Alt-Fiction & Cake

Because what would Alt-Fiction be without a fantastic assortment of baked goods?

The fabulous Adele was hostess with the mostess *and* organiser supreme. Alasdair served faithfully as Brekkie czar and all-purpose mood elevator. Great to see Vick and Vince and Kat again as well as to meet new folks.

The Phoenix proved a great venue, mostly because of the winning combination of WiFi, food and drink that kept people from roaming far. The staff were unfailingly pleasant and helpful, which makes a huge difference. And unlike the Quad last year, they did not run out of beer.

They were warned about writers!

I had a panel on adaptations to different media with Dave Moody and Niki Valentine, then read in the flash fiction panel a story I had written that morning (The Rook). Played Trivial Pursuit in the cafe and chatted with folks. We had a terrific Italian dinner!

Sunday was my chat with Graham Joyce about the very dangerous fairy folk. Not sure I was entirely awake, but people said nice things after.

Theme of the weekend: Buffy's Once More with Feeling :-) thanks to everyone, especially Adele. Bursts of ideas as well as plans for next year!

Know-vember: Adele

Thanks to the lovely Adele (@hagerat) for being the first volunteer! Adele runs UnBound (your home for reviews and news on spec fic works) and has awesome skills at kickboxing and baking (a religion has been founded around her baked goods -- that's how tasty they are). And look: she's just as cute as can be swathed in a sloth!

1. What's the first thing you do upon waking in the morning?

Hit snooze. Then turn off my alarm, pet ginger cat who is usually sleeping on the bed and looking huffy about the noise, check email and twitter on my iphone (addict) then crawl out of bed. 

2. What's a song you might be persuaded to dance to?

Country music makes me want to dance. Shanghia Cigarettes by Caitlin Rose is a good one. But I only dance in the house with all the curtains closed. 

3. Where in the world do you live?

East Midlands, UK, in a little village. 

4. What's a great night out for you?

My nights out tend to consist of kickboxing training, which is how I like it. I can have my arm twisted for food and a film. 

5. What's a great night in?

Book, cat, movie, laptop. Life is good.

6. If you were offered an all expenses paid trip anywhere in the world, where would you go?

New Zealand I think, it appeals. Although a long lazy tour of Europe would be fun too. 

7. What book do you wish everyone would read so you could talk about it?

The Office of Lost and Found by Vincent Holland-Keen coz it's mad as Badgers. 

8. What movie makes you cry?

Nothing recently although i used to sob every time at the Muppets Christmas Carol. I've toughened up since then. 

9. What makes you laugh?

Most things, I'm easily amused. 

10. Are there fairies at the bottom of your garden?

No. They moved out because of the Cats, there is a Dragon though. 

Thank you, Adele! You're the tops!

Talking Myth at Alt.Fiction

The fabulous Adele has worked her magic on the audio recording from Using Mythology in Writing panel from Alt.Fiction in June and it's now up as a podcast at Un:Bound. I appear alongside Mark Chadbourn and Adrian Tchaikovsky. I recall that we had to come up with one true myth and one fake one and the audience had to vote on which one was real, so there's some fun impromptu story-telling (because no, I didn't really prepare ahead of time despite being told). I can't recall if it's this session that was interrupted by a marching band passing outside. Something to listen for.

It was a lively session and we had a lot of fun and the audience seemed really engaged, too. Thanks again to Adele for thrusting me into the conference -- I really enjoyed myself.

Just got back from Robert's. Last night he made me crab cakes and roasted potatoes, then this fabulous tomato-watermelon salad with local goat cheese. Oooh. And to top it all off: freshly made peach ice cream right from the orchard and a helping of strawberry ice cream right from his porch! Mmm. Best of all: leftovers!

Alt.Fiction

A great time had by all, although Adele and the Unbound crew spent most of the day recording the podcasts. Clearly the QUAD was not accustomed to hosting writers as they ran out of both pint glasses and every kind of beer except Stella by Saturday night. Here's Adele  modeling her new tattoo, a line from her friend Vince's forthcoming novel. I had a wonderful time getting to know Vince, Kat, Vick and everyone else. Interesting adventures all weekend, including hotel strangeness (maybe I should have tried the black pudding).

I had a reading first thing, which is a bit awkward, but we had a good audience. I also had a chance to hear Graham Joyce read from his new novel (wonderful!) and chatted with him after, talking about Galway after I mentioned I'll be heading off there. I was delighted to hear from him about the pirate queen Grace O'Malley who was based there.

Before the madness commenced: the podcasts went on all through the day. I was part of a couple of them. I'll link to them when they go up at Ubound.

Here is the lovely Miss Chloe! I was so delighted that she came all the way from Switzerland to the conference. We had a wonderful time chatting and hanging around. Lovely!

Back at the fabulous Adele's now: it's blistering hot in the East Midlands! What's up with that? A good excuse for a party, right?

Utter Nonsense

Thanks to the fabulous Adele at Un:Bound, I have a post up at Everybody's Reading, the site for the festival of reading in Leicester this week. I wish I could be in Leicester for the celebration, but I suppose this will be the next best thing.

I write about my love of nonsense and its roots in Lewis Carroll's books (which is of course why I insert a picture of me in my Mad Hatter hat from Brussels):

If there is one theme of my life, it has to be nonsense. I blame Lewis Carroll. I had a jacket-less hard cover edition of both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There that was the lynchpin of my childhood. Along with the Mary Poppins series, Alice’s adventures filled my head as a child in some profound kind of way that – looking back – I realised has shaped me ever since. Carroll’s books prepared me to discover Peter Cook, Monty Python and Vic Reeves and put me permanently out of step with my contemporaries.

I don’t care. 

Read the rest over at their site and please consider leaving a comment so they know you dropped by. By the by, if you're wondering where my BitchBuzz columns are, my editor is on holiday in Greece and I didn't get it together to write posts in advance (madness! utter madness!), so I got a two week holiday, too. However, there are still fantastic columns by our other writers so drop by.

I have to run to campus now because I realise it's probably my duty as programming chair to print the placards for all the panelists so you can know who's talking in the panels at Albacon. Sigh. At least I remembered!

Kit Marlowe and I will be there, of course, flogging our books. Kit's got her own Facebook page now, so drop by and "like" it as we say in the parlance of our times. Look for our lovely promo postcards -- and our lovely selves who are really one. Of course. But I'm talking nonsense again...

Kit Marlowe Visits UnBound

Kit Marlowe is over at the UnBound blog with the Ravenous writers today. She's writing about cant, jargon and slang in her books and in her favorite novels. Join her and the whole crew, who are a fun bunch of folks and our wonderful hostess, the fabulous Dana Fredsti. Here's a snippet:

I love language!

I know, I know: all writers do, but I love the superfluity of language that supplies slang. I think in part it's like knowing a secret handshake or being part of an exclusive club. I specialize in rather obscure languages: for my graduate work I studied Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, Old Irish, Old High German, Middle High German, Modern German, Modern Swedish, Modern Icelandic and Latin (whew!).

But what I really love most are informal vocabularies that define a time or place...

Kit has reason to be cheery: her novella set in Jazz Age London, "The Big Splash," will be released by Noble Romance next month. Wow, barely born and already two publications! That's making a big splash for sure.

I, on the other hand, am still struggling out from under a bunch of tasks I'd hoped to have done by now so I could be back to focusing on writing. Soon, soon!

Interviewed at UnBound / BitchBuzz

The wonderful Adele over at the fabulous book review (and more) blog, UnBound has interviewed me and wormed many secrets out of me :-) and that's me laughing at the noodle restaurant the week before. It was such a pleasure getting to know in real life someone I had got to know over the 'net. I love the internet! So many friends and opportunities I would not have had but for it.

Yesterday I dawdled along the Thames near Millbank mudlarking. There was the usual assortment of glass and pottery shards, but I also found odd things like the front part of a telelvision set (no screen of course), a camera, a set of rusty keys with a Galapagos diving fob, which amused me (surviving all that diving and then losing your keys in the river? Then again maybe it was all a pose anyway). I went to the Tate Britain afterward. I'm still amazed at how much I love the new Turner section, mostly for his unfinished paintings which seem like precursors of the Impressionists. There's a new room of early Bacon works that include a painted screen and three rugs (!) from his interior design business in the 30s.

And my latest column is up, too, at BitchBuzz: a mad mash-up of the Stoppard matineé, the guy behind me on the bus, random musings about the Middle Ages and the usual weird stuff in my head. Enjoy!

Magus: The Alan Moore Conference (Day One)

Here's a lovely photo of me and Marc Singer snapped by the wonderful Adele, who already has her write-up of the Magus conference up over at her book blog, UnBound, and has pictures up as well. I was looking forward to this conference despite not quite having my paper done before I headed off to the UK. So many weird things happened while I was working on the paper that I decided to make that journey part of the paper, too.  I think I'll put the Powerpoint presentation on line with the paper as narration, so I won't detail everything here, but I had a lot of interesting coincidences arise from listening to Moore's performance CDs while sauntering through various museums in London and while lunching with my friend Roger Sabin in Red Lion Square (the site of the original performance of Snakes and Ladders.

I ran into Paul Gravett on the train coming into Northampton: I hadn't seen him in a few years, so it was great to have a chance to catch up on the cab ride to the campus, because he was busy right away as the keynote speaker. Adele was in the lobby with everyone else, so we had a chance to chat and meet other folks. I was pleased to see someone else I knew, Marc Singer, who was giving a paper on the Pog issue of Swamp Thing. I was a bit surprised to find that I had been moved from a later afternoon slot to the one immediately following the keynote, but it's just as well to have the paper done, so I didn't mind.

Nathan Wiseman-Trowse welcomed us all to the conference and talked a little bit about its genesis from a half-joking proposal to a serious academic undertaking (but fun, how could it not be?). He then introduced Paul who gave a lively presentation, "Something from Nothing -- Small Killing, Big Numbers: Comics Beyond Referentiality and Reinvention" which tied together some wonderful art exhibits of Moore's work (I especially yearned to see the Belgian one) and these less well known stories by Moore. I was glad Paul introduced the theme of the magic of art, creating something out of nothing, because I was going to be running with that topic, too. In a rather amusing moment as Paul talked about the giant diagram Moore created for Big Numbers, Gary Lloyd ran down with a facsimile so we could all see just how insanely detailed it was (four large sheets of paper with miniscule writing in tiny boxes representing each character and their storyline in all the issues. Wonderful!

I was on a panel with Rikke Cortsen from the University of Copenhagen. Antonio Venezia was supposed to be on the panel, too, but wasn't able to make it to our re-scheduled time and presented later in the day. Rikke's presentation, "Building Fictional Worlds: On the Construction of Place in Alan Moore's Top 10", examined how the variety of chronotopes employed helped map the complexity of not only the interwoven stories, but also the distinctly different time lines that overlaid the story lines.

My paper was a bit less formal and really became a performance about Moore's performances and the weird coincidences that dogged me as I wrote it. Most of you know that I enjoy a little theatricality in my performances and it seemed to go well. There didn't seem to be enough audible laughs at the right places (EL Wisty! Did people not recognize EL Wisty?), but afterward many people complimented me, so I was satisfied that it went well enough. The panel finished with a lively discussion, which soon proved to be the norm. So many people all interested in Moore's work gathering together, it was inevitable that people were bursting to discuss their ideas with folks who knew the score.

Lunch included a screening of Don't Let Me Die in Black and White, but most folks were too busy talking and eating to really take it in. After lunch, I headed to the panel "Chaotic Criminality: The Villains of Alan Moore".  First up was Geoff Klock, who appeared via Skype, which has a great potential for interconnectivity, but I can't help thinking he might have had a better presentation had he actually traveled to Northampton, for it was a bit rambling and had a few factual errors that irked. Mervi Miettinen from the University of Tempere presented "Past as Multiple Choice? Textual Anarchy in The Killing Joke" which explored the carefully controlled 'anarchy' of a dogged structuralist like Moore. Laura Hilton from the University of Birmingham presented "Reincarnating Mina Murray: Subverting the Gothic Heroine?" which compared the very different approaches between the film and the comics versions of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the traditional passive Gothic heroine and both Moore's and Stoker's use of Mina as the powerful prototype of the New Woman. Yes, the excrementally bad film version destroys everything subversive about her.

The final panel of the day had Tony Venezia (Birbeck College) giving his presentation, "'A Sense of History's Patterns...': Mapping Northampton in Voice of the Fire and Big Numbers" which once again returned us to Moore's obsession with his hometown and its geography (and chorography). Our co-host Nathan gave us "Marvel or Miracle: (Re)Placing the Original in Alan Moore's Marvelman" which traced patterns within the history of that much troubled superhero. Deneb Kozikoski Valereto (Leiden University) offered a thoughtful study "Philosophy in the Fairground: The Killing Joke and Thoughts on Madness" which again focused on the deliberate interplay between insanity and Moore's careful and complex organisation.

We had a brief stop at the reception, but then Adele and I went to a pub toward the rail station so she could interview me :-D I'll let you know when it's up. I headed back to London and got ready to do it all again the next day.

Adele AKA Hagelrat: Why People Don't Read

Adele is the fabulous hostess of Unbound, a lively book blog that covers a broad swath of authors (yes, I was recently a guest there myself!). She's also pretty darn funny and an astute reviewer. As her post shows, she's passionate about sharing the flame of reading.

Our awesome hostess has invited me to come and talk about something that matters to me about books. So that was easy really, it matters to me that people read. So I thought I'd take a quick look at some of the barriers to reading generally.

First and foremost the simple ability to read. I worked in young offender institutes briefly when I first left uni and the psychologist in one of those YOI's told me that in that particular one only 19% of the kids were educated to primary level or above. These are 16 - 18 year olds who cannot read or write to the same level as six year old. Add to that that in the UK when I was small dyslexia was a middle class excuse for stupid and few people could afford to get their dyslexic kids an appropriate education. The attitude to learning difficulties has improved massively over the last 30 years but there are plenty of people in the UK right now of every age who simply cannot read. They therefore do not have access to the quiet pleasure of written stories. Many of them have never had the joy of being read to either so the whole world of non visual story telling is lost to them. When you think of how fundamental story telling is to us as a species, part of our identity, our moral code, the offer of adventure and experience beyond what we can hope to actually have for ourselves and illiteracy is a huge tragedy and the loss of part of our social identity.

Perhaps the power of social media should be harnessed for the forces of good, to raise awareness and push this massive problem into the public consciousness so that in another 30 years time we won't be having this conversation again?

Another thing that is becoming a cause for concern is access to books. For those of us who already have a passion for reading it sounds silly, there are libraries and bookstores and the internet and frankly the hundreds of books in our homes already. There are friends to borrow from and paperback exchanges and the charity shops. But many of these things are disappearing.

Waterstones is the last big bookstore throughout the UK, there are a few smaller specialist chains like Forbidden Planet, but the high street bookstores are gradually disapearing. What happened to Dillons, Ottakers, Blackwells? Are they still around at all? Borders UK has gone, Blackwells I think is just a campus store now. WHSmith spreads itself too thin and is hardly a soothing browsing experience now, especially in Leicester where book browsers are bumped aside by the billions of visitors to the post office that is now situated there.

Libraries in schools are already becoming digital centres and city libraries are being chipped away at bit by bit serving community functions in priority to actually providing books and knowledge. I think there is room for libraries to do both, but to do both well requires money and commitment.

Gradually the processes by which we push the first paperbacks into people's hands and let them discover the worlds within, get Kidnapped or seach for Treasure Island are being eroded. We have initiatives to fight back, World Book Day for one, BookDoctors (and ours here is both lovely and wonderful) but it's not enough.

I am not considering ebooks here for a simple reason, browsing. In order to seek out, purchase and read and ebook you have to know you want to read, the discovery of reading comes from other sources than the computer. That of course segue's me nicely into where the love of reading comes from. Grasping for the Wind recently did an around the blogosphere on this and I didn't get my answer in on time, so you get my personal answer and my views generally now.

Love of reading for many of us comes from people who love to read. It's simple but it's true. My mother loved to read and won prizes for her poetry readings as a child so watching her stalk around the room reading Tennyson was enchanting. In the great tradition of our species my mother passed on her passion to me through oral storytelling, like a greek bard bringing stories to life in my mind while I listened. In order to get more stories than she had time for reading became my priority for myself.

At the points in my life where my reading habit has waned it has been friends lending me something that really captured my imagination that drew me back in: Tigs lending me a Clive Barker book when we were fourteen, Mandy lending me a selection of horror a couple of years ago when I was stuck for something new. Just being around other people who read has made a huge difference all through my life. One friend and I used to sneak out of school at lunch time to go to the local library because we'd exhausted the school one and when I left the area I gave her my library card because the six book limit was causing her problems. Now I am a book blogger and amateur reviewer, surrounded by people from all over the world that share this all consuming passion and I have realised two things: How many other people there are for me to share this with and how small the literary world really is.

One of the top sites for book reviews in the Booksmugglers blog, I believe they get about 26,000 visitors a month. In book blogging terms that's huge, the publishers who specify usually state between 1,000 - 3,000 before they will put you on their lists.

Compare it to You Tube, one of the leading video sites available a quick search produced this from yahoo answers "In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made over 3 billion video views". So in one month 26,000 want to look at one of the most popular book review sites as opposed to 70 million wanting to look at short videos of cats falling off stuff and clips from old tv shows.

It seems sometimes that everyone reads, because we surround ourselves with people like us, but in the grand scheme of things regular readers are a minority group. Perhaps we should register ourselves as a charity and start a programme of aid work, doing live readings in school playgrounds at breaktime.

If people who love reading are the way in for new readers, then perhaps we have a civic duty to tout that love everywhere we go and at least try and provoke the question why.