26 November 2003

Nanowrimo word count: 29,004. Just 4 days left to do the last 20,996. Oh boy.

24 November 2003

Fantasycon

The only way to describe the weekend (and a bit) that's just been, is to swallow a thesaurus and regurgitate the entries connected to fantastic, fabulous & phenomenal. Yes, ladies & gentles, it was just that good.

Juliet McKenna turned up on Saturday for a couple of panels and was fab to listen to. She sat on the Myth panel in the morning, with Chaz Brenchley, Katherine Roberts & Catherine Fisher; and boy was it a lively one. It started out with the trouble of overmilking Arthurian myth and moved on to cover most of the other world mythology bases, then sliding back home to Britain & oral traditons.

Her afternoon panel was one about character building, joined by Chaz (what a sweetie) Brenchley, Mark Morris and Katherine Roberts. That was a fun one, and was also great for getting an incite into the authors in question.

There were interviews with guest of honours Catherine Fisher & Christopher Fowler, a brilliant late night ghost story with audience participation from the inimitable Tina Rath, and an entertaining vampire presentation from Gail Nina Anderson.

Saturday also gave us the skinny on what publishers, booksellers &, bizarrely, the library service look for when they're buying titles. Ariel, Jo Fletcher, Stephen Jones & some chap from Stafford library were all on that one and it didn't take long to see how passionate they were about the genre. Jo Fletcher in particular is very keen in pushing new fantasy authors.

(more later when I wake up a bit)

19 November 2003

Fantasycon fantasycon fantasycon yay!

And I shouldn't really be blogging as I've still got to put together the BFS Publications statement of accounts for the agm thingy, and cyberstore junk has to be done, and author royalties, and Issue 4, and email queries, and a million other things before we leave for Stafford tomorrow; but instead I've gone into major work avoidance. I mean, Sat & Sun I reread the entire Anita Blake series, Mon & yesterday I went through the first 4 books in the Dark Tower series... even got distracted by Evil Twin's Playstation! It has to stop...

Of course, seeing as how it's my birthday next Thurs, I've got the annual parental funded book shopping spree to look forward to at this year's Fcon dealer room.
What's so funny is the mother person keeps saying things like 'now if you don't see anything you want you don't have to buy anything..' Strange woman. You can't put me a room full on books without me wanting at least a hundred or so things, and I've gone back to liking horror flavoured books so that increases my want list.
And once the books are in my possession I'm going to be absolutely useless for anything. (ahem, no change there then.)

So Fantasycon then - Starts officially on Friday at 4pm, but I'll be around all day Friday setting up (hence getting there on Thursday for a bit of pre-con chill), then once it kicks off, I'll be behind the registration & BFS books table til they close.
Saturday I'm taking the day off and doing wall to wall panels! Then Sunday is juggling shifts on the BFS table with the offical BFS junk eg. agm & awards thingy. (As usual, I'm not going near the banquet as posh food and me don't get on.)

It's yet to be seen how smooth the trip will be given that it's mum, me & evil twin going. I predict razor tongues at dawn. Evil Twin intends to spend as much time near the bar as possible drinking whoever under the table (it's her special mutant power), mum will most likely be totally getting the wrong end of just about every stick going.

And don't even talk to me about the nanowrimo thing. This year is going to be a total ditto of last year. I hit 14637 words by the end of the first week and then... meh. It'll be a last minute rush next week, I can just see it now. What I've got so far is kind of fun. A little on the schizo side, but definitely fun. Slightly AU contemporary fantasy that's gone way weirder than I thought it would. Oy.