching it disappear into the little red slot, his heart is giddy. (I’m being intentionally traditional because the image is better, but same goes for e-subs).

4/ Writer waits. While waiting he imagines his title and byline on the contents page. He wonders if there will be accompanying artwork. The reader response and reviews will be universally positive. There’s a fair chance of being picked up by a Years Best anthology. The story might even feature on the awards shortlists…

5/ He tells himself to get a grip. Smiles at his foolish extrapolation, but that after all is supposed to be his stock in trade. Still, being objective, it’s a very good story. It’s certainly better than half the stories in any given issue of his chosen market. If the editor is as excited by it as he is, then it’s a shoe-in for publication.

6/ Days/weeks/months pass. Nothing happens. From week three, our author starts checking his email more frequently than usual. He’s often late because he waits for the postman to arrive before leaving for work every morning. Still nothing.

7/ Writer wonders: did my letter/email arrive? Have I been waiting all this time and they never got it? Or has the reply got lost in the mail? What if they sent a contract the same day and it never arrived? Should I send them a query, just to check – or will that earn me a black mark for being pushy?

8/ Writer checks the available information about the market. The website says they hope to respond within three months. That sounds rather woolly. Perhaps intentionally so?

9/ Author looks up what the online communities have to say about it and the seeds of doubt, worry and injustice that had begun to germinate during the Great Silence are fertilized by the mulch of communal dissatisfaction.

10/ Some time later…the story is either accepted or rejected. Writer either laughs at their own foolishness and forgives the overworked publisher for the understandable delay, or demotes them for future choice of market and picks the next market on the list.

Now, all of this is a tad exaggerated, but not that much. And I understand the frission of wondering what someone is going to make of your story.

But.

For the amateur writer (which, financially speaking, most of us are – let’s face it if you’re earning money you can live off from writing fiction your relationship with the slushpile is going to be different to the rest of us), does it really matter how long it takes? Really? Does it really matter that editor A replies to you three weeks (or six months) faster than editor B?

Long time ago I learned a useful trick that keeps the stories that are sitting on editors’ desks out of mind where they ought to be. It’s called “writing something else”. Best cure for submission angst there is – write a new story, and make it even better, fresher and more exciting than the one before.

And the added bonus is, when you finally get those replies in, they come as a nice surprise. I’ve received rejection letters from markets that I’d forgotten existed.

Feel free to disagree. Perhaps I’m not adopting a professional enough attitude. Perhaps I’m not treating my work with the respect it’s due (and if I don’t no-one else will)… but you know what? I write because I enjoy writing. Publication is great, but it’s secondary to the creative process itself.

Life’s too short to get upset about the length of time these things take.

Of course, when you’ve got someone waiting for you to deliver something it’s a different story.

And since this is my lunch hour, I should be working on the Nov.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got better things to do…

Painting!

Weekends are the bane of my life, so they are. It’s that yawning, inviting gap of blank space that smiles so invitingly at you all week long. You make grand plans for filling it – in my case with The End Of The Novel – and then it’s gone in a frittering of interruptions and minor displacement activities, and you’ve only achieved a tenth of what you planned.

I’m not going to dwell on the procrastination blues – what I will say though is that when I have to process a writing problem, it’s often a good idea just to go away and do something else entirely and let my brain get on with it.

So. We spent the weekend painting M’s new kitchen. We fired up to B&Q after work on Friday and got the necessaries, and on Saturday morning, armed with two and a half litres of “Droplet”-flavoured emulsion (er, light blue to you and me) and a tin of white for the woodwork, we set about it like pros. Which meant: first off, after jumping into our old togs, nipping down the hill for rolls (bacon/square sausage/square sausage + tattie scone) and a couple bottles of Irn Bru (glass, natch). After that we broke out the rollers and went at it.

Cut to seven or eight hours of Ralph Macchio-like zen state later. Thought about the pub, but only had energy for How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? (is it just me or does anyone else think the “So Long, Farewell” routine for booting out each week’s failure is crass in the extreme?), an excellent takeaway from Wongs and a bottle wine. Followed by The Sleep Of The Dead.

Sunday I woke early, and delayed our return to painting by suddenly knowing how to replot the end of the book to make it work. Result. Once that was documented we got back into painting mode (our imaginary Mr Miyagi berating us in his characteristic taciturn manner), aided and abetted by a rare foray into the (vast) reaches of M’s vinyl collection (Free, Big Brother And The Holding Company, Badfinger, Mott The Hoople, Family). Next thing we knew it was time to go. M had a meeting and I had a project plan for getting the Nov done in three weeks, plus the first missing scene worked out and dying to be written.

The result – I’ve got 8000 words of detailed notes for the last three chapters and the writing boiler is well and truly stoked again.

And the good news, with the rest of M’s flat, and then mine, and then hopefully a new flat in the not too distant future, is there’s plenty more painting to be done if I need it.