What’s a media-tie in novel? Well this is the description on the IAMTW’s website:

We write science fiction, westerns, mysteries, romance and thrillers and sometimes all of the above. Our work embraces just about every genre you can think of, from STAR TREK to CSI, from GUNSMOKE to MURDER SHE WROTE, from DUNE to James Bond, from RESIDENT EVIL to Hannah Montana.

Our books are original tie-in novels, comic books and short stories based on existing characters from movie, TV series, books, games, and cartoons… or they are novelizations (books based on screenplays for movies and TV shows).

Tie-ins and novelizations are a licensed works… meaning they are written with the permission and supervision of the creators, studios, or other rights-holders of the original characters.

I’m only 17% of the way in (why yes, I am reading it on an eBook reader – why do you ask?) but so far it’s proving very interesting. However, what really got me thinking was a section where a group of the authors discuss the challenge of adapting a film script into a novel (the section entitled “Writing the Novelisation”).

The authors describe how they try to make the book more than the film from which it is derived, aiming to make it look as though the book came first, as though this was the book the film was based on. While still staying true to the film, they try to add depth, fleshing out those areas of story and characterisation that the film was forced to fast-forward past.

They also talk about the challenge of coming up with a narrative structure that suits a book; while a film can constantly cut back and forth between different scenes and different characters, a book needs a more stable structure. And they talked about how satisfying it is when you can come up with some sort of narrative scheme or angle that adds a new depth to the book that wasn’t in the film.

And it was this that got me thinking about my all-time favourite media tie-in novel.

Grease, by Ron De Christoforo.

This might sound like a bizarre choice, but you have to understand that the novel is so much more than the film. The film’s fun, I’ll not deny that. But it’s a musical, not perhaps frothy, but not that deep either. How the hell do you take an ever-so slightly camp and over-the-top musical and turn it into a novel?

Well in this case, De Christoforo took a minor character from the film, Danny’s best mate Sonny, and turned him into the engaging narrator of a gritty but fun, first-person novel. He also gave Sonny a girlfriend, Marsha, who joined the Pink Ladies, so that she could later tell Sonny things that had happened when the girls out of the boys’ sight. As for the songs, at least one that I recall (Greased Lightning) was re-imagined as an impromptu rapping sessions, with the rest just left out altogether.

Some novels draw you in, making you feel like you’re peeking into another world. That was how it was for me, with Grease: a young teenager in early 80s Britain feeling like he’d learned what it was to be a slightly older teenager in late 50s USA. It was full of detail: Polar Burgers, the pre-chain dump of a fast-food restaurant they used to eat at; the ‘57 Chevy pickup Sonny borrows from his cousin so he and Danny can go and visit Sandy; the zip gun Doody makes in shop that all the others laugh at.

It’s my favourite tie-in novel of all time. But more than that, it’s just one of my favourite novels.

I loved it.

If you’re interested, you can actually read the first bit of it using Amazon’s preview feature. Just click on this link. Or alternatively, to save you doing that, I’ve taking the liberty of grabbing the first page and a half and putting it here (the preview has more pages than this).

But before I do that… Have you got a favourite tie-in novel, either an original story or a novelisation? If so, please drop me a comment here to say what it was. I’d love to see if anyone else has any quirky surprises.

Click here to read more.

So we went, and it was okay. (In fact, the compare, Stephen Grant, was actually pretty damn good – I bought his DVD afterwards). But one of the acts came up with an anecdotal / observational sequence that I didn’t much care for, enough that it got me thinking exactly why.

It offended me, and I didn’t find it funny. But it’s not enough for me to just say that. After all, that a joke offends you doesn’t in itself make it offensive, and that you didn’t find a joke funny, doesn’t in itself mean that it’s humourless. I need to be able to say exactly why I think it’s a poor example of humour – especially given that I write humour myself. It’s not so much that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, more that if you’re accusing someone else of living in a greenhouse you really ought to check out your own accommodation first.

But rather than deconstruct that exact joke, I’m going to take a step back and work on a hypothetical example instead. So let’s come up with our own supposed anecdotal / observational joke that we can deconstruct, a joke whose bonnet we can raise and who engine we can strip down. How about this:

I often go into the gay bookshop that’s just round the corner. I don’t want to buy any books, I just like slapping gay men in the face with a copy of Penthouse. Of course, I run away afterwards. If any of them try to follow me I just shout, “That’s what testosterone smells like!” [Mimes a gay man, feebly and pathetically running after him].

Okay, I’m hoping that pretty much all of you would find that both offensive and unfunny. But why? Well the whole point of humour is that you should be coming up with, well, actual humour. Twists where you go in an unexpected direction. Insights that the audience didn’t see coming. Creating links between things that aren’t obviously links. But the key thing is that it should all be built upon clever wit and underlying truths. While the audience is laughing you want them to also be thinking, “Good point!” or “That is so true!”

So let’s look at the first element in this sequence:

I often go into the gay bookshop that’s just round the corner. I don’t want to buy any books, I just like slapping gay men in the face with a copy of Penthouse.

The core of this piece is an unexpected twist. When you say you were going into a bookshop, the audience will assume that it’s because you wanted to buy a book. When you say that it was actually because you wanted to assault one of the book shop’s inhabitants, that’s obviously pretty genuinely unexpected. But is there any cleverness or underlying truth to it? None that I can see. And the bit with the Penthouse creates a linkage between the assault and the fact that a gay man wouldn’t be terribly interested in a magazine containing pictures of naked women. But again, no real cleverness there.

How about the second half of the sequence:

Of course, I run away afterwards. If any of them try to follow me I just shout, “That’s what testosterone smells like!” [Mimes a gay man, feebly and pathetically running after him].

That section is built upon the tired, and untrue, stereotype of gay man being weak and effeminate, a stereotype that has historically been used to denigrate and marginalise them. (If your opponents’ arguments are more logical than yours, the best way to attack them is to instead turn them into figures of fun so no-one takes what they say seriously).

The key point here is that this joke will only work with an audience who have homophobic tendencies. Or to put it bluntly, you’ll only find it amusing if you find the idea of someone causing intentional distress to gay men, for no other reason than that they are gay, funny.

Tell that joke to a homophobic audience and you’re probably have them rolling in the aisles; tell it to a non-homophobic audience and you’ll bomb, very badly. Because it doesn’t actually contain any real, genuine humour; it instead achieves its laughs by leveraging prejudice and stereotype. A comedian telling such a joke isn’t providing insight or wit; he’s simply encouraging the majority to exalt in the bullying mockery of a minority.

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d say that if your joke is genuinely funny, then it should work on the people who are actually its subject. I’m not expecting them to laugh uproariously, but you should at least be getting a wry smile, a joking groan, and a roll of the eyes. But if you receive a stoney silence from them, that’s a strong indication that you’re laughing at them, not with them.

I know this kind of humour is the way it’s often been done. I just think it’s a pretty lazy way to get your laughs. I’m not saying I’ve never strayed across the line into genuinely offensive territory. It’s perhaps an occupational hazard if you write humour. But I’d rather get my laughs by coming up with something genuinely funny, rather than by telling 5% of my audience that they’re shit and getting the other 95% to laugh at them.

(It’s true that there are cases where the targets of a joke deserve to be ridiculed and insulted: nazi war criminals; Foxtons the estate agents; the man who invented indestructible clamshell packaging. But while such a joke might not therefore be offensive, if it contains no real actual humour, I’d still call it lazy. Just because it’s okay to insult someone doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t still try to come up with an actual joke.)

So what was the joke I didn’t like? And did the audience appreciate it? Well here it is (this is from memory, so it might not be word-for-word perfect):

I often go into the healthfood supermarket that’s just round the corner. I don’t want to buy anything, I just like hitting vegans in the face with a steak. Of course, I run away afterwards. If any of them try to follow me I just shout, “That’s what burning protein smells like!” [Mimes a vegan feebly and pathetically running after them]. You know Heather Mills? She’s opened a vegan cafe round here. Every time I drive past it I want to throw a leg of lamb through the door.

I’ll leave it to you guys to deconstruct this sequence. But the audience certainly loved it, if the volume of laughter was anything to go by. I’ve often said that I love Brighton because being an alternative kind of place, it’s somewhere where I feel at ease in my own skin. I didn’t feel like that on Saturday night.

Notes

While I’m actively looking for comments on all of my posts, I thought it might make sense to pre-empt some potential questions.

1.At its core, veganism isn’t about health and it isn’t a diet. While there are some people who describe themselves as vegans purely on the basis of eating a vegan diet for health reasons, veganism is actually a moral and ethical philosophy first defined in London in 1944, whose participants attempt to eliminate the exploitation of animals by avoiding as far as possible the use of animal products (meat, fish, eggs, dairy, honey, wool, silk and leather). No-one who’s seen the unhealthy shit I put down my throat on a very regular basis would ever think I was doing it because of health. I could write several pages on why I’m a vegan, but it basically comes down to this: when I think about cows going into one end of a slaughterhouse alive and coming out the other end dead I feel like crying. I’m not expecting other people to share that sentiment, but I don’t think I deserve to be publicly ridiculed and insulted for feeling it.

2. A vegan diet can include lots of protein and if a vegan is unhealthy and unfit it’s not because they’re a vegan, it’s because they’re eating unhealthy (albeit vegan) foods and not exercising. I know plenty of fit and healthy vegans, including my friend James Southwood, a two-times British champion at Savate (French kick-boxing).

3. The “heathfood supermarket” referred to in the joke is Brighton’s excellent Infinity Foods, a workers’ cooperative with a commitment to eco-friendly practices. We go there to stock up on vegan chocolate buttons, vegan cheesecake, vegan ice cream and vegan Chelsea buns. (We can buy healthy food in any standard supermarket).

Writing on the train has been my standard modus operandi for some years now. But just recently, while sorting through my old emails, I found one I sent to various friends that identifies exactly when it started:

Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:14:14 +0000

From: [me]

Subject: Project “Write On The Tube” Status Report

The project began today, with the taking of the Linux powered mobile writing unit (known hereafter as “the laptop”) on the home-to-work tube journey.

Project initiation was initially delayed by technical issues, but when I got into work I had another look at the laptop, and this time was able to figure out how to turn it on. A second attempt at project initiation will therefore be made during the second “work opportunity window” this evening, on the work-to-home tube journey.

That first laptop was a cheap, reconditioned model I’d gotten from Maplins, and it was very much an experiment. At the time, I had no idea whether or not I’d be able to write on a busy, noisy, bouncing tube train. As someone who’s always written on a word processor, all my writing had thus been done at home. I was doing a monthly column for Mongoose, and was finding that the writing of each column was dragging over a whole weekend. And yet, I spent an hour and a half each weekday on a train, with nothing to do save read or think.

Writing on the train might have been the solution, or it might have been a complete failure. I might have found it impossible to concentrate, to be creative, in what isn’t an obviously creative environment. There was only one way to find out, which was to try it, but given the high chance of failure I was keen to keep my initial costs down. Which was why I went to Maplins.

And having tried it, it worked. It turned out that I could write on a tube, much better in fact that I ever did at home. Freed of the distractions offered by books, TV and the Internet, I had nothing else to do save write. It isn’t other people who distract me from writing, it’s myself. I don’t need peace, quiet or solitude – I just need to have nothing better to do.

I guess that makes me lucky.

I followed up that Linux laptop with a G3 iBook (Mac). That eventually suffered a catastrophic failure somewhere in the graphics circuitry, following which I bought an Intel iBook. That’s still with me, but it stays at home now, because my writing tool of choice is my MacBook Air, which was my Christmas present to myself a couple of Christmases ago.

And in answer to the question you might have been asking since the second paragraph of that email, yes, I did feel a right twat sitting on a train with my new laptop unable to figure out how to turn it on. (I seem to recall that the problem was that at home, it had sat in a docking station, and the docking station had an on/off switch — but without the station, I needed to find a second, more hidden switch, and that took a bit of finding).

Of all the apps I played with, the one that really got me thinking was the Marvel comics app that my friend had purchased. It’s a really nice slick app. I’d already been thinking that I wanted to start reading Paul Cornell’s Captain Britain and MI: 13, but after this, I might hang fire until I have an iPad of my own. The graphics look stunning on its display, and its just a nice way to read a comic.

No, scratch that.

It’s two nice ways to read comics.

Method one is to hold the iPad in a portrait orientation, and read the comic a page at a time, as can be seen on the screenshot on this blog post. The display is perhaps a little smaller than a standard comic, but it’s still very readable. You go from page to page by just swiping with your finger.

Or, you can hold the iPad in a landscape orientation and double tap on a individual frame, at which point that frame expands to fill the entire screen. You then just read the story frame-by-frame, again by swiping with your finger.

Method two was the way my friends were using to read it, but I felt that by doing so, you miss out on a part of the comics experience. After all, comics are both a literary and a visual experience; you don’t only read a comic just as you don’t only listen to a TV programme. And the arrangement of frames on the page is (IMNSHO) an important part of the comics reading experience.

For example, the size and density of the frames can be used to control the pace of the story, while the turnover of a right-hand page can be used to both disguise and introduce twists.

A writer (or artist) might first slow a story down by having a two-page spread densely covered with tiny frames, taking the reader step by precise step through the action of a story and then – on the page turnover – punch into a single, huge, two-page frame. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow as it were.

The shape of frames can tell a story; regular frames suggesting order, irregular frames suggesting chaos. Imagine you were telling a story where the protagonist had been drugged; a chaotic frame layout here might be an effective way of of getting over that confused, disorientated feel.

I think you lose a lot when reading frame-by-frame; but I suspect that this might be the way many – perhaps most – people will read comics on the iPad. Over time, especially given a new generation who might never have read comics in paper format, it might become the dominant way of reading. And if that happens, perhaps comics will be written to deliver a frame-by-frame reading experience, rather than a page-by-page one.

I’m not saying it will be worse. As things change, they generally aren’t worse, only different, and are only perceived as worse by those who are used to the old ways of doing things. If people prefer to read frame-by-frame, who the hell am I to say they shouldn’t?

Even so, I think a little part of me will grieve for page-by-page comics. And if you think that marks me out as a crusty old fogey then yes, you’re right. I’m forty years old. What did you expect? But none of that means that I’m not looking forward to having an iPad and reading comics on it.

And if you see me on a train reading comics on my iPad?

I’ll be holding it portrait, dammit!

* * * * *

Gaelcon… Probably The Greatest Convention In The World

While shopping at GenCon we bumped into some of the guys behind Gaelcon, Ireland’s biggest convention, and they suggested we come on over. Demonic and Bubba couldn’t make it. But me, Bog Boy, Mark and Evil G. took up their offer. And it was good. It was very, very good.

* * * * *

Dragonmeet… A Pretty Good Convention

A few of us volunteered to be gophers at Dragonmeet, which is probably the best convention in the UK. It was pretty interesting, allowing us the opportunity to see the other side of a convention, and we still managed to have a few laughs.

* * * * *

Warpcon 2005

Warpcon 2004 had been an all time low for me, due to a cough that started bad and turned painful, and was notable only for the disappearance of the signed/annotated Slayers Guide to Games Masters that I’d created for the charity auction. Since then, the Slayers Guide had been found, lost, and requested again. Unsuccessfully. I’m still looking for the bastard.

But I did have a good time at Warpcon 2005. Full story with pics here.

Note:- In true Dukes of Hazzard, fifth season, post failed contract negotiations style, this exiting issue of Critical Miss features an entirely new cast of characters: RPGActionFigure, BoxNinja, TimeForTea, Janet and UbiquitousCat – collecively known as the CGS guys. But don’t worry, we’re not jumping the shark, honest. It’s just that none of the other miserable bastards wanted to come. (Stu was poor, Bog Boy was busy, and Mark had apparently acquired a life).

* * * * *

Conpulsion 2005

Me and Bubba headed off to Edinburgh’s Conception 2005 hoping to have a good time.

We had a great time.

And after returning home alive I wrote the mother of all con reports. Hope you like it.

* * * * *

QCon 2004

I’d decided to go to QCon because I wanted to do something mad, and even though my friends thought only of what they might be left in my will I stayed resolute, despite the occasional wobble.

But in the end I went, and had a time that was both good and interesting. This is the story.

What is Eastercon? Well there’s the obvious answer: it’s a convention held every Easter. There’s the slightly more informative, but still straightforward answer: it’s the British national science fiction convention, held at a different venue each year by a team who bid to host it in much the same way as with the Olympics.

Or there’s the real answer.

It’s a place where fans to go to meet fans. And that’s the key for me. This is my third Eastercon, and one thing that’s become very apparent to me is that an Eastercon is not like a theatre, with the players on one side and the audience on the other. This year and last, I was on panels (three last year, one this). But that doesn’t make me special. Because just as I spent the rest of my time attending panels as a watcher, so half¹ the people in the audience at my panel were probably panellists on some other panel.

Whether it be fans talking informally to each other in the bar, or more formally to each other in a discussion panel, Eastercon is a two-way conversation not a one-way broadcast. (I think most of the pros, and certainly all the ones I spent time talking with, get this completely. But I have a suspicion that perhaps some of them don’t.)

Anyhow, enough with the philosophy, what happened?

To reflect each con’s different location and organising team, each instance of Eastercon has a different name. My first Eastercon was Orbital 2008, held two years ago at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel near Heathrow. A year later we were at the Cedar Court hotel near Bradford for LX 2009, so named to reflect its status as the 60th Eastercon². This year, we were back at the Radisson with Odyssey. I procrastinated until January before booking by which time the Radisson was full, so I ended up in one of the overflow hotels, the Renaissance (which was only two or three minutes walk away, so it was no real hassle).

A lot happened, so rather than give a 15,000 word chronological account, I’ll just break this report up into random sections.

The Hotel

The Radisson is strange. I’d say that the architect was clearly on acid when he designed it, but that would then beg the question of what the owners were on when they signed off on his design. It’s a charming, mad and confusing space in which a man can lose his bearing and disappear for days.

Perfect for a science-fiction convention in other words.

I think it was best summed up by a floor plan of the convention I saw tacked up to a wall somewhere that declared: “Warning: This is a 2D representation of a non-Euclidian space.”

There is no ground floor, as the hotel is numbered American style, starting with floor one. Entering the lobby on the aforementioned first floor, you’ll see no lifts, just a rather magnificent set of stairs leading away and up. Follow them, and you’ll find yourself in a corridor next to the Atrium bar.

You are now on the third floor.

What happened to the second floor? Well my initial understanding that there was no second floor lasted until sometime into Sunday when I was informed that there was actually a residential-only second floor, tacked onto the side and back of the building, and accessible only by a moderately hidden pair of lifts and an even more hidden staircase. (If you were there, and this is all new to you, you had to go left at the lobby and then straight on, past the two Newbury rooms, and that’s where you’d find the semi-secret entrance to the second floor).

My panel was in room 41, which is on the fourth floor, which is where it gets really interesting, because the stairs that take you straight from the lobby to the third floor without making any intervening stop on the second floor stop there, and don’t go any further.

I actually had to consult the map on this one. Eventually – after a winding journey that took me out of the atrium bar, along a corridor, back into that atrium bar, back into the corridor (after taking a second look at the map) with me this time successfully spotting the doors that led to a concealed staircase – I made it up to the fourth floor.

Except that I was on the wrong bit of the fourth floor. The staircase I’d gone up was the one you wanted for rooms 40 and 42, but while it did have a door to room 41, it took you into the end of the room where the panellists’ table was. (i.e. If you opened the door and poked your head through you’d find a roomful of people looking straight at you).

To get into room 41 without making a show of yourself, you had to go back down to the third floor, go left out of the Atrium bar and then away, and get to the same lifts and stairs set that you’d use to get to the second floor, but take them to the fourth.

i.e. The fourth floor is split into two totally separate portions, with the only connecting route being through room 41, which has doors at either end.

And I haven’t even mentioned that the hotel’s largest room, the Commonwealth Room, is not the standard oblong shape you’d expect, but a weird slab sided trapezium.

It’s a very strange building. Cthulhuesque, even.

Themed Days

One of the weird things about this con was that I seemed to find my days being themed according to who I met, something that was pointed out to me by John Coxon (@johncoxon) when we bumped into each other in the toilet on day four (which was John Coxon day) and he remarked: “I didn’t see you at all for the first three days and now I keep on bumping into you!”

Day one, Friday, I met a nice vegan lady called Christine and her son. I was at the cafeteria getting a jacket potato and beans (I had that meal on days one, two and three, and only failed to have it on day four because they’d ran out of beans, which resulted in my having a jacket potato and ketchup instead) and I heard her from two places back in the queue asking what was vegan. You don’t meet that many vegans out and about (although I understand there were at least a good handful at the con) so I introduced myself and we had a nice chat over dinner. They’d come down for all four days and were really looking forward to it.

I bumped into them repeatedly through that day and had some quite long chats, and then never saw them again except for one brief flash on Sunday when I passed them on the corridor in a real hurry to get somewhere and with no time to do anything other than smile and say hi.

Day three, Sunday, was the day I kept on bumping into the two Chrises, who are the brilliant pair I met at Orbital two years ago and who loved Game Night so much that they were responsible for probably half the sales I made at the Discworld Con by press-ganging people into buying it (with Brian Nisbet being responsible for the other half). Along with Chris’s other half Dave, they’ve been a great source of support and encouragement and it was really good to catch up with them again.

I actually spent a lot of time with them throughout the con, but I seem to recall Sunday was the day where I really kept on bumping into them, including the time where I’d just had my eyeballs surgically removed by a girl apparently wearing nothing more than a corset, a thong, and some fishnets, and the two Chrises karmically appeared just as I was in the process of trying to shove my eyeballs back into their sockets.

“We’re going to tell Jules what you were looking at!” they told me, laughing at my transfixed stare.

Meeting People (The Atrium Bar)

I met and chatted with a lot of nice people, and apologies for the many people I fail to mention. In no particular order:

I talked with Darren Nash (@thenashmeister) and @ktabic (whose name I do remember, but which I won’t mention because he hasn’t put it on his Twitter account) for a lot of Thursday night. Friday night I had a really good conversation with Danie Ware (@danacea) from Forbidden Planet and Jim Swallow (writer of novels, tie-in novels, audio plays and computer games).

At the book signing on Saturday afternoon, I had a really nice chat with Chaz Brenchley, who was sitting to my left, and then – when he had finished signing a lot of book – a somewhat shorter but equally satisfying chat with Iain M Banks, who was sitting to my right.

(Strictly speaking, with one book sale – to @ktabic, who I’d been talking to on Thursday night – I outsold Iain, but this was of course only because he’s at the stage of his career where he’s merely signing the books and not selling them).

I spent quite a while on a few occasions chatting with the guys behind the Glasgow con Satellite 3, which will be held in February 2012, and which sounds pretty good. Monday night I bumped into Piers Buckley, who’s a friend of my publisher James Wallis, and who I met two years previously with his other half at Orbital.

I spent quite a bit of time on Saturday and Monday with my Brighton writer friend Mark Barrowcliffe (a.k.a. the fantasy writer M. D. Lachlan – @mdlachlan), who was down for those two days. (On Saturday he did a particularly good, and particularly well-attended, presentation on the sort of Victorian Martial arts that Sherlock Holmes would have used. Doing this sort of presentation is a lot more work than simply doing a panel, so it was really good to see how many people turned up and how much they enjoyed it.)

And I also managed to catch up with the very nice, funny and just plain damn cheerful Paul Cornell (@Paul_Cornell). (He’s the sort of guy who’s entertaining enough that if he’s on a panel, you’ll go it, regardless of what it might be about).

Any that’s just the people I can remember now. Unlike the two previous Eastercons, when I’d had Jules with me, I was there on my own, so I pretty much had to poke my nose into people’s conversations and say hi. If you were one of those people who took time to talk to me, whether I’ve mentioned you here or not, thank you.

The Panel

I only had one panel this year, on “Humour in SF and Fantasy”, but I think it turned out to be a good one. The panellists were John Coxon (the moderator), writer Raven Dane, two times Nebula award winner Esther Friesner, and comedian Donna Scott. Other than John, who I know from previous Eastercons when he’d been on the ZZ9 (the official Hitch-Hikers fan club) stand next to us, I hadn’t met any of the other panellists. But we met up in the Green Room before the talk and got on really well.

We had a very good crowd, and I think we managed to both have a good discussion as well as provide a few laughs (which is always good when you’re up there as people who are allegedly funny at a professional level).

We did have one massively unanswerable question. Raven had explained that some publishers have told her that they won’t do humorous fantasy or SF because Terry Pratchett owns 90% of that market leaving everyone else to scrap over the remaining 10%. (Personally, I think that those publishers are missing one vital point, which is that it’s not a fixed size pie – if a load of really funny books come out, then the number of humour books sold will increase).

But regardless of that, it did then provoke a question whose precise wording I can’t recall but which was something like:

“Regarding the point about publishers refusing to publish humour because Terry Pratchett has 90% of the market, and given that his illness means that at some point, he won’t be able to write any more books, do you think that will result in more opportunities for writers of fantasy humour?”

Not for the first time in my writing career I retreated behind the table, where I was joined by Donna.

I have to say thanks to John Coxon, for firstly saying some very nice words about Game Night during the panel, and then encouraging me to offer it for sale at the end for anyone who wanted it. (I happened to have three copies in my backpack, and sold all three).

Gophering (And The Red Shirt)

This Eastercon was a quite different experience for me because it was the first at which I didn’t have a stand in the Dealers Hall and could thus spend my time enjoying the con. My plans for the con were basically to attend panels and hang out in the bar, but when I saw there were programme items about becoming a gopher I started to think that maybe I should help out a bit as well. I was planning on attending the Thursday night gopher session, but then met people in the bar, and forgot. But at the opening ceremony on Friday evening the organisers reiterated how much they need volunteers to make Eastercon work, so I attended the Friday night gopher session, run by the lovely “Gopher Dad” Rachael Livermore, and signed up for three hour long shifts on door duty outside the Dealers Room.

This involved sitting outside one of the two entrances to the Dealers Room making sure that no-one entered if they weren’t wearing a convention badge, and that no-one save dealers took any food or drink inside. This isn’t actually as easy as it sounds. The badges come in full weekend and individual day versions but aren’t double-sided, which means that when they’ve flopped round backwards (which in true toast butter-side-down fashion is about 60% of the time) you have to ask people to flip them around.

I tried employing what I thought was a pretty intuitive whirling finger gesture here, but from the confused looks I got I fear it actually just came across as vaguely obscene. Take the flipped over badges, add in the people who’ve left their badges in their hotel room, season with the people who don’t have a dealer tag, but have supposedly been asked by a dealer to get them a drink, and top with the occasional random mundane who’s wondered in off the street and well, it’s not that easy.

It was about fifteen minutes in that I remembered a Dork Tower issue in which they went to GaryCon but found their way into the con stymied by… the Door Nazi. And now that was me. I fear there is now a whole segment of fandom that knows me only as the pernickety bastard on the Dealers Room door. But I was just trying to do my job conscientiously and well.

Good works aside, Gophering isn’t entirely without rewards. For each shift you do you get given two pounds worth of the convention’s own currency, groats, redeemable on food and drink at the convention bars or on one special item mentioned at the opening ceremony…

Yes. For £10 of groats you could get a special red-shirt version of the convention top, the other versions being those worn by the convention committee (gold) and the convention staff (blue). You couldn’t buy the red-shirt with cash; you could only earn it.

I wanted that red-shirt. (If anyone from Illustrious 2011 is reading this, and wondering if you should repeat what is clearly a cheap psychological trick, then my answer is yes, you should do it – because in my case at least it’s a cheap psychological trick that worked).

After working an hour on the Saturday (actually an hour and fifteen minutes because no-one came to replace me, requiring a staff guy called – I think – Black Knight to kindly relieve me) I ended up working three hours on the Sunday because someone again didn’t turn up and I ended up doing a two hour shift. But I was actually happy to do the extra hour because it meant I was only one hour short of my goal.

So straight after my panel on Monday morning I marched down to the Gopher Hole and asked Rachael if she had any more shifts on offer and she asked if I was free to go down to the Dealers Room straight away. I was, although in my eagerness to get down there I skipped a toilet break which turned out to be rather necessary with the result that by about fifty minutes in I was fit to burst. Luckily however, this was John Coxon day, so when he wondered past me (with a Gopher tag on his badge that showed he was qualified to cover me) I was able to ask him to spell me for just a couple of minutes while I had one of those pisses where you were so desperate to go it’s practically better than sex.

And then the red-shirt was mine.

(And if anyone feels like pointing out that I missed a couple of minutes of my shift, I’ll point out in return that I’d done fifteen minutes extra on Saturday and about nine minutes extra on Sunday, over and above what I’d been paid for).

I was really chuffed to have the shirt and to spend the rest of the day walking around in it. Panels are fun, and I love doing them, but like I said at the start, Eastercon’s a conversation not a performance, and I’d like to think that when people saw me in my red shirt they’d know that I got that.

The closing ceremony was really special. I always try to attend opening and closing ceremonies at cons, not because they’re interesting (they’re frequently not) but because to me they act as emotional book-ends to the overall experience. As with last year, when they got to the end of the individual thanks they asked everyone who’d helped out as either a panellist or a gopher to stand up – at which point it seemed like nearly a third of the hall stood up.

And then they asked everyone who wasn’t a gopher to sit down – at which point most of the people standing up, stood down. Suddenly it was just a hall full of seated people clapping a much smaller number of standing people, most of us wearing our red-shirts.

It really reinforced the point that while appearing on a panel at an Eastercon is a really cool thing to do, especially for presentations that require a lot of preparatory work, in general, you really shouldn’t let yourself think it makes you some kind of big shot, because they will be an awful lot of people there who are also on at least one panel.

Last year, I had to sit down at the point when it switched to Gophers only, and become one of those doing the applause. This year I got to stay standing up and receive the applause – right up until the point where they announced that the Gopher Dalek was going to reward the Gophers in the most appropriate way, played a burst of machine-gun fire over the speakers, waited until we all flopped down “dead”, and then dimmed the lights.

This might sound really geeky, but standing up their in my red-shirt while all the seated people clapped just felt really cool and was one of my highlights of the con.

If you want to have fun at an Eastercon try and get yourself onto a panel; if you want to feel special, do some Gophering.

Moving On…

What next?

Well for me, my writing career is apparently going to go onward and upward. I know this because at the debrief party for Gophers after the closing ceremony, I had my fortune told my Esther Friesner, who had been on the panel with me. As I said before, Esther is a two-time Nebula award winner, and thus actually is a genuine big-shot; but she nonetheless, like me, had clearly been doing some Gophering because she was at the Gophers’ party and wearing a red-shirt. (If you ever get to meet her, she’s a really nice lady).

Anyhow, Esther was doing some cheeblemancy in aid of the St Mungos charity for the homeless. What is cheeblemancy? Well it’s fortune telling using hamsters. Esther told me that she usually has a full fake hamster in a wheel, but she hadn’t fancied the possibly quite interesting conversation she might have had trying to get that through customs, so she was doing a simpler version using a hamster key-ring and a marked up sheet.

I had to hold the hamster, think of the past, present and future (during which my mind basically skipped from childhood, to Jules, and then to some kind of awards ceremony) and then go through a slightly complicated hamster flipping routine which – on only my second attempt – resulted in the hamster landing on the sheet in what was apparently an interesting position.

Esther explained that its positioning indicated that I had been through trials but was now poised to reap the rewards. She said that what was especially crucial was that the key-ring’s chain, which she referred to as “the anchor”, was lying in the central “balance” area. I pointed out that the hamster’s ear was also extending into the central area. (Can’t hurt to point these things out, right?)

She looked and agreed that it was. So, bright future then.

Joking aside, I was very pleased with how much really good feedback I got regarding Game Night from a whole load of people at the con. It would be both boring and egotistical to repeat all the anecdotes, so I’ll just settle for quoting something that Mark (M. D. Lachlan) said in his Eastercon report.

Met up with Jonny Nexus there who has quite a fan club for his novel Game Night – published by a small press. I keep encouraging him to try with a major publisher because people really do seem to love this book.

As for Eastercon itself, the venues for both next year and the year after that were decided at a voting session on Sunday afternoon. Next year, we’re all be heading to the Hilton Metropole at Birmingham’s NEC for Illustrious 2011 (@Illustrious2011). Then in 2012, we’ll be heading back to the Radisson at Heathrow again for Olympus2012 (@Olympus2012). This is a mostly different committee from Odyssey, but is aiming to build on their experience.

And finally, at an event on the Saturday night, the team that want to bring the Worldcon to the UK in 2014 formally launched their bid, and revealed that they had settled on London’s Excel centre as their choice of location. You can find more details at their website or you can follow them on Twitter at @londonin2014. They’re offering a £14 pre-membership package that will give you a discount on the final tickets should they win the bid. Simply arranging the bid is a pretty costly exercise, so I’d strongly recommend that as may people as possible buy pre-memberships. (I have).

I also bought my membership for Illustrious immediately after the bid session (nice low badge number for me, next time!). So all Eastercon people reading this – I’ll see you next year at Illustrious. (That’s if I don’t see you at this August’s Discworld convention first).

And that was Eastercon.

I can only finish with a quote that would have worked so much better had Jim Lovell and his crew named their Apollo 13 spaceships the other way round³.

Farewell, erm Odyssey, we thank you.

¹This is probably a slight exaggeration for effect, but not by as much as you’d think. With four and a half days of programming from nine in the morning until midnight, and often with several items going on simultaneously, most of which will require four or five people on the panel, an Eastercon devour panellists like Casualty or the Bill devours bit-part actors.

²Or was it the 61st? There’s apparently a long running controversy over an Eastercon that is believed by some to have taken place at (I think) Kettering in 1957, but whose memory is blurred enough that its very existence is questioned. Must have been one hell of a party.

³I could have gone on about how like its namesake, Odyssey had sustained us safe through four days in a hostile environment. But alas, Odyssey was the command and service module that blew up and died, much as my metaphor did when I remembered which way round the names went.

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?

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.

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.

So what is an Eastercon, where and when is this one, and why should you come?

Well Eastercon is the British national science fiction convention. It’s held annually, at Easter (duh!), with typically a different venue and organising team each year – which is why each iteration has a different name. I’ve been to two Eastercons: the first two years ago, when Orbital was held near Heathrow; and the second last year, when LX was held in Bradford. This year’s convention, Odyssey, which will be the 61st Eastercon, is being held at the same Heathrow location as Orbital. The basic details are:

Odyssey 2010, The 2010 Eastercon, 2 – 5 April 2010

Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Heathrow, London, UK

Guests of Honour

Alastair Reynolds

Iain M Banks

Liz Williams

Mike Carey

Artist Guest of Honour

Carlos Ezquerra

Fan Guests of Honour

Fran and John Dowd

I’ve thoroughily enjoyed both Eastercons I’ve been to, and I think I’m going to enjoy this one even more because it will be the first where I’m not spending eight hours a day in the dealers hall. According to the website, there are already 927 people signed up, so it looks like it will have a good buzz to it. If it’s anything like the previous two conventions, the programme will be packed with items covering literature, science, drama, music, life and everything, and with tones ranging from the deeply serious to the happily absurd – which I think are sometimes the best. At LX, one of the most memorable panels I went to was one where they demonstrated an item called a “violet wand“. If you want to know what that is, then I’d point you at the wikipedia entry, but will say that it was originally developed as a Victorian healing device and is now generally used for what might be termed “bedroom recreation”.

That was quite a late night panel.

At present, they only seem to have details of the science programme up (there will be several strands of events), but even that ranges from:

Life of a Hydrogen Atom

The universe around us is made up of many different types of atoms, yet only two types, hydrogen and helium, were created in the Big Bang. Other elements have been formed by a wide variety of fascinating astrophysical processes since then. This talk will take you on a quick tour of some of these processes by following the life story of one of the simplest things in the universe – a proton – from its birth in the Big Bang to its death, swallowed up by a black hole.

…to:

Alien Archeology

What will our panel of ‘experts’ make of the various items they are presented with? Is it a Denebian ritual object, or simply a salt shaker?

…with both of these being panels I’d love to attend.

Oh and my fellow Brighton author Mark Barrowcliffe (a.k.a. M D Lachlan) will be doing a seminar on ‘Sherlock Holmes’ Baritsu:

…a lecture on Victorian self defence for ladies and gentlemen – how the Victorian gentry subdued the hobbledihoy.

It all looks very quaint until you remember these guys built the British Empire. If you can stand against a Zulu ibutho charge then you know a bit about being in a scrap. I may do the talk in character, which should be fun. Advice ranges from the quaint ‘look him in the eye and say “do you know who I am?” to the chilling ‘it is possible to tear off his arm from this position, after which you can chastise him at will’.

Details here.

If you’re at all into science-fiction and fantasy, I’d strongly recommend going to Odyssey. You can sign up here. Hopefully see some of you there.