For the past few years, the event's been held at the Quad in Derby, which was a great venue, full of nooks and crannies, odd turns and secluded cubbyholes where writers, fans, artists and the like mingled to chat and just generally hang out. This year's venue was the Phoenix Centre in Leicester, which was a smart venue with a good bar (always important) but I felt it lacked something of the character of the Quad. Still, that didn't affect the quality of the event. The first year I was there, I didn't have a lot to do, but the previous year, I was all over the place on podcasts, panels, workshops and barside conversations. This year I was on two panels and had the Sunday to be a fan, going to panels to actually hear the other panelists – something I didn't get the chance to do last year (apart from going to eat the noisiest pie in Dan Abnett and Alistair Reynold's final panel of the day). On the whole, I prefer being busy at these things, as I think if you have writers, artists, editors, agents and their ilk at such events, you need to work them like dogs!

This year's lineup of guests was particularly strong, and I was lucky enough to get this year's Guest of Honour, Ken MacLeod (a fellow Skye man, no less) to sign my copy of Intrusion, though I did make a bit of a hash of it all, as I'd followed him into what turned out to be a small room with a very intense looking workshop going on. I got the signature, but didn't feel I could get into a long chat with all the very earnest folk who'd come to take part in the workshop looking on...

Black Library was well represented, with this year's other Guest of Honour being none other than Mr James Swallow, he of Blood Angels, Horus Heresy and Sisters of Battle fame. Hanging onto his coattails was myself and the lovely Sarah Cawkwell, whose record of blushing in my company continued unabated (though I forget what I said that made her blush). I'd managed to get roped into two panels this year, and the first was Dragon's Pen.

Dragon's Pen

This involved me, Conrad Williams and Paul Kane pitching our novels to an esteemed panel of Dragons, and doing it badly to highlight the common mistakes folk make. I'd dug out an old novel synopsis from years back that had never gotten any further and decided I'd reacquaint myself with it before pitching it like an idiot. I figured, I'd pitch like I normally do, and that would probably have enough blunders in it that I'd be okay. But as I re-read the synopsis on the train, I found that I actually really liked the story. So when I came to pitching, I made some glaring errors like saying my mum was a big fan (and therefore the rest of the world ought to be), that I'd previously published it as fanfic and the internet liked it, that I wasn't willing to change anything, that it was formatted to my tastes, not what the agent/publisher's website wanted. Oh, and I held back the ending just in case they stole my idea. I disagreed with the panel's assessments of the story (whatever they were) and generally made an ass of myself, which was entirely the aim of the panel and got the idea across of how NOT to pitch to agents and publishers. Conrad's pitch for a 70s themed pack of sleuth, medallion-men vampires called Dracularseholes, will live with me for many years to come, and Paul's pitch of a story set around a convention where the world outside turns into zombies seemed entirely prescient... A great panel, with lots of laughs, and lots of good pointers from us on how not to do it, and from the panel on the things you really ought to do. Everything I did above, do the opposite and you'll be fine.

Steve Jobs Killed SF

This panel was a great one. I was on it with Charles Christian, Jim Swallow, Tony Ballantyne and Kim Lakin Smith. The notion being that SF was in decline because all the gadgets and technology that are the staples of this fiction is already within (or will soon be) our grasp. This was a spirited debate, with lots of good points raised by the panel and the audience. What made me laugh about this one, was that I was on a panel last year called 'Has SF Conquered Mainstream?' so I'm not sure what happened in the intervening year to cause the genre to be dying! In any case, the broad consensus seemed to be that, no, the genre wasn't dying at all, but had diversified into many sub-categories that SF as a single genre almost wasn't an appropriate 'label' anymore. Every genre that makes up that broad church is thriving, so despite Steve Jobs giving us all we wanted, even before we knew we wanted it, there's always new horizons to look to, as technology and imagination are always on the grow.

So, with my panels done, I went to actually listen to some other panelists speak. Genre tv was discussed at length, as was adapting your work into other media, and though I missed the 'Diversity in the Genre' panel (which Sarah was press-ganged into at the last minute) I'm told it was a cracker. And as we sank we well deserved pint at the end of the day, Graham Joyce landed at our table like a freight train to persuade us to come to FantasyCon in Brighton, which would be great, but given it's the week after UK Games Day and the week before I whisk the family off to Canada for the BL Book Expo in Chestermere Public Library, I don't think I'll be able to swing it.

Salute

The following weekend was Salute, which was held in the Excel Centre in London. I travelled down to the event with Christian Dunn, and we had a great old natter about genre tv and writing Choose Your Own Adventure books – where I revealed that I'd written two of them in my schooldays in my English jotters. I still have Fortress of the Desert Lord, which is a lovely reminder of the fact I always wanted to write and why I'm not a multi-millionaire architect...

Salute was a very different beast from Alt.Fiction, as I was there purely to chat and sign books. I wasn't sure what to expect about Salute, as the last time I'd been to this event, it was to run demo games of Inquisitor. Not a short span of time. But it was a great event, and barring an hour when I managed to grab some lunch (£5.90 for a small coke and a sandwich!) and see a great many ex-GW staffers working at the event, I signed for the entire time I was there and got to spend some quality one on one time with the readers. It's why I like events like this, I get the chance to spend time talking with the people who actually buy the books. At Games Day, it's a rush, a non-stop pell mell of folk, and as much as I try to spend a good bit of time with everyone who comes to see me, I don't like the idea of folk spending their entire day in a queue, when there's better thing to go and see and do! It's one of things I keep getting told at events...speed it up, but I reckon the person last in the queue deserves at least as much time to chat as the person at the front. Anyway, I talked to loads of folk, signed loads of books, and had a great time there before threading my way through London to get back on the train to Nottingham.

So if I spoke to you at either event, thank you so much for coming along, and I hope you enjoyed it all as much as I did. If I didn't, then I'll hopefully see you at one of the upcoming signings. I'm in the Dublin branch of Games Workshop with Dan Abnett and Aaron Dembski Bowden on the 26^th of May. I think we're going to be there from 12 noon, but I'll post something closer to the time just to be sure.

Right, got to get back to Angel Exterminatus. I hope to hand the halfway finished manuscript in to the editors today.

I'll be there from around 11:00 in the morning, but as well as just hanging out, going to panels and talking to folk (and trying to get my new copy of Ken MacLeod's Intrusion signed, I'll also be on a couple of panels. On Staurday at 12 noon in Screen 1, I'll be taking part in the Dragon's Pen event, where we show you how NOT to pitch. I'm not sure yet what I'll be doing for this, but knowing me, I'll probably just pitch the way I normally would and that'll show you all the horrible pitfalls to avoid. Fellow Pitchers will be Conrad Williams and MD Lachlan, and the Mighty Dragons facing us will be...John Jarrold, Steve Tribe and (ulp) Ramsey Campbell. Scary stuff... I'm betting that after this, I'll have a lot more sympathy for the folk facing Duncan Bannatyne and his cohorts.

Then, also in Screen 1, I'll be taking part in the SF Panel discussion with Tony Ballantyne, James Swallow, Charles Christian and Anne C. Perry. This promises to be a lively discussion as well, and we'll be looking at, amongst other things, where SF has to go now that Steve Jobs and Apple have made the Star Trek communicators and 40K's dataslates a reality...

You can find the full programme, together with all the great guests coming along on the Alt.Fiction website.

So come along, it'll be a great weekend of writing, talking, signing and connecting.

See you there.

“The beginning is the time the catch and keep your readers. A beginning of a story is very important, if you don’t get you readers eye at the beginning they are not going to read the rest of your story, even if the middle of the story or the end of the story is really good they will never know.”

Out of the mouths of babes and innocents, eh?

So, with Priests of Mars off with the Editors, I'm in the early stages of my next Heresy novel, Angel Exterminatus, in the pleasing position of having all the novel synopsises (do you know how many times I typed that word...?) ahead of me till the end of the year done. Since my last venture into Heresyland, I've been to Arkham, the 41^st Millennium, the Age of Legends and the Old World, but now it's time to get back to the treason of the Warmaster, and boy, am I looking forward to this one. Last time, I dabbled in the fascinating, murky waters around the main thrust of the Heresy with The Outcast Dead, but now I'm getting back to playing with the Big Toys; Space Marine Legions and the Primarchs. Angel Exterminatus is going to be a big book for a number of reasons, and in a number of ways, most of which I can't really elaborate on for fear of spoiling the surprise or venturing into waters I haven't yet charted, since this book is still in its Beginning Phase.

And that's kind of the theme of this blog entry, new beginnings.

I sometimes struggle with the beginnings of books. I know the plots, the characters and the overarching themes/plots I want to cover, but getting the right fit up front is so important to me that I often spend the first few weeks on the opening two or three chapters, which is a lot longer than I want to spend there. But I'm a firm believer that if the foundations you set up at the beginning of a book aren't right, then the rest of the novel just won't stand up straight, you'll constantly be pulled askew by the bad start you've made and won't be able to get back without building it all up again from scratch (see, all those years at university studying architecture and building surveying weren't wasted!). I've scrapped beginning after beginning, rewritten, rearranged and re-just-about-everything-else with quite a few of my novels, because that nagging voice in my head keeps telling me that something's not quite right. That voice is almost never wrong. The other voices...? Well, time will tell...

With Angel Exterminatus, I'm in that stage of a novel where I'm finding the fit of it all, the right voice for the characters, the clothes they're wearing and and the scenery they ought to be chewing in their dialogue. I'm feeling my way around. I know this place, but it's been a while since I visited, so I'm limbering up for a long haul. It's a slow process, like going on a date with a whole lot of people at once, some you know vaguely, some are new to you and some are strangers who've just walked in after hearing that there's a free buffet. And you have to impress them all. Like going on speed dating and hoping to get everyone's number at the end of it all. It takes a lot for everything to align at once, but when it does, as it has now...then it's a great feeling to know, just know with utter certainty, that it's working, that it's bloody right. That this is how it ought to be done.

The first couple of chapters of Angel Exterminatus are set post-Isstvan V and deal with the Iron Warriors prior to the arrival of the Emperor's Children for a meeting between Perturabo and Fulgrim. It's taken a while to get right, inventing new things to make sure that the Iron Warriors and Emperor's Children feel like no other Legions, that they have their own character and don't inadvertently end up as pantomime villains – a common pitfall of portraying the Chaos Space Marines. I want to ensure that the scenes, dialogue and vibe the reader gets will lead them to the Iron Warriors or Emperor's Children even if I took out all the specific names and unit types. It means striking a balance between what people already know, what they want to see and what I want to achieve with the book. Certainly these legions are very close to my heart, and I know that a lot of people like them too (the steady sales of Storm of Iron and Fulgrim tell me as much...). And since it's a joint novel between them, I don't want one to overshadow the other. At least until the end...

I'm at that point now, with a through line that works in what was established for the Legions back in the Index Astartes days and what's come since. Over the years other people have written the Iron Warriors and Emperor's Children, of course, but in my head, they're still mine. Which is a patently ridiculous notion, given that they exist in a shared universe, tie-in fiction realm, but still...they're mine. Which is how you have to feel if you're going to write anything with conviction and love and passion. If you don't write thinking that this is the only way these guys can be portrayed, then you're not invested enough. So I want to make sure they meet everyone's expectations of the masters of siege warfare and decadent excess (not least of all, again, mine...). To make them my own, I wanted to invent new traditions, new colour schemes, new units, new names and new....everything, all of which needed to be introduced in a way that didn't feel like an Index Astartes article or an excerpt from a Codex. All that white heat of creation takes time and effort and imagination that combines in a witches brew of sitting around looking like I'm not doing very much at all, doodling with words and sounds on a notepad and scouring my books/net for interesting resonances with the subject matter. All of which is a long way of saying that the beginnings of a novel are just about the most important part of a novel, so get it right...

But. There's always a but. There's always the danger that in that obsessive quest for perfection you end up spending the lion's share of the time you have to write the novel on the beginning. It's a trap I've not often fallen into, thankfully, but it would be apt in this case since the Emperor's Children are just about to turn up...

It can't have escaped anyone's notice that it's Games Day this Sunday, the 25th of September. If it has, shame on you, but in order to ensure that you have one last chance to come along to this mighty event, here's some details to whet your appetite...

Games Day is the annual showcase of all things Games Workshop, and as always Black Library will be there with a host of activities and new releases. This year at Games day we have something a little different. As well as all your usual, annual chance to get your hands on pre release books and get them signed by your favourite author, we will also be running limited “Meet the Author” sessions for Black Library fans. In these intimate sessions you will be able to question your favourite author away from the manic excitement of the main Games day area.

In addition there will be two seminars during the day:

The morning seminar will be about writing for Black Library

The afternoon seminar will explore the fantastic art of the Black Library

We’re also going to have all the remaining copies of the extremely limited edition Promethian Sun, as well as the Games Day exclusive Mega Chapbook, only available on the day and packed full of action and carnage.

There will be copies of Dan Abnett’s new Gaunt’s Ghost novel Salvation’s Reach as well as Graham McNeill's Outcast Dead, the latest instalment of the million selling Horus Heresy series. This year’s Games Day will also see the triumphant return of William King, Author of Blood of Aenarion.It’s going to be a fantastic day for any fans of Black Library, so be sure you’re there.

But that's not all... Oh, no...

As if UK Games Day wasn't enough, I'll be jetting off the following day for the southern hemisphere to attend Australian Games Day on the 1st of October. En route, I'll be stopping off at Singapore with the redoubtable Mal Green to sign some books at Paradigm Infinitum Pte Ltd, 220 Orchard Road #03-01, Midpoint Orchard, S238852 on the 27th September. You can catch me there between 8pm and 9pm local time. And as an extra cheeky treat, I'll be back there the following day, the 28th of September between 12.30 and 1.30 local time. If you're out in that neck of the woods, be sure to come along and say hello!

Then, once we hit Sydney, there's even more signing and chatty goodness!

Games Workshop Sydney Graham McNeill meet and greet. On the 30^th of September between 7pm and 8.30pm, I'll be at GW Sydney (222 Clarence St, Sydney, Australia 2000). This is an event for Games Day ticket holders only, and will be a chance to get up close and personal (should you want to...) and chat in more detail over the books and all things BL. It's going to be pretty exclusive, so if you haven't got a ticket and registered with the store, then what are you waiting for, get going!

Then, of course, there's Games Day itself, which is being held on the 1st of October at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney. It's an all day event(ish) and there's going to be limited copies of The Outcast Dead, the very limited Games Day Chapbook, and loads of other tomes that you otherwise won't be able to get your hands on for, like, years and years or something. So get a ticket, come along, and I'll see you there!

Right, I think that's everything. For now.