Anne Lyle's Blog, page 3

Nine Worlds 2014

This weekend (8th-10th August) I was at Nine Worlds Geekfest, a British convention very much in the mould of CONvergence. 2014 is only Nine Worlds’ second year, so it’s something of a work in progress, but it still manages to be one of the best of the UK circuit.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the convention is the programming. In addition to a strong books track, there were tracks on comics, games and various other fandoms (including steampunk, cosplay, Doctor Who and Joss Whedon), and even one for knitting – a welcome surprise, given my recent (re)take-up of the hobby. Some of the tracks were inevitably a little sparse, but with so much variety there was always plenty going on to choose from.

This year I didn’t have any professional duties; I was invited onto a panel but it was scheduled for Friday lunchtime and I had too many day-job commitments that week to take a day off. However it was nice to be just another fan for a change, instead of having to plan my weekend around a bunch of promotional activities. Hence I indulged in a little low-key cosplay, adding a leather jerkin, over-the-knee boots and one of my CONvergence vambraces to my usual con uniform of black trousers and baggy white shirt, as the junior version of my favourite videogame character, Ezio Auditore.

Sharknado!

Of course many attendees put in a lot more effort and imagination than I did, and everyone was given five tokens to hand out to cosplayers whose costumes they liked best. Among those I gave mine to was a lady in a Wonder Woman costume that was entirely knitted from head to toe (even her boots!), but for sheer crazed inventiveness it was hard to beat my friend Max Edwards as Sharknado!

Another highlight for me was the Whedon singalong, this year not only with a piano player but with some of the participants up on stage. The programme was also extended; as well as Once More With Feeling, there was – appropriately enough – a Doctor Horrible sing-along complete with cosplayers as Captain Hammer and a gender-flipped Doctor Horrible. This year I made sure to take along a bottle of water so that I didn’t sing myself hoarse; next year I might even remember to learn all the lyrics beforehand!

If I have one criticism of Nine Worlds 2014, it’s that the atmosphere wasn’t quite up to last year’s standards. I don’t know if it was the layout of the Radisson Edwardian, which lacks the huge open-plan lobby of the Renaissance, or maybe it was the cleverly staggered schedule that kept traffic jams down to a minimum in the often narrow corridors and stairways, but there seemed to be a lot fewer people around even though attendance was higher. Usually at a convention I manage to bump into everyone I know, but I definitely missed several people at Nine Worlds.

I also have to say that the Bijou is probably the worst hotel bar I’ve ever been to, in terms of both prices and selection: nothing on tap, just a handful of bottled beers and one cider (Magners – ugh!), and on Friday night I was charged £4.50 for a small glass of sparkling water! (On Saturday night I paid only a few pence more for a large glass of red wine. Go figure!)

Despite these minor quibbles, Nine Worlds remains one of my favourite conventions, for its inclusivity and the thought that seems to go into all aspects of organisation. If this is the future of fandom, count me in!

 

We’re still not your bitches

Yesterday I received an intriguing email from a colleague at work, asking if I would write a 140-word short story for his niece for GISHWHES (a worldwide scavenger hunt hosted by Misha Collins of Supernatural fame), and offering a bottle of booze of my choice as a thank-you. Apparently, it was necessary for the story to be written by a previously published SF author, and I was the only one he knew personally. As my friends and Twitter followers know, I’m a big fan of Supernatural, and the task was so modest (especially in proportion to the reward!), I accepted.

However I’ve since heard that high-profile authors such as Neil Gaiman have been pestered for contributions by all and sundry, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t offered any material compensation. Now, I understand that participants are keen to get good contributions, because the grand prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to an exotic locale with Misha himself, and yes, GISHWHES does a lot of work for charity – but this particular item on the list is not, as far as I know, helping to raise money. Asking a writer to contribute work so you can win a holiday with a TV star is a very different matter from asking them to contribute to, say, a anthology the profits of which will go to charity.

So before I share my own very modest contribution, I just wanted to point out the egregiousness of this behaviour. It’s particularly ironic because Gaiman wrote about entitlement issues on his own blog some years ago, resulting in an amusing song, “George R R Martin Is Not Your Bitch“, by John Anealio. Seriously, folks – writing is work. Even 140 words of it is work. Between pondering and rejecting ideas, jotting down one I liked, then honing the prose down to the set limit, I must have spent a good hour on the project*. I don’t always charge for work – I’m happy to do favours for friends, in the right circumstances – but it’s only polite to offer compensation so that the person doing the work can choose whether to accept it or not**.

Anyway here’s my story which, as stipulated in the rules, is about Misha, the Queen of England, and an elopus (the GISHWHES mascot, as seen above). Well, OK, it’s about Misha in his role as Castiel, though I include a small detail taken from a convention photo of Misha – I hope it qualifies.  Caveat: this is hardly deathless prose. I’m mostly posting it as proof to the organisers that Team BeanLovesNephilim‘s contribution is genuine. Go team!

A Midnight Visitor

Queen Elizabeth sat bolt upright and flicked on the bedside lamp. A stubble-chinned young man in an “I heart Jensen Ackles” t-shirt stood at the foot of the bed.

“Who are you?” She felt for the alarm button, briefly wondering who this Ackles person was.

“My name is Castiel, Your Majesty. I’m…an angel.”

She paused. “Come to take me to Heaven at last, eh?”

He turned white. “No.”

“Good. Charles will be so disappointed. So why are you here?”

“I’m hunting an elopus, ma’am.”

“What’s an–”

Her words were lost in an earsplitting sound like a bull elephant on the rampage. The window exploded. A tentacle snaked through the jagged fragments and snatched the angel away before she could blink.

The Queen peered quizzically into her empty cocoa mug, and reached for the brandy.

 

* Don’t go thinking that a better, more experienced writer would be faster, though. Famous writers like Gaiman are held up to higher standards than the rest of us mere mortals, and regardless of talent, writers vary hugely in how fast they write.

** I said I’d be happy with a bottle of red wine – my tastes in Scotch are too expensive for the amount of work involved in this project

Friday Reads: The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, by Lois McMaster Bujold

For some reason I’ve been very slow in getting into Lois McMaster Bujold’s work; despite reading and enjoying Ethan of Athos many years ago, and loving The Curse of Chalion, it wasn’t until this year that I went beyond that. I was in a mood to read some SF as a palate-cleanser after so much fantasy, so I started her Miles Vorkosigan series at the beginning (of which more another day). Then I discovered there was a one-day conference on her work being held here in Cambridge just after WorldCon (when I happen to be off work), so I decided I’d better read more of her books before going! I bought a couple more of the SF series in ebook form, then remembered that her entire four-book fantasy series The Sharing Knife was gathering dust on my bookshelves (I bought them several years ago, from a work colleague).

The Sharing Knife is very different from your typical European-inspired fantasy – like Peter V Brett’s Demon Cycle, it has a very rural American flavour, like The Little House on the Prairie with monsters. However, whereas Brett’s series is all about the fight against the monsters, The Sharing Knife is basically a romance with a bit of monster-bashing on the side. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; Bujold is such a good writer that she can hook you with charming characters and domestic squabbles as easily as with heart-pounding action.

I guess a brief summary is in order at this point! The first book in the series, Beguilement, follows the adventures of young runaway Fawn Bluefield, who encounters the semi-nomadic people known as Lakewalkers and falls in love with one of them. However the path of true love never did run smoothly, as the Bard once said, and this is certainly true in Fawn’s case: not only are the Lakewalkers and farmers highly suspicious of one another, but the Lakewalkers’ raison d’être is to eliminate “malices” – unpleasant magical beings that bend animals and humans to their will and blight the land. After a near-fatal encounter with a malice, Fawn is nursed back to health by her Lakewalker rescuer, and the second half of the book is dominated by this romance plot.

On the fantasy side, Bujold presents an interesting cultural contrast between farmers and Lakewalkers. The former are your familiar Western (in both senses of the word) society – patriarchal, conservative and prudish – whereas the Lakewalkers are egalitarian and have a laid-back attitude to sex that’s quite a revelation to the aptly-named ingenue, Fawn. There’s nothing especially new in this scenario – I was reading books with similar settings back in the eighties – but the richness of Bujold’s characterisation and worldbuilding takes the whole thing up a notch. The Lakewalkers in particular have a complex culture that is not without its dark side, which makes a refreshing change from the series’ predecessors, which were often simplistic and overly utopian.

Culture clash seems to be a running theme in Bujold’s work, since (at least in the books that I’ve read so far), the Miles Vorkosigan series often highlights the cultural differences between the archaic Barrayarans with their aristocratic government and sexist attitudes, and the pacifistic egalitarian Betans. I think this is one reason I enjoy Bujold’s work so much; SFF is such a great genre for exploring cultural differences, but too many writers use culture as window-dressing (or ignore it altogether).

As for the romance, to be honest if it’s not your thing, you’ll probably find this book boring. Personally I loved it: the lead characters are charming, the chemistry between them totally believable, and the fact that neither culture is going to welcome their relationship provides more than enough tension to keep you turning the pages to find out how it all gets resolved.

If I have one gripe, it’s that Bujold is overly reliant on “damsel in distress” scenarios (and seems particularly fixated on threats to pregnant women), but at least she doesn’t fridge female characters out of the blue (Brett, I’m looking at you…), and her heroines are no shrinking violets either. Fawn may be ignorant and lacking in self-esteem owing to her youth and upbringing, but contact with new ideas allows her to blossom, and except in the literal physical sense she can never be described as weak.

Overall I really enjoyed this book, and the sequel is riding high in my TBR list. But first I need to catch up on some more Miles, not to mention all the other books I’ve bought and not read yet. Sometimes I wish the day was twenty-six hours long, as it is on Barrayar!

 

 

Plotting vs Pantsing – it’s not either/or

Over the past year or so I’ve been gearing up to write a new novel, and I’ve had to rediscover my own writing process all over again. Writing The Alchemist of Souls took so long that I barely remember how I got from vague idea to first rough draft, and whilst the two sequels are very recent, they were written so fast it’s something of a blur!

If anything, writing The Merchant of Dreams and The Prince of Lies gave me a very misleading view of how I work. I assumed that because I was able to come up with an outline fairly readily and only needed a couple of drafts before it was ready to polish up and send to my editor, that this was the way it would go for all future books. Turns out, not so much.

Whereas on the sequels I was working with familiar characters and an ongoing plot, in this new project I’m starting from scratch. Not, admittedly, from a blank page like some true pantsers such as Stephen King, but whilst I have some characters and a setting, there are a thousand plot possibilities, a thousand places I could take them. And although I need a basic outline to prevent me from running out of steam, try as I might I cannot outline an entire novel in advance - at least not a first novel in a series. My creative right-brain only comes out to play when I’m writing prose – outlining is too left-brained and analytical, and hence liable to go astray if I try to do it before I’ve written anything. It’s a chicken-and-egg conundrum: I need an outline to finish a first draft, but I can’t outline until I’ve spent time hanging out with the characters on the page. Aaargh!

I blogged about my struggles to pin down a plot last summer and autumn, but it wasn’t until today that the light bulb went on. This is the early, unpublished phase of my career all over again: piles of false starts but no finished novel. Back then I made the mistake of thinking that if I couldn’t get into a story after a couple of attempts, it was a lame idea and I should try something totally new. I now know that I should have persevered and explored all the plot possibilities before moving on – but what I didn’t realise until today is that the false starts are a vital part of the process for me as well.

Note that this is a different thing from Chapter One Syndrome, whereby a writer polishes and tinkers with a novel’s opening over and over instead of completing the draft and then revising. This is writing a first chapter and realising you don’t like the way the character has turned out or where the story is heading, and trying again with a new character or scene (or both). I’m not really bothered about the quality of the prose (and in any case it tends to be at least tolerable), but if the story isn’t working it has to go, regardless of how good the scene is.

This came to a head because for the past two weeks, my writing process has been:

At the weekend, come up with a brief outline of the whole book, and a detailed outline for the first couple of chapters
On Monday morning, fired with enthusiasm, start writing the first chapter
By Tuesday or Wednesday, realise it’s not working for one reason or another, and grind to a halt

Rinse and repeat! I was just beginning to despair when I realised that this is a necessary stage for me. It only takes a few hours out of my weekend to throw together a new mini-outline and decide how the book is going to start, and only a few hours of writing to discover if it’s going to work. Better to do it that way than to labour over an outline for weeks or months and have it still not work.

So, next time someone asks if I’m a plotter or a pantser, I can honestly say “neither”. Or perhaps more accurately, “both”. And at the end of the day it matters not one whit how you write a book, as long as it gets written.

Plotting vs Pantsing – it’s not either/or

Over the past year or so I’ve been gearing up to write a new novel, and I’ve had to rediscover my own writing process all over again. Writing The Alchemist of Souls took so long that I barely remember how I got from vague idea to first rough draft, and whilst the two sequels are very recent, they were written so fast it’s something of a blur!

If anything, writing The Merchant of Dreams and The Prince of Lies gave me a very misleading view of how I work. I assumed that because I was able to come up with an outline fairly readily and only needed a couple of drafts before it was ready to polish up and send to my editor, that this was the way it would go for all future books. Turns out, not so much.

Whereas on the sequels I was working with familiar characters and an ongoing plot, in this new project I’m starting from scratch. Not, admittedly, from a blank page like some true pantsers such as Stephen King, but while I have some characters and a setting, there are a thousand plot possibilities, a thousand places I could take them. And although I need a basic outline to prevent me from running out of steam, try as I might I cannot outline an entire novel in advance – at least not a first novel in a series. My creative right-brain only comes out to play when I’m writing prose – outlining is too left-brained and analytical, and hence liable to go astray if I try to do it before I’ve written anything. It’s a chicken-and-egg conundrum: I need an outline to finish a first draft, but I can’t outline until I’ve spent time hanging out with the characters on the page. Aaargh!

I blogged about my struggles to pin down a plot last summer and autumn, but it wasn’t until today that the light bulb went on. This is the early, unpublished phase of my career all over again: piles of false starts but no finished novel. Back then I made the mistake of thinking that if I couldn’t get into a story after a couple of attempts, it was a lame idea and I should try something totally new. I now know that I should have persevered and explored all the plot possibilities before moving on – but what I didn’t realise until today is that the false starts are a vital part of the process for me as well.

Note that this is a different thing from Chapter One Syndrome, whereby a writer polishes and tinkers with a novel’s opening over and over instead of completing the draft and then revising. This is writing a first chapter and realising you don’t like the way the character has turned out or where the story is heading, and trying again with a new character or scene (or both). I’m not really bothered about the quality of the prose (and in any case it tends to be at least tolerable), but if the story isn’t working it has to go, regardless of how good the scene is.

This came to a head because for the past two weeks, my writing process has been:

At the weekend, come up with a brief outline of the whole book, and a detailed outline for the first couple of chapters
On Monday morning, fired with enthusiasm, start writing the first chapter
By Tuesday or Wednesday, realise it’s not working for one reason or another, and grind to a halt

Rinse and repeat! I was just beginning to despair when I realised that this is a necessary stage for me. It only takes a few hours out of my weekend to throw together a new mini-outline and decide how the book is going to start, and only a few hours of writing to discover if it’s going to work. Better to do it that way than to labour over an outline for weeks or months and have it still not work.

So, next time someone asks if I’m a plotter or a pantser, I can honestly say “neither”. Or perhaps more accurately, “both”. And at the end of the day it matters not one whit how you write a book, as long as it gets written.

CONvergence 2014

Q: What do you get if you put together 6000+ SFF fans, a bunch of outstanding organisers and a great venue? A: CONvergence, a regional convention that’s been running in Minnesota for the past 16 years (and hopefully will continue for many more).

I first heard about CONvergence back in 2012 from then-Angry Robot editor Lee Harris, and as I have a number of writer friends in the Midwest it seemed like the perfect choice for my next US convention. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to go in 2013, but I was determined to make it this year – and I’m very glad I did.

CONvergence reminds me a lot of Nine Worlds Geekfest, only on a much larger scale. It has the same broad age range (no “greying of fandom” here!), loads of cosplay, and a friendly, inclusive atmosphere. OK, so some of the latter was helped by ubiquitous posters pointing out that “Costume Is Not Consent” for the benefit of the socially inept/clueless, but it’s good to see a convention tackling our subculture’s issues head-on instead of hoping they’ll go away of their own accord (or even pretending they don’t exist).

Doug Hulick answers fans’ questions at his reading

It soon became obvious that CONvergence is run with younger (teens/twenties) fans in mind: there were rooms dispensing free coffee and toast, whilst others (often decked out in geeky themes) handed out various alcoholic beverages – as long as you were carrying suitable ID (I soon learned to bring my passport!). All this took place in the cabanas along two storeys of corridors around the hotel swimming pool, giving the event the atmosphere of the world’s biggest dorm-party.

I’m glad I arrived early (Wednesday night), and that my friend and local podcaster Paul Weimer was around to take me to the convention hotel, as it ensured we were registered ahead of the official opening day and also helped me get my bearings before things got really hectic. [Pro tip: if you have panels or other scheduled events, it's best to scout out the venue in advance so you don't get lost in the crowds - or stuck in queues for the loo!]. That night I hung out in the bar with Paul, Lee, Irene Gallo from Tor and a few other bookish folk, and from then on it was an increasing social whirl that left me giddy but wanting more!

Other highlights of the convention for me included:

an impromptu interview with Paul Weimer and Shaun Duke for the Skiffy and Fanty podcast
listening to Doug Hulick reading a deleted scene from his new novel Sworn in Steel (above)
attending a fascinating and occasionally hilarious panel in which Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch and C Robert Cargill held forth on the topic of Storytelling 101 (below)
watching Paul Cornell teaching a bunch of bemused Americans how to play cricket
My first encounter with a proper, i.e. alcoholic, US cider – Angry Orchard - which was not at all bad
the Dead Dogs Party, which started with a game of Once Upon a Time with Paul Weimer, Shaun Duke, Mike Underwood, Tex Thompson, Carrie Patel and her husband Hiren, and ended in the wee hours of the morning drinking scotch and playing Cards Against Humanity with Scott, Bear, Cargill, Steve Brust (and both cases, a bunch of other cool people whose names have melted into a haze of jetlag – sorry, guys!)
Signing loads of books at the Angry Robot stall in the dealers’ room – well, loads compared to most of my signings!

(left to right) C Robert Cargill, Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch talk “Storytelling 101″

Signings apart, the dealers’ room was still pretty cool. As might be expected from a cosplay-oriented convention, there were plenty of stalls selling steampunk and leather gear; I picked up a nice pair of studded vambraces – because a girl needs a bit of armour to go with her weaponry! - and a pendant and pair of earrings made out of old typewriter keys. I also bought a couple of t-shirts (one with a Mudder’s Milk logo) as well as a large hank of gorgeously soft alpaca yarn (yay for knitting being a geeky craft!) and a set of DIY Once Upon A Time cards. I have the 2nd edition of this card game, but having played a few games at CONvergence the basic set seems a little tame, so I want to add some cards with a slightly more grimdark/Tough Guide to Fantasyland flavour for our next bout at WorldCon.

Convention swag!

My panels were…interesting. The first one, Loki Can Rule Me Any Day, was a lot of fun, and unsurprisingly focused on Loki fandom more than on the ostensible topic of secondary characters. There were a passel of Loki cosplayers attending, including one female fan who totally rocked a movie-Loki costume complete with glowing tesseract. The second panel, The Science of Sex, was less satisfying (pun intended!), at least from my perspective; the other biologist failed to show, so the discussion veered more towards the sex/relationship therapists on the panel, leaving me feeling somewhat out of my depth.

More Lokis than you can shake a sceptre at!

I was also somewhat frustrated at not having been assigned a place on any of the Shakespeare panels, given my obvious qualifications, but word is that the schedule organisers were new this year, which might also explain why some panels were not only all-male but inexplicably so – like the one about Joss Whedon’s Agents of SHIELD. It was the one blot on an otherwise amazingly inclusive convention, and I hope that the organisers improve this aspect next year.

So will I be going back to Minnesota’s big summer geekfest? You betcha!

LonCon3 Final Schedule

I received my full schedule yesterday for LonCon3 (aka WorldCon 2014), and it’s pretty busy! Since it’s such a large convention, I’ve included locations so that you have a better chance of finding me – all my events are at the ExCel.

Thursday

4-4.30 pm

Reading (Capital Suite 10)

Friday

8-9 pm

Panel – Fantasy vs SF: Is the Universe Looking Out For You? (Capital Suite 11)

Saturday

11am -12 noon

Signing (Autographing Space)

4-5 pm

Kaffeeklatsch, along with Cory Doctorow (London Suite 5)

Sunday

3-4.30 pm

Panel – Imagining London: History and Fantasy (Capital Suite 13)

Convention schedule update: LonCon 3

This bit of news managed to get lost in my inbox, but I’m happy to announce that I’m on two panels at LonCon 3 (aka WorldCon) in London next month:

Fantasy vs. SF: Is the Universe Looking Out for You?

Friday 20:00 – 21:00

Stephen Hunt, Rosemary Kirstein, Anne Lyle, Ian R MacLeod, Robert Reed

“If you posit some impossibility in a story, like turning lead into gold,” Ted Chiang has written, “I think it makes sense to ask how many people in the world of the story are able to do this. In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there’s the implication that there’s something special about those individuals. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you’re implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody. Forget rocket ships v dragons, this is the real heart of the genre distinction.” Are sf and fantasy shaped by diametrically opposed worldviews? Does a knowable universe whose laws anyone can learn, and everyone has to work within, offer a more egalitarian vision than a land of special destinies? Or is it difficult to imagine even an sfnal world in which the future is evenly distributed?

Imagining London: History and Fantasy

Sunday 15:00 – 16:30

Laura E Goodin, Clifford Beal, John Clute, Elizabeth Hand, Anne Lyle

London has long been a rich venue for fantastical storytelling. But how has the image of fantastic London changed over time? How was fantastic London created in the work of writers like Dickens, Stoker and Doyle, and how does that vision differ from the historical-fantasy Londons writers are creating today? Which aspects of London have consistently attracted writers, and which aspects have been unjustly neglected?

Both of these look like great topics with some exciting speakers, so I hope to see you there!

Convention schedule update: CONvergence

This morning I got a nice surprise in my inbox: details of my schedule for CONvergence in Minnesota! I have two panels, one fairly serious, the other…not so much

Saturday 5th July

10pm Loki Can Rule Me Any Day – an exploration of side characters who have become fan favourites

11.30pm Science of Sex It’s a necessary biological function – what more can we say about it?

I winced a bit when I saw how late they were, but hopefully I’ll still be operating somewhat on UK time so it will only feel like early evening. I hope to see some of you there – if you want a book signed, just ask! (Preferably not when I’m eating/in the loo/otherwise busy…)

Mini blog tour – and mega giveaway!

The other day I realised it was almost two years since the publication of The Alchemist of Souls - time flies when you’re chained to your desk writing sequels! As it happens, I also started getting invitations to guest post on various blogs, which has turned into a mini blog tour.

Plus there’s a big giveaway on Fantasy Faction this month, with three copies of The Prince of Lies and one full set of the trilogy up for grabs!

Here’s the schedule:

Photo (c) BBC

12 March Doctor Who Girl - part of Angry Robot Books‘ celebration of International Women’s Day
3 April Writing Through the Blues (and bumper Night’s Masque giveaway) at Fantasy Faction
5 April When Science Met Fantasy, for Fantasy Café‘s Women in SFF Month
7 May Author Q&A at Book Nerd Reviews

It’s good to be blogging again after a slow winter – hope you enjoy the posts!