Empire for the Legend!

As I may have mentioned in my last post...Empire has been shortlisted for the David Gemmell Legend Award... Well, the Shortlist polls are now open, so I need YOU to click here and vote for Empire. If we rally enough support, we could do something pretty special for the world of tie-in fiction, so get on over to the DGLA website and vote for Empire! Remember that Empire also appears in the Ravenheart Best Fantasy Cover category, so be sure to give Jon Sullivan your vote too!

Eastercon

I went to Eastercon at the beginning of May, and it was a bit of an odd day. For starters, it wasn’t a signing event and I wasn’t particularly down to do anything, so it was an excuse to go as a fan and see what sort of stuff was out there. I got to the Heathrow hotel and met up with BL’s Alex Davis, where we did what most folk do at conventions. We went straight to the bar. Beveraged up, we bumped into Ian Watson and (a few other writerly types that Alex knew) before we met up with Jenni – an editor from Solaris, and Catherine – Alex’s former partner in crime from organising the Altfiction convention (which I’ll be attending later this year…). We had a great natter – including one with a random guy who came up to talk to us about geoengineering and how we could solve the climate change problem by breeding white seals to reflect energy back into the sky…

I attended a panel discussion Writers and the web – blogs, Facebook, Twitter Amazon etc. Another BL stalwart, Mark Charan Newton, was on this panel, along with Joe Abercrombie, Maura McHugh and John Meany. I felt a lot of this panel was taken up by John Meany’s painfully unfunny grandstanding and fans using their opportunity to ask questions as a way to talk about how great they were. Despite that, Mark and Joe made some good points about how a writer needs to utilise these new tools at their disposal to achieve real longevity, but how that needs to be tempered by the reality that a writer needs to actually, you know, write… And that the number of folk you’re reaching and being lauded/hated by is – relative to the number of people who read your books – actually very small. Joe’s point about picking your level of involvement and sticking to it was a point that struck home, as was Mark’s that it’s a medium that isn’t going away any time soon and needs to be embraced.

I embrace it in a cautious way, using my blog to chat to my readers and let them know where I’ll be, what I’m up to or any other random bits and pieces I fancy writing down. I loathe Facebook, though will probably have to create a fan page at some point, as too many people have told me ways in which I can make that work for me, as opposed to having it dictate to me how often I do things with it. I had a Facebook page when I first went freelance, but found it quickly came to dominate my inbox, prompting me to be back checking it so often that days went by without any work of real substance getting done. That got deleted sharpish.

Later I buckled and got a Twitter account, which lasted all of a couple of weeks, as I realised I wasn’t writing anything I thought was even vaguely interesting. I mean, why would folk care about this tiny snippet of ephemera I’m posting about what sandwich I had for lunch? I know it’s a useful tool, but I always feel like I’m skiving if I write a blog entry/tweet/Facebook update. I sweat and think that I should be creating, propelling the latest novel to its thrilling climax instead of wittering on about something else (or, in this case, wittering on about wittering on…). I’m gradually coming round to the idea that this is part of my job too, but that my main job, the one that pays the bills, and buys travel cots etc is writing novels. I’m an author and that’s what I do. It’s what I need to do if I want to stay an author without feeling like a fraud.

Like all things, I think there’s a happy middle ground where 90% of my time is writing books, and the rest is divided up between doing signings, blogging and other bits and bobs connected to my work. The little and often pattern of blogging seems to work for me (this post excepted) so I’ll keep that up more. Anyway, back to Eastercon…

So, with that panel over, I went to Swordplay for Writers, hosted by the magnificently named, Mr Killbane. To my mind, this was an over-earnest discussion where someone who knew a lot about swords tried to tell us the history of swords, rather than anything to do with how to make the people who use them in our books more realistic. I imagine him sitting in front of the tv shouting that you’d never use a hand and a half sword like that, or that it’s completely unrealistic to show a five foot man with a two handed sword in one hand and a magic wand in the other. Still, there were some cool swords to touch and swing around, so it was fun in that regard.

With those panels done (the only two I really had time for) I wandered to the Dealers’ Room, where – after Alex told me he’d spent £200 the weekend before at World Horror Con – I had high hopes of acquiring something cool. By accident I’d taken £300 from a cash machine at Heathrow, so was worried I might blow the lot. It turned out that my money was quite safe, as this room was a massive disappointment. It looked like the various dealers had just emptied their basements and attics of all the second/third/fourth hand books they could find and tried to flog them on from soggy cardboard boxes. Absolutely nothing tempted me, so I left with my wad of money unbroken and went back to the bar. I bumped into Alex briefly, but didn’t stay too long after that, as there wasn’t a lot else to see or do that appealed to me, and I had a three hour journey back home.

So, was Eastercon worth it? As a one day visit, I’d say not for me, but I think that’s a function of my level of involvement more than any failing of the con. Being there for a few hours is no way to get the best out of a convention; you need to be there for the weekend (at least) and probably go with some pals, or know folk there. I got the impression that plenty of people there were regulars at these conventions and that by attending lots of them regularly, you’d get an exponential amount of enjoyment back out it. Sadly, I can’t make that kind of commitment, so will have to look at events like this as fun things to do if I can, but not as anything I think I’ll get to regularly. Though, having said that, Eastercon is in Birmingham next year, so perhaps I could be there for longer and make more of a day/weekend of it.

Stuff

In other news, Iron Warrior is selling well and, as I write this, there are thirteen copies left, so if you want to get one for the very reasonable price of £30 instead of the no doubt astronomical prices you’ll be charged on ebay once they’re all gone, get on over to Black Library to pick up a copy.

In short, loving the new Doctor Who. David Tennant left some big shoes to fill, but Matt Smith is doing a bang up job of making the role his own. And Karen Gillan is just cute. And Scottish, so it’s Win Win.

In Guilty Pleasure Corner, we’ve been watching Pineapple Dance Studios, where the runaway star is Louie Spence and his outrageously camp performance. I say performance, but I suspect (and hope) that’s who he really is, as it’s tremendous fun to watch. The whole studio looks like it’d be a fun place to work, though you’d have to be okay with days where you got absolutely nothing done. On this week’s show there was a guy from Nottingham who wanted to run a sword fighting course at the studio, and the moment I heard where he was from I cringed, just knowing that the show was going to take great relish in showing that he liked to play toy soldiers and read lots of fantasy books. Sure enough, the camera pans along a line of Death Guard Terminators, an unpainted Fire Warrior and a shelf stocked with fantasy novels, vampire books and so on. Hell, those could have been my shelves! The trouble was, he appeared to take himself far too seriously, and when Louie started taking the mick out of his proposed class, you could see he wasn’t happy about it. I’ve long since made peace with my geekiness and wear it as a badge of honour, though this guy, as much as I’m sure he’s a lovely guy in person, came across like the worst stereotype of fantasy fan imaginable. Still, we got to see some 40K miniatures on tv, so it’s not all bad.

Right, that’s enough for one morning. As I mentioned earlier, a writer’s job is to write, so I best get doing some of that then. I’ve a tribe of the Empire to destroy. Speaking of which, did I mention that Empire needs YOUR vote in the Gemmell Awards? Click here to go and vote for it!