It's Leicester, Jim, but not as we know it

I spent the Easter weekend standing, on aching feet, behind a table at the National Space Centre, celebrating First Contact Day with a serious number of Trekkies/ers (depending on your persuasion).
A very lively event, well received by all accounts - thought I was unfortunately not able to see much of what was going on.

I spent Saturday in the company of steampunk author Steve Turnball and his charming wife, but things got a little out of hand on Sunday, when my wife joined me and seemed to both enrapture and upset a number of the locals. I think it was something to do with her attire.

 

Most enjoyable, and hope to do more events at the Space Centre.

Blog Neglect: Stamp it out - TODAY!

Blog, Oh Blog, how have I neglected thee?

I plead the usual defence - stuff happened. Hardly an excuse, because surely I should have been blogging about it. Shouldn't I?

Anyhow, a big part of the stuff has been working with Fox Spirit to get 'Warrior Stone:Underland' ready to launch in the new year. Edits are nearing completion, and we have confirmed the talented Linzi Goldstone as cover artist.

The other BIG THING is that Aphrodite's Dawn is going to be relaunched over Christmas; new cover art, new edit, and available as a paperback. All though Metaphoric Media. Should be available from the week before Christmas.

And the last element of the excuse (apart from a new day job) is that I am currently editing or rewriting THREE books; 'Amunet' (Steampunk Urban Fantasy), 'Maverick' (SF), and 'Warrior Stone: White Magic'. I am hoping 'Maverick' will be published some time around May/June, and 'Amunet' has yet to find a home.

I have a feeling 2014 is going to be a very busy year!

BristolCon Artist Shoutout #1: Talis Kimberley

BristolCon laid on entertainment for the die-hards that wouldn't leave after the Con closed, and we were extremely lucky that said entertainment was provided by Talis, ably abetted by by Chantelle Smith on vocals and Simon Fairbourn (I believe) playing so many instruments it was almost surreal.

I love Talis is informal style. I hope she wont be offended if I say it the very unpolished nature of her performance that makes it so immediate and personal - and I mean personal in the sense that you get to feel she is playing for you, not just as a gig. It was wonderful, and I still have the refrain of the Plastic Spoon song earworming me days after.

Simon played (not simultaneously) Oboe, bass acoustic guitar, penny whistle and trumpet. Thinking about it, I'm lying; he did play both guitar and penny whistle sort of at the same time. Credit where its due after all. I have to admit (having been accused of assault with intent on a guitar myself), I enjoyed watching Simon play almost as much as I enjoyed listening to Talis and Chantelle.

So there you have it. Swindon based, www.talis.net for more info, being listened to even as I type this. Go see her if you get a chance, or buy an album if you like really personal folk. And I haven't even mentioned the knitting.

And if you folks ever see this - thanks again :)

I got Interviewed

The nice people at Making Connections asked me some interesting questions, and I tried to do them justice with the answers. You can have a look at the interview here. I talk about how my characters work for me, how I balance my writing against my day job, and other stuff.

While I'm throwing links around, my facebook page is feeling lonely and neglected. Drop by and show some love with a 'Like' :)

Too Tough on Trolls?

That apparently is what the UK is being accused of by some in the article on the bbc website

I'm kind of torn. I do believe that anybody guilty of cyber-cruelty should be nailed, and the full force of the law landed upon them. If you are racist, or threatening, or act in a way to deliberately cause real hurt, you should face the consequences. Our society generally is over-tolerant of random acts of cruelty.

On the other hand, the police swooping on the 17 year old who tweeted about Tom Daley's father was utterly ridiculous and an over-reaction beyond all reason. It smacked of 'if you cant catch the criminals, criminalize those you can catch'. Much of seemed to be because of a backlash hysteria against the 17 year old.

And perhaps that's the problem. Its the hysteria of the next that governs the action of the police, and governs our opinions of what is happening online. There was a recent feeding frenzy around a site called LendInk. Somebody reported it into the Facebook Writing Community as being a pirate site. In fairness, there had been two genuine alerts weeks before, but the attack on this guy was immediate and lethal, with so many complaints being registered with his ISP he was taken offline.

The internet, and social media, are so immediate too much gets said before we think about the implications. Perhaps there should be a universal, mandatory 5 minute posting delay to allow our forebrains to catch up with our hindbrains.

Tony Nicklinson - A National Disgrace

For the three of you how may not know, Tony has been paralysed from the neck down by a stroke. He can communicate only be looking at letters on a board. He describes his life as 'torture' and 'a living hell'.


Tony want to end his life, but he cant, because he cannot move. Dignitas will not help him, and the law in the UK says anybody who assists him is guilty of murder, a position repeated by the Court of Appeal, who chose to duck the issue and pass it back to the government to deal with rather than being big enough to deal with it in law.


This country's continuing cowardice in coming to terms with this issue is disgusting. We spend millions on court cases whining about terrorists human rights and worrying about them being deported to countries where they might be tortured, and yet we inflict this deliberate horror on our own citizens in this supposedly civilised country.


We do not live in the dark ages any more. Our laws should not be influenced by religious hysteria. It is cruel and inhumane to force people who have a good reason for choosing to end their lives to suffer on. Suicide, or this sin of taking ones own life is irrelevant. There is no argument to support 'well it could be used to force old people to die'. Sufficient safeguards can be put in place to prevent this. Palliative care is an option, but should not be forced upon people who dont want it.


This is cruel and petty, and at the bottom of this and every other story like it is a human being in torment who is being abused by their government and their society. It has to stop.

Pride vs Greed

Wasn't sure about posting this, but its been on my mind for days now and wont leave me alone, so I guess that's a 'yes'.

Main Olympics are over, and everybody is quite rightly heaping plaudits on those who made it happen, with special applause for those who volunteered, and people who went out of their way to be nice, polite, funny, helpful. I take my hat off to every last one of them and thank them for making the Olympics and, vicariously, Great Britain, shine in the eyes of the world.

And then I think of the unions who stood there with their hands out, driven by blind greed and political leverage, trying their damnedest to bully us into doing what they wanted by threatening to make the  Olympics and, vicariously, Great Britain, an utter shambles and disgrace, and to humiliate us in the eyes of the world.

I hope they are ashamed by the examples of others. I hope their membership is ashamed. I doubt it. Greed and politics are powerful motivators, and these days it seems much more so than pride.

7 Weeks

Holy Smokes, its just seven weeks to FantasyCon 2012. A weekend of debauchery and schmoozing with the Genre cognoscenti and literati while indulging in serious liver abuse and highly questionable disco dancing (which last year went on until 5am).

Then four weeks after that, Bristolcon. First time there, but Bristol is my hometown so it will be nice to take a trip back. Sure there will be much of the same going on, just slightly smaller in scale. Sometimes small is nice. One of the best cons I ever went to (and my first) was NewCon5 (organised by Ian Whaites of NewCon press), and the least fun I had was at SFX this year, where there were 4500 people.

For me, the whole point of Cons is to meet people. Sometimes, you simply end up with a friend, which is great. Or you could find yourself chatting to a personal hero, or someone who can help you in the business, or someone who wants to read what you've written and just doesn't know it yet. Big cons tend to be impersonal. The talent gets hidden away in 'green rooms' and 'queue here if you have the right colour wristband to talk to this level of celeb. Hell, they even charge for autographs. Not my scene.

Keep it cosy. Keep it personal. :)

ARIA trailer

My good friend and mentor Geoff Nelder has a new book out. Take a look at the trailer here , then drop over to his blog 

Random act of kindness

I'd like to nominate S. Spencer Baker for a 'Random Act of Kindness' award.

Cant go into details about what, but he recently showed a generosity of spirit to a total stranger (me) that left me slightly at a loss for words, and wondering how I could repay his kindness.

Guess the best thing I can do it this. Go buy his books. I have read the first of the 'Slabscape' series already. It is good, and it made me chuckle at several inappropriate and inconvenient times. You can find his book on Facebook here

Manic...

is life at the moment. The infamous day job is absorbing time like a sponge, the new story, Amunet (now 25k words and growing fast) is doing its best to soak up whatever is left, and some scumbag tried to break into my house. Putting the damage right is taking what little time I have left spare, so I suppose the little git did manage to steal something.

But on the back of that I got a really nice surprise. The police have been brilliant. I was expecting a crime number and little else, but we had a SOCO sweeping for prints in 3 hours, beat bobbies an hour behind that (on an england football night, too). Then the next day the PCSO's were doing door to door on my street and streets either side, and dropped in on the missus to make sure she was all right. To top it all off, we got a call from victim support, asking us if we were OK and was there any help we needed.

And all for an attempted break in. I am impressed, and will be writing to the appropriate senior officer to say so. Its good to have your stereotypes challenged occasionally

Standing at a crossroads...

After many, many longs months of editing and tweaking, my latest two projects are finally at a point where I can throw them out to the market and see if anybody bites. Both are for the Young Adult market; one SF and one Urban Fantasy/Steampunk.

Of course, having macheted my way through that particular jungle, the next problem is what should I start on next? I just looked at my project folder and I have seven books waiting to be written. OK, two are follow-on's from stuff already completed, but I have Vampires, Brain-sucking Aliens, a Psychic, and a baby factory!

Maybe I need to stop having ideas faster than I can write them :) Still, I'm not complaining. Cant think of anything worse than coming to the end of a project and not having any ideas for what to do next :)

What is urban fantasy?

OK, this may sound a bit of an odd one, but I have been struggling with this for a while. See, my definition of urban fantasy is, in a nutshell, Harry Dresden. It's fantasy, in a mundane urban environment, usually where the general populace don't have a clue of what is lurking in the shadows around them. Simon R Green's 'Nightside' books come broadly into this catagory, as do Tim Waggoner's Matt Richter series.

But then along comes the 'new' Urban Fantasy: Buffy! Kim Harrison! A plethora of hard hitting 'girls with attitude and the moves to make it stick'. Mandatory love triangle, usually involving at least one paranormal. The cynic in me says its a highjack job - paranormal romance looking to get respectable by including some rough and tumble :) I'm mostly kidding. Mostly.

I read an interesting blog today. The long and diverse history of urban fantasy, by Carrie Vaughn. She nails the hijack down to around 2007. Dresden started around 2000, Nightside around 2003. I dont know enough about Waggoner's work to say if Richter is his only Urban Fantasy, but that was around 2009, so it sounds about right. Anyhow, her article is well worth looking over.

I've no problem with a genre evolving. Heck, I really like Kim Harrison's work (and love the pun titles), and Buffy works on so many levels for me its unreal. I also love the 'Demon Trappers' trilogy by Jana Oliver. But at the same time, there is a sense of Urban Fantasy as a label being refined down, and excluding much of what it once was in favour of marketing it to an ever more specific slice of readers. That I am not in favour of . Genres are already too specialised, and the boundaries between them are already to high.

...but I don't read kids books

I was having a chat with a colleague in my day job and had somehow managed to casually drop into the conversation that I had published my first book - as authors do. The initial response was all interest and 'wow' until we got to the 'what's it about' bit. As soon as I mentioned it was 'YA' said person flinched away and said 'I don't read kids books'.

Now I was quite surprised by the instant rejection. I thought about marshalling arguments based on Potter, but the moment passed. The surprise didn't go away, though. I mean, I wonder how many people think of YA as 'kids books'? Someone should do a survey.

See, I disagree with that. OK, maybe I'm biased, but I haven't read a YA book yet that wouldn't appeal to an adult who read the same genre. Anyone who likes Jim Butcher's work would probably like The Demon Trappers trilogy by Jana Oliver Its interesting to see that some of the books I read ages ago as 'adult' have now been re-branded (or cross-branded) as YA. David Eddings 'Belgariad' springs to mine.

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this, and if you are one of the 'I don't read kids books' try one and see. Preferably mine, of course.

On Giving and Taking Offense

Heard something on the radio this morning. It wasn't a 'news item' as such, so there may be a touch of the apocryphal here, but here goes. Apparently, the bus drivers of Brighton and Hove have been advised - on pain of disciplinary action - that they are not to use term like 'love', 'darling', 'babe' when referring to customers.

This is based on one (I'll just say that again - 'one') customer reporting that she felt offended being addressed in such a way.

I can almost guarantee that said bus driver was not going out of his (or her way) to offer a calculated insult by looking at this customer and thinking 'I bet I can wind her up if I call her "babe"', and its has to be better than the surly grunt we get seem to get of so many bus drivers. Can you blame them?

OK, there are times when its appropriate to use one form of address over another. I would expect to be addressed as 'sir' in most shops, but on the street, I bump into somebody (or vice versa) 'mate' is perfectly acceptable, as is 'love' or 'darlin'. So I am confused what this woman who complained wanted to be called. 'Miss' is now considered an insult, 'Missus' is considered derogatory to younger women. 'Mzzzz' perhaps? Or maybe 'Citizen'?

Somebody posted something recently on facebook - I wish I could remember who so I could give them full credit - that very much addressed this sort of thing, and I support the concept totally. Isn't it long past time we all stopped looking for things we can take offence at, and instead decided to take offence only when offence is intended?

I saw a news item yesterday that upset me enough to knock my own book launch off the top of my blog. The item was a man by the name of Dr Raymond Janowski, Deputy head of something important for Hertfordshire Health Authority (or whatever the right name is) blandly trying to defend the Health Authority's policy of forcing people to lose weight before allowing them to have surgery. All a little imprecise, I know.
See, I was busy spitting nails because the article was actually about a 79 year old woman who was desperately in need of a hip replacement. She wasn't hugely overweight, but the hospital was insisting she lost over three stone before they would operate.
How in the names of the gods is a 79 year old woman supposed to lose a third of her body mass if she can't walk? You lose weight by exercise. Dieting alone is not very effective,and at her age she would be risking malnutrition of clinical anorexia - either of which would have compromised her recovery a damned sight more than a little excess fat.
There is a time and place for insisting that people lose weight before an operation, but this example was rampant bureaucracy, unnecessary and heartless, and I wish that these pompous, self-opinionated fools who make rules for the masses but ignore the needs of the individual could be afflicted with the ailments they refuse to cure, just long enough to give them a flavour of the suffering of others. Bet the rules would change then.

Where is all the YA SF

I was recommended to this link, which is a fascinating look at science fiction for young adults by Malinda Lo. In one way, it makes me feel good, because one of the reasons I started to write YA was because I thought that adventure stories, especially for boys, were underrepresented. Seems I needn't have worried.

One the flip side, I never realized I had so much excellent competition!

On the whole, though, its competition I'm glad to have, as it means the YA market for the sort of stuff I like to write, and more importantly read, is vibrant and active, and that has to be a good thing

New YA imprints announced

Busy day today on the announcements front. First, Angry Robot announce a new YA imprint and then, to my lasting delight, Terry Martin, of the House of Murky Depths has also announced that he is venturing into the younger reader's market, starting with a book by the very talented Kim Lakin-Smith called 'Queen Rat'. Keep up with the news on Terry's blog.

I knew I should have spent more time chatting with him at FantasyCon :)

Top Ten Unsuitable Books for Teenagers

My editor posted this link to his facebook page. I'm not sure how he finds the time to read newspapers, even virtual ones. Maybe he has a netbot scanning for interesting articles.

Anyway, I went off and read this article in the Guardian, and ended up adding two of them to my own reading list. Won't tell you which two, though. You might be a teenager and I wouldn't want to lead you astray ;)