Fantasy Con Parts 1 and 2

So much has happened in the last three days, it’s gonna be a bit of a marathon putting it all down. And instead of multiple blog entries, I'm going to keep adding onto this entry (and ammending the title too so you'll know when it's updated)...


Book Launch

Okay, so let’s start with Friday. Firstly I got some really good news about the book-launch. The planned launch will no longer be in a pub somewhere in Sheffield, but now at Waterstones in town (arguably the biggest bookshop in South Yorkshire). Apart from saving quite a bit of cash, it’s also the perfect venue for my inauguration into the ranks of the published, and I am really looking forward to it. The bad news is that numbers are limited. Instead of having room for 200 guests (which while I could have achieved, I would have struggled slightly if anyone bowed out at the last moment), I am now down to only 100 guests maximum, so will have to cherry-pick and cut the guest-list in half.
I’ve tried doing this already, and boy is it hard!

So anyway, Friday had started off well. So let’s get down to the real purpose of the weekend…

Expectations

I’ve been to a couple of conventions before - around Fantastic films, and a comic book convention, all when I was a teenager. So Fantasy Con is my first convention in, oh, twelve years or more. So I arrived in jeans, a shirt and a smile to discover that it really was like going back to my youth, where the vast majority of guests wore black, the blokes sported long-hair, and t-shirts with “New Model Army” plastered all over the front and back.
It was that mixture of both nostalgia and reflection that struck me first. You see I stuck out like a sore whatssit, while perhaps 12 years ago, I would have just merged seamlessly into the general melee of guests. I felt as though I had been away for far too long – into the mainstream world I guess. Will I ever go back to looking that way? I don’t have the hair for it (indeed it appears to be shrinking rather than growing) and the days of me marching into a record-shop to buy the blackest t-shirt stencilled with either Sisters of Mercy or New Model Army, are behind me – I remember those days with fondness, but it’s a corner I have since turned.
So I have to deal with that. And hey there were other people dressed as conservatively as I.
The other expectation that was quickly confounded was the idea of the convention being something that fans would gravitate towards. After-all, my experiences of conventions had been just that – for the fanboys or fangirls, that breed of enthusiastic people who would easily queue up for an hour for a writer’s signature, or even just a handshake. I know, I was one.
But Fantasy Con is not like that all. Indeed, if you were to look at the ratio of writers and publishers to fans and part-time fans, I guess it would be about 2 or 3 to 1 in the writers and publishers favour. In other words, this was beyond my experience of conventions – this was more a gathering of some of the most talented and brilliant minds of fantastical fiction that has been assembled in years. There were guests of honour sure – Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Raymond E. Feist, Neil Gaiman and Juliet E. McKenna, yet this does the whole thing an injustice in terms of the talent on show. I mean the following were simply there as guests!: Simon Clark, Pete Crowther, Mark Morris, Chaz Brenchley, Storm Constantine, Stephen Gallagher… I could go on and on and on. And if you don’t know many of the above, search their names on Amazon, and check out their books.

Needless to say, my intention was to march boldly into the Con and promote my book to anyone who would listen, yet in the end, the whole thing was really intimidating and just a little overwhelming, kinda like being the novice trying to mix with the masters. It was a sweet and bitter experience, so before I go into it further, please let me pause for breath. It might be a long pause for, oh, 24 hours or so, but I’ll be back…

Promise...


...And breathe out.

Blowing one’s budget

It’s always a good idea to have a budget when you’re going to one of these things. After all, you are expected to eat, drink and buy a few books at conventions. And even when you’re presented with a goodie bag at the beginning with quite a few books lovingly pressed into your sweaty palms, there are enough stalls to entice you to buy, buy, BUY! And I blew my budget in spectacular fashion, partly due to the hotel itself (which was a tad expensive) but mostly due to the buying of many, many books. Especially from the indie presses. And that leads me to my next revelation…

Small vs Big

As I mentioned above, I was here to do a little self-promotion for the book. Yeah, it’s a little early, but then is it really too early to promote yourself? Well, I guess not, but I think preparation is key. And I must confess I wasn’t as well prepared as I should have been.
For a start, I was armed with order forms and a stack of promotional cards which I thought enough to get me noticed. But the indie press, (aka small press) had produced book-marks, high-quality catalogues, flyers, sample books… a weight of promotional material that literally drowned the likes of Harpercollins, Hodder Headline and the other “big press” publishers in a sea of the dazzling and spectacular. I realised on the Friday afternoon that if any material I had with me was spotted amongst the mountains of flyers spilling over onto each other, then I would be lucky – hell it would even be miraculous.

After chatting to a few of the indie press bods, like Chris Teague (Pendragon Press) and the guy on the TTA desk (my apologies for forgetting his name!) I quickly realised these conventions are where the indie press do the bulk of their selling. They put everything into it, and it’s not just the promotional stuff either – there were boxes and boxes of books, piled high, stacked under tables and probably hidden away in any orifice the Britannia Hotel had to offer. It was an impressive presence – and almost an embarrassment of riches as the indie press were publishing house-hold names in British Fantasy and Horror. Writers who I grew up with, who I read about in magazines like FEAR, that I thought had disappeared off the radar, but now found a home in the independent stables. My wallet was actually trembling at the sight of this, I can tell you.

The Masters in the flesh. And out of it.

Whenever anyone chats around the dinner table or at the pub about great living writers of the fantastic, it’s very unusual that any of the following are not mentioned: Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Raymond E. Feist. Yet here they were, all three together, and I for one would listen to what they said.
Each of these “big-hitters” had a one hour slot – a public interview followed by questions from the audience, and that’s not including the panels they attended during the con. Being a convention that was aimed at the writer and not strictly the fans, the interviews were less about anorak stuff, but more on the writing process – how did it start, where did it start, and where is it going? From great writers like these, it is this stuff that’s invaluable to new writers like myself.
For example, I learnt that the best way to keep the writing flowing when creating in shifts (very pertinent to me, as I am a spare-time writer!) is to finish the “shift” mid-sentence rather than the end of a chapter or subsection. I guess it’s like getting on a roller-coaster where you know the ride has to stop at some point before the end. Instead of taking a break at a natural pause i.e. when you are slowing down or gradually climbing up a steep piece of track, you actually halt at the point where you’re staring down the longest drop imaginable with a mixture of terror and exhilaration. You then later hop back on at that point, not having to slowly build up to that fear and momentum again, but instead flinging yourself back into the drama with almost sheer recklessness. It’s a trick that seems so simple, and to some reading this probably not a great secret, but it’s one I missed until this weekend. And having since tried it, yes I can report, it actually works.

At the other end of the writing spectrum, they talked about the soul of story-telling: the stuff of inspiration, the psychology of writing and the philosophy of the imagination. Listening to these guys and the debates that ranged across the panels, I realised my error that I have been largely writing in a vacuum over the last few years.
During my university years there were plenty of people debating their own existence, or new worlds, or the limits of the Imagination. They were the stock arguments of the pubs, clubs, and smoke filled dingy student lodgings. But that environment has long since departed, and all that is left are echoes of those discussions, growing fainter each year. It’s not like these questions cease to be a pertinent topic of conversation with me, rather they aren’t a topic of conversation in my current social circle, Dave Budd the exception (but he’s living in London – so it’s not like I can just walk down the road for a chat!). And this weekend revealed to me that I am the poorer for it. I surround myself with books and films, and paintings etc, but they are void compared to the most basic of communications, ie a good chat or debate.

Listening to these writers talk about stuff they probably spend their lives discussing over dinner parties, at conventions, in the foyer of their publisher, and probably in their sleep, it was another revelation – a spiritual kick in the head so to speak - that perhaps I had to get back into that environment before I lose it completely and become part of the banal landscape around my day to day life…


(AND NOW FOR ANOTHER PAUSE FOR BREATH…)