Canadian author, journalist, blogger, Internet freedom fighter and general all-round good guy Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is apparently having a bit of a rough time at the moment. As he reports via Twitter:

Hired a temp flat through #Foxtons; loo ceiling is leaking and water is ELECTRIFIED. Foxtons claims this isn’t their problem [link]

As you can imagine, this revelation got him about as much sympathy as you’d expect: which is some, but not a huge amount. After all, given the reputation of estate agents in general, going to a notorious bunch of cowboys like Foxtons is like engaging in business with a man who is not only a member of the British National Party, but who is renowned for being particularly unpleasant even for a member of the BNP. Perhaps typical of the reactions was this one:

If only you had consulted the Hive Mind first. Foxtons are scumcrooks of the highest order. Avoid forever more. [link]

I should mention that Cory did point out that he’d been short of options:

I knew Foxton’s were terrible, @white_mischief, but we were desperate and needed a flat on v short notice. What a disaster. [link]

But it did get me thinking, and remembering something else that Cory had mentioned some weeks ago:

Taking my “Life in the UK” test today for permanent residency. [link]

As long as I can remember there’s been a constant debate as to how we as a nation can help immigrants to the shores settle in our communities and integrate into our societies. The current government’s response has been to introduce tests, like the above mentioned “Life in the UK” test. I’m not necessarily against that. But are they asking the appropriate questions to teach the correct knowledge?

With all due respect to Cory, if his unfortunate misadventure is anything to go by, the answer appears to be no, because when we consider the knowledge that a British resident really needs to know, Foxtons being complete and utter bastards should surely be towards the top. So let’s look at some of the example questions one might face in this test:

An adult person receiving unemployment benefit should join New Deal programme if he/she has been unemployed for

• 6 months
• 12 months
• 18 months
• 24 months

Erm, what? I don’t know that. Who would know that? You only need to know that if you’re unemployed, and if you’re unemployed the question implies that you will have at least six months to find out. Will knowing the answer to that question be of any use whatsoever when integrating into British society? No. Let’s take another one:

What percentage of the population live in Wales

• 5%
• 6%
• 7%
• 11%

Who gives a shit? I mean, really? Most of the population of the UK are English (84% according to Wikipedia) and they’re only dimly aware that there is a UK outside of England. They don’t give a shit about Scotland (a fact that Margaret Thatcher took advantage of when road-testing the poll tax) and probably aren’t even aware of Wales enough to fail to give a shit about it.

You know what, UK government? If you want a genuine citizenship test you should be asking questions like this:

You are queuing in the Post Office. A man pushes into the queue just in front of you. Do you:

a) Push back in front of him;

b) Remonstrate with him;

c) Tut loudly;

d) Do nothing.

The answer is, of course, c, tut loudly. Doing nothing would be spineless, remonstrating would only risk causing a scene, and to push back in front would be the act of an excitable southern European.

Oh well. It could be said that the greatest of all British virtues is to use inertia and inactivity to amateurishly muddle through any problems the world may throw at us, usually drinking tea to pass the time until it all goes away. Looked at that way, actively attempting to help immigrants integrate and settle would be quite un-British.

But still, Cory. Foxtons. Foxtons? What were you thinking of?

I’ve just discovered a rather cool new feature that Amazon have introduced: Author Pages.

Basically, it’s a page for each author which can customised with the author’s picture and a biography. You can get to the author’s page by simply typing the author’s name into the search box. The author page should then appear as the second item in the last, along with all the various books by or about that author.

Here’s Neil Gaiman’s for example:

The really cool thing is that you don’t have to create the page. Amazon will create a default one, just waiting for you to fill it in. For example:

Mind you… It turns out that not every author has had an author page created. Here’s what I get when I type “Jonny Nexus” into Amazon:

Thanks Amazon! ‘Preciate that! That latter book’s by “Anonymous” by the way. How the hell they get “Nexus” into that I have no idea. The answer might be in its product page, but I’m frankly too scared to look.

Anyhow, I’m thinking I should perhaps stick to Amazon.com:

No author page, but no spank books by “Anonymous” either. That’s gotta be a result, right?

At some point in this post I’m going to talk about Game Night sales and vaccinations, but I’m going to start off about talking about one of the pitfalls of reviewing, which is that a review is not so much a description of how much you enjoyed the book as a prediction as to how much someone else might enjoy it.

From time to time I talk about books I’ve read here, and I’ve realised that when it comes to the degree to which I might recommend a book (and perhaps whether or not I might recommend it at all) there are two factors that come into play.

• How much I enjoyed reading it.
• The extent to which I can predict which other persons might enjoy it and the degree to which they might enjoy it.

It’s like you end up with two scores: a personal enjoyment rating, and an ability to recommend offset. For example, two books might give me the following:

Book that is hard to categorise

Personal Enjoyment: 5 out of 5

Recommendation Offset: -2

Recommendation: “Well I absolutely loved this myself, but…”

And:

Book that sits solidly within a genre

Personal Enjoyment: 4 out of 5

Recommendation Offset: +1

Recommendation: “It’s a good book. If you liked [genre/other book] I’m pretty sure you’ll like this.”

What does this have to do with Game Night sales? Well having realised the above in connection to writing reviews I’ve realised that it applies just as much to more informal word-of-mouth recommendations. And one thing that has become clear from Game Night reviews (and by extrapolation from informal word-of-mouth also) is that for many, perhaps most, people, it comes with a conditional, negative recommendation offset.

Or to use the format I defined above, for many people it appears to be:

Game Night

Personal Enjoyment: 4 or 5 out of 5

Recommendation Offset: 0/-2

Recommendation: “I really like it myself, but unless you’re a roleplayer don’t bother reading it because you won’t get the jokes.”

And I’m not just making this up. Here are some snippets from actual Amazon reviews:

First off, if you’ve never played an RPG before, stop reading this now; click onto another page, this dainty is not for you. If you’ve role-played, but didn’t really enjoy it, you’d better leave too. Still with me? OK then I’ll begin.

And:

It’s a shame that if you are not a role-player that a lot of the humour of this book will be lost. But if you are, it will probably be one of the funniest books you ever read.

And:

Guffaw or run for the hills, it all depends on whether you are already a gamer

Now I don’t actually think this is a correct conclusion to draw. For instance the following comes from a review written by a Discworld fan who’s never roleplayed in her life:

I picked up this book at EasterCon 2008 and read it so fast. It is funny, original, clever and oh – did I mention funny.

I am not into RPG – have never played dungeons and dragons or anything similar but I understand the convention and know that Roleplaying groups are supposed to be dysfunctional, argue with their Dungeonmaster etc. That is more than enough information to understand this book.

…

I read this and recommended to a friend who sat up all night reading it. We have both recommended to lots of friends and they ALL said they loved it too.

The friend she mentions greeted me at a convention the day after I sold her a copy of Game Night with the wonderful line:

“I didn’t sleep half the night and it’s all your fault! I couldn’t put it down, because it’s brilliant!”

And these are by no means the only non-roleplayers to tell me that they really enjoyed the book.

It’s very frustrating. But I can’t really complain, because I did originally envisage Game Night as a niche product targeted at roleplayers, and the fact that it was equally enjoyed by non-roleplayers came as a pleasant, but somewhat unexpected surprise. When originally conceiving it, I hadn’t thought that its niche status would be a problem. After all, if twenty million people worldwide have supposedly played Dungeons and Dragons at some point, I would only have to sell the book to a tenth of a percent of them to achieve sales of twenty thousand.

Excuse me while I pause for hollow laughter.

As it happens, Game Night has sold a little over 1600 copies in a bit over two years, a lot less than I was naively hoping for, but a figure that I now realise is pretty good for a novel published by a small gaming press, and which is not available through conventional book distribution channels.

And this is where we come to the discussion of vaccination promised earlier. You might point out that the Recommendation Offset mentioned above was conditional: it was only -2 when the person was talking to a non-roleplayer. Surely Game Night could have achieved a viral-like spread purely through roleplayers recommending it to their roleplaying friends? Well this is where the theory behind vaccinations comes into play.

See, to totally eliminate a disease, you don’t need to achieve vaccination rates of 100%. Get them up to something like 95% and you will kill it off completely – because the 5% of unvaccinated people don’t meet each other often enough for the disease to successfully spread.

And I think that’s what happened to Game Night. To a certain extent, all book publicity word-of-mouth is conditional; you’ll only recommend a horror novel to your friends who like horror books, for example. But Game Night was in some ways a genre within a genre within a genre (roleplaying inside of humour inside of fantasy). So perhaps its perceived niche status caused readers to only recommend it to a very select number of their friends, and just as with a disease in a largely vaccinated society, this prevented it from achieving that dreamed of viral status.

The conclusion: another good reason to add to the list of reasons as to why you should try to ensure your book fits into a recognisable genre.

And you know what? I think that considering everything, 1600+ sales is actually pretty damn good.

Where do I go from here? Well the novel I’m currently working on is the same style of humour as Game Night, because the last thing I wanted was:

“Well I really enjoyed it… but it is very different from Game Night.”

…but with a much more universal theme/subject of time travel humour.

Watch this space.

Last night found us facing our biggest challenge of the campaign so far: a sanity test in which the penalty for success was a D10 san loss, with failure incurring a scarcely believable D100 penalty. And the three of us were already had San scores down in the fifties at this point.

For those who don’t play Call of Cthulhu: our characters encountered something so mind-numbingly awful that we had a roughly fifty-fifty chance of suffering a massive psychological shock, and that phychological shock would be of such magnitude that were we to suffer it our chances of going permanently insane as a result (as opposed to merely temporarily do-lally) were also about fifty-fifty.

Or:

50 % chance of being very shaken.

25% chance of going temporarily insane.

25% chance of going permenantly insane.

We somehow all made it. Mostly.

Oh, and apparently the worlds going to end in thirteen months time, presumably unless we save it.

No pressure then.

That there are two kinds of people in this world is a truth universally acknowledged; what exactly it is that divides the world is where the disagreements arise. Extroverts and Introverts? Optimists and Pessimists? (Or as famed fictional pessimist Sir Humphrey Appleby would have it, Idealists and Realists?)

Left-wing or right-wing? Liberal or Conservative? North or South of the River? Blur or Oasis? King of Rock Elvis, or King of Pop Jackson? Tea or Coffee?

Is it as a t-shirt of mine proclaims? “There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

Or perhaps the crucial distinction is the one that cleaves my own family right down the middle and once nearly caused a family Christmas circa 2004 to descend into a bitter, full scale row: the division between those who think that George Bush did the things he did because he was stupid (myself and my mother), and those who think he did the things that he did because he was evil (my brother and my father).

No. The longer I live, the more I am convinced that all such divisions pale before that which truly divides us. I speak, of course, of the division between people who believe in a thing called “fresh air” and those who believe only in not being cold. Or to put it another way, between those who like their windows closed in winter, thank you very much, and those who insist on opening them at least once a day even when the temperature outside is so far below freezing talk of monkeys getting their balls frozen off is not mere nautical-derived metaphor.

I myself am firmly in the camp of those who believe so-called “fresh air” to be nothing more than an urban myth, no more real than the Ancient Greek’s aether, or the “molecular memory” of homeopaths. If given a choice, I would close my windows in October when Autumn arrives, and open them up again come April, having given spring a month or so to get its feet under the table.

Of course, in matters such as these choice is not always on offer. The picture at the top of the post is the window currently sitting open just to my left, from where it directs a cold draft across my forearms. Yes, having first married a committed member of the “open windows” camp, I’m now working with one too.

Dammit. Maybe I ought to start wearing jumpers.

A few weeks ago, I made the latest stop on the Game Night on the Web blog tour, at Ian Sturrock’s Live Journal. Ian’s a roleplaying writer of some repute, with the works on his CV including the Conan RPG from Mongoose Publishing, so I was very pleased to stop there.

Ian did first an interview and then a drabble competition to win a copy of Game Night, and if you’re wondering what a drabble is, I explained all about it here. (But the summary is that they had to write a story of exactly 100 words on the theme of roleplaying humour).

I was tasked with judging the winners. It was quite a hard job, because all the entries were good, so I eventually split the competition into two categories, one for the story that demonstrated the best writing (while still being funny), and one for the one that demonstrated the best roleplaying humour (while still being well written).

Ian announced the winners on his blog last week, but I wanted to say something about it here, and also give people a second chance to read all the entries. I’m going to post them all here, with links to the original post for the entry – so if you want to comment on a particular entry you can go straight there.

(Warning: If you’re not a logged in Live Journal user, you will be required to click to confirm that you are an adult before being allowed to view any of the Ian’s blog).

So with that, here they are:

Best Writing Winner

An entry by gbsteve:

King Conan looked down from the Eagle Throne, his brow furrowed. 

‘What is it this time?’he asked his fawning vizier. 

‘A delegation of Zingarans, eager to parlay.’
‘Send them in,’said the King, waving his hand dismissively – a hand that had strangled snake-gods, climbed the Mountains of Forever, fondled dusky maidens on the altars of evil temples, now reduced to signalling to courtiers. The Zingarans approached. On a signal from their leader, two women threw themselves to the ground and set off a terrible wailing.

‘Why?’ thought Conan, ‘why did I ever mention the lamentations of the women?’

Best Roleplaying Humour Winner

An entry by jradimus:

GM: Sorry, you can’t use this character.

Player: Why not?

GM: Because this is a pirate adventure, and he’s a 13-year-old Chinese boy, in the Caribbean in the 17th-Century. How did he get there?

Player: He’s on a journey of learning and spiritual self-discovery in preparation to becoming a Shaolin monk.

GM: Of course he is. But how did he get there?

Player: He decided he should go see this “New World” he’d heard of, and got captured.

GM: So now he’s a 13-year-old Chinese boy captured by pirates! He’s gonna get passed around like rum.

Player: Oh…GM: Yeah.

Runners Up

Cthulhu Madness by wargrimace:

The priest was tied up, while the three investigators stood around . 

Joe said, “strip him naked, with a stick of dynamite between his legs, he’ll soon talk”. 

Why is it every time we capture someone, you decide that you’re going to strip and torture them, said Claire. 

Dan chipped in, “why don’t you just stick that dynamite where the sun don’t shine and be done with it”.

Will, put his pencil down, “I’m supposed to be insane”.

You have a fear of the dark and convinced your being stalked by a rabbit, not obsessed with stripping everyone, replied Dan. 

An entry by agesgaming:

Chris: “A square table…c’mon I thought we were gonna share the story.”

John: “What’s wrong with the table?”

Chris: “The square table is a fascist piece of furniture. You’ll set at the head and then everyone will fight to sit next to you.”

John: “I suppose you’re a roundie. Great, you want me to sit around the table and get nothing done. How are gonna run a game when you don’t have a leader?” 

Chris: “We could sit on the floor.”

John: “I’m not some peasant. I’m a knight of the sixth order.”

Chris: “I guess it’s game over then.”

Cairo, 1934 (an approximate campaign summary) by kitchenutensil:

137 suspects, including 13 boys, have been arrested in a bizarre case of arson and murder. Police report that the suspects all claim to have been secretly tracking one of the other suspects, on behalf of one of 5 self-styled “investigators” of American origin. A small explosion destroyed one house and killed 4 local men. The sole survivor claims that he was also hired by one of the “mad investigators” to follow another “investigator”, and that the 5 of them were fighting over books and statuettes at the time of the explosion. The whereabouts of the 5 foreigners is unknown.

Another entry by gbsteve:

GM: As you approach the dock, you see the distant figure of Fingers Arbuthnot, rowing out towards the black galleon.

Paladin: We’ll never catch him! And he’s got the Hellkey!

Mage: Don’t worry, a fireball across his bows will soon make him turn round.

Paladin: Careful now.

GM: Hm, it’s dark and he’s 90 yards away, roll for accuracy. Just don’t roll a …

Mage: 1, I got 1.

GM: There is a distant explosion and you are engulfed in a cloud of burning row boat and lightly charred thief.

Paladin: You’re only supposed to blow the bloody oars off!

An entry by timecorps:

Lucy’s Omniscope: or Real Observers in Fictional Worlds

Lucy was thinking about the her new Quantum Omniscope when Carla came in. “They’re plotting downstairs: lotteries; horseracing; making money out of your new crystal ball. Where do you get your ideas?”

“This was your idea” Lucy answered. “Remember ‘God the Storyteller’?”

“Last night…” Carla stopped. “You invented this to find God?”

“Theism is unprovable. So I looked for the story.”

“And?”

“He’s a lazy storyteller. Remember Schrödinger’s Cat? Almost everything is unobserved, undetermined, like the cat. I saved everything observed in this file.”

Carla frowned. “Only 656 bytes? How big a story would that make?

“Oh, about 100 words.”

That’s all. Hope you liked them. And thanks again to everyone who took part.

In no particular order, and in no way a complete list, here are some thoughts on some books I’ve read recently. These aren’t quite reviews, and I’m not therefore going to be scoring them.

* * * * *

Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Like David Devereux’s Hunter’s Moon, which I’m writing about below, this book comes into the category of “Book I probably wouldn’t have bought under normal circumstances, but did so because I met the author and he seemed like a pretty cool bloke.” And like Hunter’s Moon, if I were assigning scores, I’d probably give Tail of the Blue Bird a 4 out of 5 “good, I really enjoyed it” rather than a 5 out of 5 “great, it blew my mind” because it’s not quite my thing. (i.e. If I really liked it and it isn’t quite my thing, then if it really is your thing then it might just blow your mind).

I met Nii Parkes at the London Writers’ Club a few months ago, when he came to give a talk. As I said above, he seemed like a pretty cool guy, so I bought a copy of his book, and read it on the train that week. What’s it about? Well here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Sonokrom, a village in the Ghanaian hinterland, has not changed for thousands of years. Here, the men and women speak the language of the forest, drink aphrodisiacs with their palm wine and walk alongside the spirits of their ancestors. The discovery of sinister remains – possibly human, definitely ‘evil’ –and the disappearance of a local man brings the intrusion of the city in the form of Kayo; a young forensic pathologist convinced that scientific logic can shatter even the most inexplicable of mysteries.

As events in the village become more and more incomprehensible, Kayo and his sidekick, Constable Garba, find that Western logic and political bureaucracy are no longer equal to the task in hand. Strange boys wandering in the forest, ghostly music in the night and a flock of birds that come from far away to fill a desolate hut with discarded feathers take the newcomers into a world where, in the unknown, they discover a higher truth that leaves scientific explanations far behind.

Tail of the Blue Bird is a story of the clash and clasp between old and new worlds. Lyrically beautiful, at once uncanny and heart-warmingly human, this is a story that tells us that at the heart of modern man there remains the capacity to know the unknowable.

As novels go, it’s perhaps a little more literary than I generally go for – but it’s still a very good fun read. Nii uses a lot of Ghanian words, phrasing and manners of speech (something which he discusses here); this can make the book slightly harder to read, but in return really transports you to this other world and culture.

I think I can best explain this book to my roleplaying readers by saying that after reading it, I wanted to run a Call of Cthulhu / Trail of Cthulhu game set in Ghana, because it perfectly catches that Cthulhuesque point on the cusp of reality and magic.

Anyhow, it’s a good book and I enjoyed it.

* * * * *

Hunter’s Moon by David Devereux

This is another book that I originally bought because I met the author (we were on a panel together at Dragonmeet), and he turned out to be a cool bloke – but it’s good enough that I now would have bought it anyway, something that I can say with some certainty because I’ve just ordered its sequel, Eagle Rising.

Hunters Moon is of the genre that I believe is called Urban Fantasy; this isn’t typically a genre I read, which should be borne in mind when reading my comments. (i.e. I thought it was pretty damn good, so if you are into urban fantasy you might think it was pretty damn great).

The book’s probably best summed up by the tag line on the cover: “Magician by profession. Bastard by Disposition.” but if that’s a bit cryptic for you, here’s the back-cover blurb:

“My name is unimportant, but you can call me Jack. I’m a musician by choice, a magician by profession, and a bastard by disposition. I’d been doing the magic thing for about five years when they found me. They said I had a talent, that I was smart enough and fit enough and enough of a shit that I could serve my country in a way most people never even get to hear about. And I did want to serve my country, didn’t I? I didn’t really want to contemplate what might happen if I said no.”

Jack has found himself on the front line of a secret war, so bizarre, so terrifying that most people simply wouldn’t believe it was possible. Working for a secret organisation tasked with defending our country from whatever supernatural threat faces it. MI5 know nothing about it and would laugh if they found out. Well at first they would … 

Wherever the forces of darkness gather, Jack is there in the shadows, waiting for them.

He is a very modern sort of magician – trained in a variety of the magical arts, adept at exorcism but also a dab hand with a Heckler and Koch, skilled in unarmed combat and electronic surveillance. And with a coven of witches calling on their dark master to help them assassinate the prime minister he’s going to need all those skills and more.

It’s a good quick read; fun, action-packed, and with one particular incident of assassination whose method still makes me both smile in admiration (at the inventiveness of the author’s mind in coming up with it) and wince in horror (at the horrible awfulness of the victim’s demise).

I won’t spoil anyone’s fun by revealing it further, but trust me, when you get to the bit where you’re shaking your head and saying, “Oh God, no, that’s just sick!” you’ll know it’s the bit I’m talking about.

I liked it.

* * * * *

Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

Red Moon Rising was a Christmas present from my lovely wife; that she has good taste and knows me well is evidenced by the fact that I really enjoyed it. It tells the story of the very first part of the Space Race, starting from the V2 rockets of the Second World War, and ending with the launch of Explorer I, the first US satellite, on the 31st January 1958.

I’m quite a space nut, and thought I was already well-versed in the history of space exploration. But this book went quite a bit deeper than my previous level of knowledge, with many fascinating anecdotes that revealed the degree to which chaotic internal politics influenced the decisions taken by both Eisenhower and Khrushchev during this period.

If you’re into space, I’d strongly recommend this book.

We started last night off with a discussion about General Tangent’s plans for when we next pause our Masks of Nyarlathotep Call of Cthulhu campaign. He’s thinking of running the old classic Traveller campaign, The Traveller Adventure, using Mongoose Publishing’s new Traveller rules.

(I’m very much up for this, as I love Traveller, and I did point out that one advantage of using this particular version of the rules is that I have their writer, Gar Hanrahan’s mobile number in my address book, which would be an excellent resource if we were to have any rules disputes. I’m not sure General Tangent quite agreed. I’m not sure Gar would either.)

Anyhow, as General Tangent put it, he wanted to do it as a good old style straight hard science fiction game, which then led onto the following exchange:

John: But have they solved the most fundamental problem with Traveller?

General Tangent: Which is?

John: The huge difference between tech levels. If you’ve got a tech level 20 whatever against tech level 10 Kevlar, it’s going to punch straight through. Basically, the higher tech level wins in combat.

Me: I think that’s the “hard” he was referring to when he said he wanted to do hard SF.

TAFKAC: Yeah, if you’re tech level ten and they’re tech level 20 you don’t get into a fight with them!

I had a very funny moment at the end of that conversation. I was backing up some emails at the time (UK2. Don’t ask.) and as a result, my Skype connection was blocky and kept on freezing. And it froze (with TAFKAC in a smiling, pointing pose) at just the point you would freeze it if you were doing a screen-capture comic like DM of the Rings or Darths and Droids – sort of like the picture of Sean Bean at the bottom left of this strip.

I’m so totally going to do some screen captures some time and put them through Comic Life.  

Anyhow, we did finally get onto Call of Cthulhu, in which my author character Zac, writer of the not-quite-that-popular Jonny Tennessee pulp novels (Zac’s character quote: “What would Jonny do?”) met someone who we thought was a seriously hot Egyptian god but who turned out to be merely a seriously hot (looks 18) high priestess and, after asking himself what Jonny would do and deciding that the answer was “try to get her into bed”, asked her to come round for breakfast (at this point still thinking she was a god) and was rather ecstatic when she said yes.

Somewhere along the line she offered me more ecstacy than I could possibly imagine, I asked her out to dinner, and she said yes.

I fear Zac may not survive past next Tuesday.

Quote of the session:

TAFKAC: [Upon being told that someone he'd hired wore glasses] You never said he had glasses. I never hire people with glasses.

John: No. You don’t hit people with glasses.

Me: Perhaps he doesn’t hire people he can’t then at some point hit?

There’s a theory that we inadvertently raise our children in sexist ways, treating our boys differently than our girls. Boys are praised for displaying physical prowess and courage; girls are praised for displaying delicacy and fragility, and for being good.

Boys are raised to become aggressive go-getters as men, and when they indeed aggressively go-get society praises them. But women are inhibited in such behaviour by a fear that they will be seen as acting in a selfish or unfeminine manner, and when they do take the iniative in the workplace, they are often condemned as being selfish and unfeminine.

So will I, a proud follower of progressive politics and thought, do the same when I have the children? Will I treat any boys I might have differently from any girls, purely because of their gender. Well the answer to that question is… dammit… yes. Why do I say that?

Because I’ve realised I treat my dog differently because she’s a girl.

The picture at the top of this post shows @4pawsnexus together with a friend’s dog, who we’ve dogsat for some extended periods over the last few years. She’s probably twice the size of him and far more athletic; she’s bred to herd sheep for hours at a stretch on cold Cumbrian hillsides, he’s apparently bred to kill rats, but I’m pretty sure that that was then and this is now, and that he’s now bred to look cute on laps. (Which he does, very – he’s like a miniature four-legged wookie).

But he’s a lovely little dog and I fell in love with him when we were looking after him. I used to take him to work on the Tube, so I spent quite a lot of time with him, and thus spent quite a lot of time talking to him. Now we have @4pawsnexus, and I spend quite a lot of time with her, and as with him, I find myself saying one particular phrase to her, over and over again, when I praise her – except that I only recently realised that (completely unconsciously) it’s a different phrase I use.

With him, I would always tell him that he was a “big, brave boy”. But I always tell her that she’s a “good little girl”.

Big and brave verses good and little.

Yep, looks like I’m as unconsciously sexist as the next man.

I’m currently doing a blog tour to promote the publication of Game Night, in its entirety, on EN World in weekly instalments (you can start reading it here). I’ve just made the latest stop at Ian Sturrock’s Blog, where he first interviews me, and then launches a competition that has a free copy of Game Night as its prize.

The competition is to write a drabble on the theme of roleplaying game comedy.

Drabble (Wikipedia Entry)

A drabble is an extremely short work of fiction exactly one hundred words in length, although the term is often incorrectly used to indicate a short story of fewer than 1000 words. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.

In drabble contests participants are given a theme and a certain amount of time to write. Drabble contests, and drabbles in general, are popular in science fiction fandom and in fan fiction. The concept is said to have originated in UK science fiction fandom in the 1980s; the 100-word format was established by the Birmingham University SF Society. Beccon Publications published three volumes, “The Drabble Project” (1988) and “Drabble II: Double Century” (1990), both edited by Rob Meades and David Wake, and “Drabble Who” (1993), edited by David J. Howe and David Wake. It was popularized online at 100Words.com.

To enter the competition, just make a comment on Ian’s post, here. I guess you’ll need to register with LiveJournal, but that’s free and only takes a couple of minutes. We’ve already got two entries as I type this, and the tweet I made to publicise it has been retweeted by Danni from Forbidden Planet, Matt Forbeck and John Kovalic as well as several others, so I’m hoping we’ll get a really good response. If you know anyone who’s into writing and might like a crack at it, please pass this along to them. Although there will only be one winner, I’ll do a post highlighting all the entries.

I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with.