I'm still working on a post about the Worldcon, but knowing my usual procrastination skills, it'll probably be next week before it goes up.
In the meantime, I dropped a line to Joe Gordon over at the Forbidden Planet website about the books, primarily driven by the fact there was one copy of one of my books in the whole dealer's room at a Worldcon taking place almost literally around the corner from my house. Turns out both my books were already featured in FP's instore magazine FPI, for which I am eternally grateful: and Joe already had a piece on them planned for the FP blog/website, which you can find here.
8/11/2005
8/09/2005
It's just over 24 hours after the end of the first UK Worldcon in ten years, but I'm still too knackered to write up anything detailed. I took a few photos, and found a few more floating around on the net. Generally speaking, it was fun: a few downer moments, but I won't concentrate on those. A few thoughts: a very, very tiny minority at conventions really need to learn something about the art of politeness. It would have been nice, given that I live around the corner from the convention center, if more than one single copy of one of my books turned out to be for sale in the entire dealer's room, given that the second came out only a couple of weeks ago. But these things happen, I suspect, not infrequently. I'll be posting some photos - some from a camera, some from a cheap camera phone I picked up the other day, some by other people I know or found on flicker - but not until closer to the weekend.
8/03/2005
Got an email through from Jim Steel that I'm on a list of candidates for what appears to be a special one-off set of British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) awards focused around Worldcon, called 'Best of British'. I'm on the list, apparently, for 'best newcomer', which is nice. Unfortunately, the deadline for voting was last Monday, except today is the first time I even heard about it ... so it goes. I don't know if it's a longlist, a shortlist, or whatever, but I'll probably pick up a copy of the BSFA's 'Matrix' magazine at the con and see what it says about me anyway. Just nice that people are thinking about me.
8/02/2005
The BBC have come up with the absolutely superb idea of experimenting with putting some of their programmes up on the internet to view at the same time as it's available on the networks. If you like your humour quite astonishingly surreal, then I urge you to watch the second episode of The Mighty Boosh. Unfortunately - or at least so it says on the webpage - it's only viewable by people in the UK. I'm no expert in these things (though I can say it plays as a streaming realplayer file), but I wonder if someone out there can find a way around this. You'll need a decent broadband connection to watch it, natch.
8/01/2005
Monday, and the Worldcon is only a couple of days away. What's weird about it is I feel like the opening act at Woodstock: I'm probably not the first one up in front of an audience, but pretty close with a reading at midday on the Thursday. Which is a bit scary, but I've done it before (okay, once). People are emailing bits and pieces around the GSFWC mailing list about stuff to talk about on panels, and I'm like, prepare? How do you even spell 'prepare'? I'm too busy hoping my bad back clears up before Thursday so I don't spend the whole weekend hobbling around with a pained expression and a pocket full of 400mg Ibuprofen. Plus, if there's one thing I really, really hate, it's the sound of my voice amplified. Too squeaky.
Like a couple of other people pointed out, there's a little in the way of pre-con preparation in the form of the Nova Scotia launch on Wednesday in Glasgow Borders - the same Borders that chucked our writing group out the door several years ago because we were 'too rowdy'. I'm not sure how a middle-aged, bearded, choir-singing sub-editor called Lawrence asking if we can have an extra chair and carrying one down from an upper floor qualifies as 'rowdy behaviour', but clearly we were far too violent, dangerous and badly behaved to be allowed to remain on the premises. I find it endlessly amusing that these same people now have to host a do on the Friday night for Tor writers, a few of whom (ie me and Hal) are members of that writing group.
I keep meaning to put together a list of things to go to at the Con, and particularly, stuff I'm supposed to be at, but I suck at organisation at the best of times. Probably I'll scribble something down (lacking a printer) at the last minute and hopefully not lose it.
One thing I am hoping to do at some point (and this is by way of a reminder to some of the other GSFWC people attending) is I'd like to take a picture of us, outside the SECC. There isn't much in the way of photographic evidence of GSFWC over the nearly fifteen years I've been a member, and considering the vast majority of the old crowd now either have agents or actual book deals it sort of makes sense to me to just take a picture. Outside the front entrance of the SECC, maybe. However, most of GSFWC suck at organisation even worse than I do, so there are absolutely no guarantees I can get them all in the same place at once. If enough of them turn up to the midday reading, I might try and entrap them there: except, of course, somebody won't be able to make it, and then there won't be any point. So what I'll probably try and do is just generally take pictures and post them up here as and when.
Like a couple of other people pointed out, there's a little in the way of pre-con preparation in the form of the Nova Scotia launch on Wednesday in Glasgow Borders - the same Borders that chucked our writing group out the door several years ago because we were 'too rowdy'. I'm not sure how a middle-aged, bearded, choir-singing sub-editor called Lawrence asking if we can have an extra chair and carrying one down from an upper floor qualifies as 'rowdy behaviour', but clearly we were far too violent, dangerous and badly behaved to be allowed to remain on the premises. I find it endlessly amusing that these same people now have to host a do on the Friday night for Tor writers, a few of whom (ie me and Hal) are members of that writing group.
I keep meaning to put together a list of things to go to at the Con, and particularly, stuff I'm supposed to be at, but I suck at organisation at the best of times. Probably I'll scribble something down (lacking a printer) at the last minute and hopefully not lose it.
One thing I am hoping to do at some point (and this is by way of a reminder to some of the other GSFWC people attending) is I'd like to take a picture of us, outside the SECC. There isn't much in the way of photographic evidence of GSFWC over the nearly fifteen years I've been a member, and considering the vast majority of the old crowd now either have agents or actual book deals it sort of makes sense to me to just take a picture. Outside the front entrance of the SECC, maybe. However, most of GSFWC suck at organisation even worse than I do, so there are absolutely no guarantees I can get them all in the same place at once. If enough of them turn up to the midday reading, I might try and entrap them there: except, of course, somebody won't be able to make it, and then there won't be any point. So what I'll probably try and do is just generally take pictures and post them up here as and when.
7/30/2005
Some more stuff is up, so excuse me while I indulge in some more of my favourite activity, blatant self-promotion. There are several pieces up at infinityplus, including: an excerpt from Against Gravity, and an interview with myself, Hal Duncan and Michael Cobley. They're all housed under a general profile of scottish writers at next week's Worldcon.
7/25/2005
The first review for Against Gravity is up on the net, and it's a good one (phrases that stick are 'pretty damn good' and 'superb ending'), which is heartening considering there were times while writing it when I felt like getting a bit Misery on its ass with a sledgehammer and a block of wood. But it all came out all right in the end.
Of course, this is all nothing more than standard second book syndrome. If that doesn't make sense to you, trust me, you have to be there to know what it feels like. First books are always easier because usually you're writing it without a contract, so really there's no serious pressure involved. It's after you've sold it and have to write a second that the pressure really starts to kick in.
Worldcon is barely more than a week away, and I've taken two weeks off work in order to a)prepare b)be there and c)recover. Unfortunately, Cheryl's review might be the only one for a couple of weeks, since it turns out there was a delay down at the publishers, and they've only just managed to send out the review copies ... more than a week after it's appeared in the shops and on Amazon.
So if you're a reviewer and were expecting it (like Rick Kleffel over at trashotron.com, who mailed me to let me know he hadn't received anything), this is why it isn't there yet.
Fortunately, they've moved the official release date of AG back by about a month (apparently this makes sure it gets reviewed by the usual media and fiction magazines): so in fact, it's not out until August.
Even though you can buy it.
Right now.
In your local bookshop.
And online.
Bah.
Of course, this is all nothing more than standard second book syndrome. If that doesn't make sense to you, trust me, you have to be there to know what it feels like. First books are always easier because usually you're writing it without a contract, so really there's no serious pressure involved. It's after you've sold it and have to write a second that the pressure really starts to kick in.
Worldcon is barely more than a week away, and I've taken two weeks off work in order to a)prepare b)be there and c)recover. Unfortunately, Cheryl's review might be the only one for a couple of weeks, since it turns out there was a delay down at the publishers, and they've only just managed to send out the review copies ... more than a week after it's appeared in the shops and on Amazon.
So if you're a reviewer and were expecting it (like Rick Kleffel over at trashotron.com, who mailed me to let me know he hadn't received anything), this is why it isn't there yet.
Fortunately, they've moved the official release date of AG back by about a month (apparently this makes sure it gets reviewed by the usual media and fiction magazines): so in fact, it's not out until August.
Even though you can buy it.
Right now.
In your local bookshop.
And online.
Bah.
7/14/2005
Against Gravity finally hit the shops yesterday (Friday), along with the mass market paperback of Angel Stations. I'm not enough of an expert to judge (ie I can see the online ranking but don't know how to interpret it in terms of actual numbers of copies sold), but they both seem to have been doing pretty well on Amazon in pre-orders.
If I haven't (again) been posting that much recently, it's because I'm not really up to writing 'what I had for breakfast' blog entries. So it does get harder to come up with interesting entries. Nonetheless, there are a few things over the past few weeks that do bear addressing.
1: Jim's post bag. In the tradition of many highly-regarded writers, artists, alcoholics and mass murderers, GSFWC writer Jim Steel is a postman. He also has to stick about five hundred copies of the new Harry Potter book through your door, except the letterbox on all of them is too small. Poor Jim. Bad Harry.
2: I had this brief moment of happy hope the other day when I found out that, yes, someone had made a 'period' version of War of the Worlds. I skipped to the official site and watched the trailer (finally viewable since I upgraded to broadband a couple of weeks ago).
I started getting seriously worried when a bloke in a very obviously stuck-on moustache ran towards the camera crying, 'unhand that woman, you brutes!' Then my happy little heart went on a long, long holiday, and my hopes went south bigtime. It is, apparently, uniquely and appallingly unwatchable on a level that challenges even Ed Wood for laughably bad filmmaking. There's a quite hilarious review here.
3: I've been along to a scriptwriting workshop at the BBC a couple of times recently, along with one or two other GSFWC'ers. Scriptwriting is something that always kind of appealed to me, primarily for financial reasons. It's 'relatively' little work for potentially much greater amounts of moolah than that available through novel writing. I used to have a terrible time trying to write scripts since it didn't feel, on some level, like I was really writing a story: more a description of events that felt, somehow, emotionally distanced from whatever made me want to write the story in the first place.
I got past that at last, primarily because every time I start writing a new book, I end up outlining it and planning it out more and more: so it starts feeling not so far from what a scriptwriter comes up with. I dug up an unfinished short story, turned it into a completed script, and felt actually really happy about it. So I'm going to submit it to something called Tartan Shorts and, who knows, if I'm very lucky I might even get somewhere with it.
So let's talk numbers: to get my head around writing a tv script, I downloaded the freely available script for Aliens. Total word count, thirty thousand words: one quarter of one of my novels. Amount of carefully annotated research concerning plausible planetary environments: zero, I rather imagine. But a lot of work in terms of plot structure and character development, I have no doubt. But even if I (or you, or anyone) manages to write an hour-long script for, say, an existing tv show, what you get paid on acceptance is equivalent to a pretty decent payment for a novel: and given a page of a script matches a minute of screen time, you're talking between forty-five and sixty pages.
Yes, there's more to it than that. Yes, it's not quite so simple. But here's the kicker: you get paid that same amount of money again on the day of transmission.
And again, if it gets repeated.
And you wonder why I'm suddenly interested in scriptwriting? I could finance the novel writing for years off of the back of something like that.
Before I sign off, I'm going to make a movie recommendation: I recently signed up to an online dvd rental service, and first through the post was Charlie Kaufman's 'Adaptation', which is about Charlie Kaufman trying and failing to write a script adaptation of a book. Kaufman is already far and away one of the finest screenwriters in Hollywood, responsible for Eternal Sunshine, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Being John Malkovich, and this. If you want to be a writer of any kind, go rent this. And feel the fear.
If I haven't (again) been posting that much recently, it's because I'm not really up to writing 'what I had for breakfast' blog entries. So it does get harder to come up with interesting entries. Nonetheless, there are a few things over the past few weeks that do bear addressing.
1: Jim's post bag. In the tradition of many highly-regarded writers, artists, alcoholics and mass murderers, GSFWC writer Jim Steel is a postman. He also has to stick about five hundred copies of the new Harry Potter book through your door, except the letterbox on all of them is too small. Poor Jim. Bad Harry.
2: I had this brief moment of happy hope the other day when I found out that, yes, someone had made a 'period' version of War of the Worlds. I skipped to the official site and watched the trailer (finally viewable since I upgraded to broadband a couple of weeks ago).
I started getting seriously worried when a bloke in a very obviously stuck-on moustache ran towards the camera crying, 'unhand that woman, you brutes!' Then my happy little heart went on a long, long holiday, and my hopes went south bigtime. It is, apparently, uniquely and appallingly unwatchable on a level that challenges even Ed Wood for laughably bad filmmaking. There's a quite hilarious review here.
3: I've been along to a scriptwriting workshop at the BBC a couple of times recently, along with one or two other GSFWC'ers. Scriptwriting is something that always kind of appealed to me, primarily for financial reasons. It's 'relatively' little work for potentially much greater amounts of moolah than that available through novel writing. I used to have a terrible time trying to write scripts since it didn't feel, on some level, like I was really writing a story: more a description of events that felt, somehow, emotionally distanced from whatever made me want to write the story in the first place.
I got past that at last, primarily because every time I start writing a new book, I end up outlining it and planning it out more and more: so it starts feeling not so far from what a scriptwriter comes up with. I dug up an unfinished short story, turned it into a completed script, and felt actually really happy about it. So I'm going to submit it to something called Tartan Shorts and, who knows, if I'm very lucky I might even get somewhere with it.
So let's talk numbers: to get my head around writing a tv script, I downloaded the freely available script for Aliens. Total word count, thirty thousand words: one quarter of one of my novels. Amount of carefully annotated research concerning plausible planetary environments: zero, I rather imagine. But a lot of work in terms of plot structure and character development, I have no doubt. But even if I (or you, or anyone) manages to write an hour-long script for, say, an existing tv show, what you get paid on acceptance is equivalent to a pretty decent payment for a novel: and given a page of a script matches a minute of screen time, you're talking between forty-five and sixty pages.
Yes, there's more to it than that. Yes, it's not quite so simple. But here's the kicker: you get paid that same amount of money again on the day of transmission.
And again, if it gets repeated.
And you wonder why I'm suddenly interested in scriptwriting? I could finance the novel writing for years off of the back of something like that.
Before I sign off, I'm going to make a movie recommendation: I recently signed up to an online dvd rental service, and first through the post was Charlie Kaufman's 'Adaptation', which is about Charlie Kaufman trying and failing to write a script adaptation of a book. Kaufman is already far and away one of the finest screenwriters in Hollywood, responsible for Eternal Sunshine, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Being John Malkovich, and this. If you want to be a writer of any kind, go rent this. And feel the fear.
6/25/2005
Everybody else seems to have got their Worldcon schedule through (and subsequently stuck it up on the web), so I guess it's time I got the finger out and put up my finalised list of 'stuff I'll be doing when I'm not falling over from lack of sleep'.
Thursday 12:00 noon: Reading (0.5 hrs)
Gary Gibson
Now here's my first lesson in abject terror at Worldcons: a reading. Kind of makes me think of the look Martin Sheen has on his face for much of Apocalypse Now: if I can just get myself through this alive, everything will be fine.
Oh, I don't mind doing readings at all. In fact, I wondered out loud a couple of times about the idea of getting some (inexpensive) voice coaching, something along the lines of those music teachers who claim to be able to teach you to sing in a day. In my experience, most authors - usually because of the understandable degree of stress and nervousness involved - tend to read their stuff too quickly, primarily because they're afraid of having any brief moments of silence in there. Which is, in fact, precisely what's necessary for people to be able to absorb what's being read to them. Listen to an actor doing a reading on the radio, then compare it to your experience (unless it's Garrison Keillor) of hearing an author read his own stuff. Not that you can really blame the author: their job is to write the stuff, after all, much more than it is to create a performance piece.
Saturday 2:00pm:Building a Future World and Blowing it Up: The Pleasures of Destruction (1.5 hrs)
Keith Brooke, Jay Caselberg, Gary Gibson(M), Larry Niven, Martin Sketchley
Is there anything better than watching a world you've constructed word by word, blow up in super nova or a nuclear war?
Two days after I got my provisional Worldcon schedule through, I woke in a sweat of Lovecraftian horror and realised what that bracketed 'm' meant: I'm the moderator. Makes me feel like Bogart in the African queen, eyeing the hungry crocodiles while piloting a boat stuffed with gelignite towards the rapids. You mean I'm in charge? You mad, mad fools. I have not got a fucking clue what I'm going to do with this one, except twitch a lot.
I do, however, have an inner sense of preservation which at the most unexpected moments bootstraps me into 'excessive chattiness' mode, usually while drowning in the inchoate horror of being at a party with only three other people there, none of whom you know, and none of whom appear to be willing to speak. I haven't, in other words, come up with anything to say, nor any even vague concept of how I might frame this panel, but I continue onwards in sanity safe in the knowledge that sometime between now and the time of the panel, righteous panic will set in and hopefully inspire some, I don't know, creative inspiration. Or something.
Sunday 3:30pm: Improving Your Writing (1.5 hrs)
Gary Gibson, Simon R Green, Jay Lake, Rowena Lindquist, Steve Nagy(M)
Authors discuss ways to improve plot, character, description, and other matters of technique
Okay, this one I think I can handle, maybe just because I'm not the moderator. I can blabber on eternally about the act (or art? 'act' seems more honest somehow) of writing.
Monday 1:00pm:Kaffeeklatsch
Gary Gibson, Ellen Kushner, Jo Walton
I was at the launch of Michael Cobley's new fantasy novel, Shadowmasque, at Glasgow Ottakar's a week or so ago, and Ian McDonald - an old friend of Mike's - came along. I mentioned to him I'd spoken to him briefly at the Eastercon, while he'd been on his way to a 'kaffeeklatsch'. I took this opportunity to ask him to tell me precisely what these entail.
Except I can't remember what he said now. I do, however, hope there's lots of coffee involved, as I think I'm going to need it by the time Monday afternoon rolls around.
Apart from all that, there's also going to be a party for Tor UK writers or summat held at the big Borders bookshop in Glasgow city centre on the Friday evening. It's also going to double as the launch party for Hal Duncan's first novel, Vellum, which is released on the same day (and which I need to get round to trying to blag a copy of from Pan while I'm at it). Naturally, I'll be there.
Other stuff: a script editor who works for a local tv company has been coming along to our writing workshop over the past couple of months: after a brief chat which included my jaw dropping when she told me how much money you can make writing a one or two hour script for someone like the BBC (assuming they go for it, of course) I agreed to drop by a scriptwriter's workshop which operates out of a West End bar sometime next week. I've actually got a couple of books on scriptwriting by people like Syd Field, but never really did anything about it. However, maybe I see things differently now, and it's an area of creative (and financial, natch) pursuit that's at least worth checking out. We'll see.
Thursday 12:00 noon: Reading (0.5 hrs)
Gary Gibson
Now here's my first lesson in abject terror at Worldcons: a reading. Kind of makes me think of the look Martin Sheen has on his face for much of Apocalypse Now: if I can just get myself through this alive, everything will be fine.
Oh, I don't mind doing readings at all. In fact, I wondered out loud a couple of times about the idea of getting some (inexpensive) voice coaching, something along the lines of those music teachers who claim to be able to teach you to sing in a day. In my experience, most authors - usually because of the understandable degree of stress and nervousness involved - tend to read their stuff too quickly, primarily because they're afraid of having any brief moments of silence in there. Which is, in fact, precisely what's necessary for people to be able to absorb what's being read to them. Listen to an actor doing a reading on the radio, then compare it to your experience (unless it's Garrison Keillor) of hearing an author read his own stuff. Not that you can really blame the author: their job is to write the stuff, after all, much more than it is to create a performance piece.
Saturday 2:00pm:Building a Future World and Blowing it Up: The Pleasures of Destruction (1.5 hrs)
Keith Brooke, Jay Caselberg, Gary Gibson(M), Larry Niven, Martin Sketchley
Is there anything better than watching a world you've constructed word by word, blow up in super nova or a nuclear war?
Two days after I got my provisional Worldcon schedule through, I woke in a sweat of Lovecraftian horror and realised what that bracketed 'm' meant: I'm the moderator. Makes me feel like Bogart in the African queen, eyeing the hungry crocodiles while piloting a boat stuffed with gelignite towards the rapids. You mean I'm in charge? You mad, mad fools. I have not got a fucking clue what I'm going to do with this one, except twitch a lot.
I do, however, have an inner sense of preservation which at the most unexpected moments bootstraps me into 'excessive chattiness' mode, usually while drowning in the inchoate horror of being at a party with only three other people there, none of whom you know, and none of whom appear to be willing to speak. I haven't, in other words, come up with anything to say, nor any even vague concept of how I might frame this panel, but I continue onwards in sanity safe in the knowledge that sometime between now and the time of the panel, righteous panic will set in and hopefully inspire some, I don't know, creative inspiration. Or something.
Sunday 3:30pm: Improving Your Writing (1.5 hrs)
Gary Gibson, Simon R Green, Jay Lake, Rowena Lindquist, Steve Nagy(M)
Authors discuss ways to improve plot, character, description, and other matters of technique
Okay, this one I think I can handle, maybe just because I'm not the moderator. I can blabber on eternally about the act (or art? 'act' seems more honest somehow) of writing.
Monday 1:00pm:Kaffeeklatsch
Gary Gibson, Ellen Kushner, Jo Walton
I was at the launch of Michael Cobley's new fantasy novel, Shadowmasque, at Glasgow Ottakar's a week or so ago, and Ian McDonald - an old friend of Mike's - came along. I mentioned to him I'd spoken to him briefly at the Eastercon, while he'd been on his way to a 'kaffeeklatsch'. I took this opportunity to ask him to tell me precisely what these entail.
Except I can't remember what he said now. I do, however, hope there's lots of coffee involved, as I think I'm going to need it by the time Monday afternoon rolls around.
Apart from all that, there's also going to be a party for Tor UK writers or summat held at the big Borders bookshop in Glasgow city centre on the Friday evening. It's also going to double as the launch party for Hal Duncan's first novel, Vellum, which is released on the same day (and which I need to get round to trying to blag a copy of from Pan while I'm at it). Naturally, I'll be there.
Other stuff: a script editor who works for a local tv company has been coming along to our writing workshop over the past couple of months: after a brief chat which included my jaw dropping when she told me how much money you can make writing a one or two hour script for someone like the BBC (assuming they go for it, of course) I agreed to drop by a scriptwriter's workshop which operates out of a West End bar sometime next week. I've actually got a couple of books on scriptwriting by people like Syd Field, but never really did anything about it. However, maybe I see things differently now, and it's an area of creative (and financial, natch) pursuit that's at least worth checking out. We'll see.
6/14/2005
I put down the novel-length manuscript I've been working on yesterday and battered out a four thousand word short story in one evening, which makes me feel nice and productive. It's a horror story, for a change, influenced by some of the stuff which has been coming into the Glasgow Science Fiction Writer's Circle over the past several weeks, and isn't the kind of thing I normally expect from myself: so there you go. I used to write a lot of short stories, but I gave it up when I realised, like a lot of people, that it's often easier to work on books. I think I've written, maybe, one other piece of short fiction in the past five years or so - also, curiously enough, a horror story. Except that doesn't really count either, since it was something I'd started about five years before that and never finished.
Got a letter through from the British Fantasy Society, regarding my appearance on the 'recommendations longlist' for their annual novel award, letting me know they're having a pre-award get-together in London at the beginning of July. I sort of fancy going, but actually getting down there and also finding a place to stay without blowing out the bank account isn't so easy. Probably, I'll just stay up north and wait for the Worldcon. So it goes.
Got a letter through from the British Fantasy Society, regarding my appearance on the 'recommendations longlist' for their annual novel award, letting me know they're having a pre-award get-together in London at the beginning of July. I sort of fancy going, but actually getting down there and also finding a place to stay without blowing out the bank account isn't so easy. Probably, I'll just stay up north and wait for the Worldcon. So it goes.
6/06/2005
6/05/2005
Well, here's something to warm the common edible European bivalve (or cockles to the rest of you): Angel Stations has made it into the British Fantasy Society's recommendations list for best novel of the year. You can find the list here. I get the impression the way it works is, this list of twenty-seven gets narrowed down to a shortlist of five, which then go forward to a final award. Considering I'm surrounded by the likes of Clive Barker, Stephen King and Lucius Shepard (not worthy), I'm not rating my chances of getting any further too highly, but that doesn't mean it's not very, very nice indeed to get this far. Thanks to Jim Steel for pointing this one out.
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