George who?

These days, ever since HBO had the good sense to bring Game of Thrones to the general public (it's even appearing on the sides of Melbourne trams at the moment), when I casually mention that I met George R.R. Martin at WorldCon last year, I garner impressed gasps rather than glazed looks.

But George has been around for ages - you can read about his previous forays into the wilds of televisionland and encounters with TPTB here

Brain teaser

My brain is all revved up and ready to go. Poor brain. It hasn't realised yet that the holidays are over. I'll let it out now for a bit of a run, which is cruel really, because I'm going to have to hobble it soon so it doesn't go wandering off while I'm at the Arvo Job.

The cats are settling down for a writing day too :(

Anyway, I'll contrast those glum observations with some good news that I found on the Internet just now: the Kenyan science fiction film Pumzi, directed by Wanuri Kahiu, is now available. I saw this film at Worldcon last year, and have been raving about it to folk ever since.

You can buy it here

A True Artist

About 20 minutes ago, realising I had not checked for snail mail today, I popped out the front door to find a young girl with a red bag, and her father and small brother, gathered at the bottom of the garden around my letterbox. They were as surprised to see me as I was to find them there. Uh-oh, I thought, lecture or sermon? Well, shame on my suspicious mind because it turned out to be all about Art.

For the young girl, rendered shy by my unexpected audience participation, pulled an A4 sheet of paper from her bag, folded it and popped it into my letterbox. I duly opened my letterbox, still not sure what was going on, fished out the delivery and opened it up to find myself in possession of a piece of original art. Of course, I duly praised it. The father informed me that I was tonight's lucky recipient of the very last picture in the red bag. Their mission accomplished, the humble artist and her support team moved on.

So there we have it - art for the sake of art, pure and created in joy, delivered free of charge to common citizens, with no name, ego or any conditions attached. I think there's something in that for all of us.

Otherwise, I put in a good, solid day of writing, or rather, of dismantling and rewriting. I also got stuck into my copy of Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, which is due out in April. You might recall that I, and a few others, received copies at WorldCon along with a request to blog reviews. So I read the first part of it out in the backyard, sitting on my Xmas swing with a cup of peppermint tea, and all I can say at this stage is that once I pulled myself from the world she has created, I had an overwhelming urge to throw away all my keyboards and vow that I would never ever again utter the words 'I'm a writer'.

End of the Month Report: September

Submissions: 5

Rejections: 7

Acceptances: 2 (Hard Rubbish (SF) & Blame Games (SF))

Published: 0

Stories presently out: 5

Mood: Much WorldConning and Arvo Jobbing and horse riding do not a productive writer make.

Worldcon: A Really Rapid Roundup

So many people are blogging about AussieCon4, and most of them are insiders with far better photos of the behind the scenes happenings and major events, far more intimate meetings with interesting people to tell about, and certainly a higher grade of gossip than me, so I’m just going to do a ramshackle rundown of a few everyday things that happened to me, amused me, or in some way caught my inconsequential attention. There will be much gratuitous name dropping as well.

1) The funny film montage shown at the opening ceremony. Cutting back and forth between Aussie films and SF classics, it gave us, among other things, Sarah Connor watching Mad Max blow up Kenny’s poo truck and the Terminator emerging from the flames, Storm Troopers shooting down Ned Kelly, hobbits hiding from the Wolf Creek psycho, David Gulpilil watching X-wings bomb Darwin, and Crocodile Dundee doing his call-that-a-knife shtick to Darth Vader. By popular demand, the montage was shown again at the closing ceremony.

2) The Write the Fight workshop was fun because we got to get up for a change and jump around and pretend to hit each other. Predictably, there were a few guys, some in berets, who were eager to impress Alan Baxter by expounding their knowledge of commando techniques for quickly killing people or by trying to grab his leg when he was demonstrating kicks, but he very deftly and graciously deflected their attempts at hogging the limelight.

3) I enjoyed any session or panel with Kim Stanley Robinson in it. The man is brilliant, funny, compassionate, optimistic about the future, ideological, and just plain lovely. He got top points from me for continually referring to Economics as a pseudoscience, and belittling it as the astrology of our times.

4) While standing in a long line waiting for the above mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson to sign my Blue Mars, I got to chat and joke with folk from Finland, the UK and Western Australia. We felt sorry for poor KSR, but not sorry enough to remove ourselves from the queue, and explored the possibility of just asking him to simply spit on the title pages of our books. It got a bit gross. I suppose you had to be there.

5) The later people arrived for a session, the closer to the front they wanted to sit, and then preferably right in the middle so that half a row of settled folk had to get up to let them past.

6) I recall suffering through a dark, bleak, very weird, Brazilian SF film and groaning with the rest of the audience at the end when it turned out to have no point whatsoever. It was like a parody of an art house movie, and yet it wasn’t. The comments from the audience made it worth the agony. It was a real bonding experience, but the memory of that film still makes me shudder.

7) I got a bag of lollies from Twelfth Planet Press when I bought a book. I love freebies and personal touches.

8) Coffee with Kaaron Warren. I signed up for my first kaffeeklatch as a tentative exercise in practicing my convention socializing skills and overcoming public shyness, thinking there would be no pressure to perform because I could hide amongst the other 8 participants. Shock, horror, I was the only participant. Amazingly, I remained calm. Fortunately, I didn’t babble. I wasn’t brilliant, but I didn’t babble. Happily, Laura E Goodin and a few other writerly folk and their friends and family joined us, so I got lean back and listen to how the other half lives (you know, how it is when your stuff gets published a lot and editors actually invite you to submit stuff) and I even occasionally butted in. The only fudge was when Kaaron kindly asked me if I was a writer and I went into my default, dismissive waffly mode. The highlight of the klatsch was when Kaaron suddenly jumped up because she had spotted Robert Silverberg , sprinted across the room for an autograph and a fangirl chat, then returned with stories of his niceness.

8) Peter M Ball signed my copy of Bleed. I tried to ever so casually mention that we shared the TOC of Moonlight Tuber #1, but my brain inexplicably latched onto Midnight Echo, so I babbled something about Midlight Mumble Mumble instead. Peter was a real gentleman and very gracious about it.


9) Have I mentioned the Build a Lego Dalek workshop? It was fun.






10) I got a big hug from Sue Bursztynski, and she shared the news that her book Wolfborn has been picked up by a publisher and will be out in December. Go Sue!

11) Coffee with Catherynne M. Valente, during which I did not mumble or babble, said a few relevant things, and scored a treasure.

12) Coffee with George R.R. Martin (I just can’t repeat that often enough) during which I also said a few coherent words. See, practice pays.

13) On the last day, I was much amused by a panel with Greg Benford, Alistair Reynolds and Charles Stross during which many science jokes were made about centrifugal forces, teleportation, FTL ships and stasis fields, and the audience laughed in all the right places. I love SF people!

There’s more, but that’s enough. I’ve got some more sleeping to do.

Worldcon: The Aftermath

I woke up this morning with a cranium-splitting headache, which I dubbed Revenge of the Convention Centre. I'm certainly glad that I slated an extra day off from the Arvo Job for recovery. It has taken various pharmaceutical products and two pots of strong tea to restore me to a vaguely coherent state. Today will involve much fresh air and liquids, an invigorating walk in the country sunshine, a nanna nap or two, and much ruminating upon the events of the last five days.

I’ll get back to you with an afternoon blog once I’ve sorted out my chaotic, post-convention state.

In the meantime, here's another Lego Dalek pic:

Worldcon Five: Coffee

Now the carnival is over… and I’m sooooo tired. Over the last five days, I’ve been getting about fours hours of sleep a night. Tomorrow will be a sleep in and catch up day.

Today was an excellent finale to the convention. I went to 2 Kaffeeklatches (strictly 9 participants at most, one author-host, and the hot drink of your choice). I hadn't considered attending any of these, but on the Saturday, 2 of my fellow YOSF&F workshoppers highly recommended that I try them, so I signed up for a few on the Sunday and Monday to break up the panels, workshops and films.

The first KK today was with Catherynne M. Valente, a wonderful, though visibly tired (day 5!!!) hostess, who gave me a signed galley of her upcoming book Deathless with instructions to blog a review of it once I’ve read it. Three other lucky participants also got copies and instructions. This had nothing to do with Catherynne having a clue about who any of us were. When she asked who hadn’t read any of her books (I’ve only read her short stories) we four were the ones who honestly, but shamefacedly, put up our hands, each of us thinking we had just effectively removed ourselves from consideration for the much coveted prizes. But lo and behold, fate did a squirmy twisty back flip, and we apparent losers were *punches air* in fact the winners!

The other Kaffeeklatch was with… wait for it … George R.R. Martin! What a lovely man! Given that there was a queue a mile long for his much hyped KK yesterday, that I got to meet him at all was a stroke of absurd luck. I went to sign up for Catherynne’s KK, and there was a sheet for George utterly devoid of any signatures. I thought it was a mistake, but no, he was sneaking in an extra session, which no-one seemed to know anything about, and so I put my name down as the #1 participant. He told us about his career and gave lots of good advice. I was particularly interested in what he had to say about the upcoming HBO series Game of Thrones based on his work.

I also attended 3 panels today, with names like John Scalzi, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Greg Benford and Charles Stross sharing thoughts, techniques and good advice. Then it was time for the closing ceremony, and finally, time to return to the Real World.

Over the past 5 days, I’ve met so many clever, funny, down-to-earth and generous people, but there’s simply no point going into it any further now, for I am too pooped to do any of it justice.

Worldcon Four: Priorities.

What happened to days two and three? You tell me. I’m in a bubble. I suspect, however, that it has to do with a little something Einstein mentioned in his Special Theory of SF Geekdom called Convention Time. Anyway, I’ll do a catchup later in the week.

For now, it’s enough to report that I’ve boldly set forth early each day, my rucksack packed with special survival rations: cheese sandwiches, Pink Ladies, gingerbread men and barrels of water (that convention centre literally sucks the fluid out of you). I've done much, learnt much, and met many people. No details now - must get ready for tomorrow.

I’m only posting today so I can show you that I achieved my ultimate goal. Well, one of my many ultimate WorldCon goals (and yes, I got Kim Stanley Robinson's autograph - yay!)
Some people will leave AussieCon4 with a Hugo (and congratulations to them all), but me, I’ve got this Lego Dalek that I made myself:

And proud I am of it too, as were the others at this workshop (proud of their own creations, I mean). This was FUN. And believe me, there will be mini-Daleks posted on Facebooks everywhere.

Worldcon One

A gentle start to Aussiecon4 - gotta pace myself. I attended the opening ceremony, then fun was had, panels were attended (only two today: ‘The balancing act of speculative fiction comedy’ and 'Minotaurs in space helmets: using myth in science fiction’), familiar names were attached to faces, hellos were said, and hands were shaken.

And in breaking news, a fellow YOSF&F workshopper who is also a Worldcon volunteer informed me that all is not lost on the building a Dalek out of Lego front – apparently there’s a session for adults too. Consider it locked in.

After a spin around the Dealers Room, I headed across the city for a movie: Tomorrow, When the War Began. Good, gripping stuff.

Scifi Spring

One more sleep to go :-)

Scifi, scifi, scifi! Oi! Oi! Oi!

When you open The Age’s A2 supplement for a leisurely Sunday morning read and discover an article about the Hugo Awards titled It’s SF, but not as we know it, and said article reels off names like Paolo Bacigalupi, China Mieville, and Catherynne M Valente while giving a Booker-like roundup of the shortlisted works, well, then you know something odd is going on.

That something odd is, of course, AussieCon4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, which starts on Thursday.

And I’m good to go. I’ve organized days off from the Arvo Job, highlighted the program (check out Robert Silverberg and other such SF luminaries, try to get Kim Stanley Robinson to sign my treasured, but now yellowing copies of Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, learn how to make a Dalek with Lego blocks*...), cleared my camera and charged the batteries.

So yipeee! Only 4 sleeps to go!

*I later realised that the 'Build a LEGO Dalek' is in fact part of the kids program, as are 'Light saber making and training' and 'Steampunk my iPhone and iPad'. Drats, drats, drats. Bloody kids have all the fun.