WorldCon Schedule

I’ll be heading over to Dublin for WorldCon 2019 tomorrow. It’s my first WorldCon, so it’s pretty exciting!

I’m honoured to have been offered three panels and a Kaffeklatsch, so if you want to chat with me about imaginary friends, synaesthesia, fountain pens, inks with MONSTER SHEEN, hypergraphia, or anything else that takes your fancy, here’s where to find me:

Kaffeklatsch
16 Aug 2019, Friday 10:00 – 10:50, Level 3 Foyer (KK/LB) (CCD)

Representation of marginalised people in games.
16 Aug 2019, Friday 16:00 – 16:50, ECOCEM Room (CCD)

In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about representation of women in games, but issues of representation and experience still need greater attention across the industry. How diverse and inclusive is gaming today? What should we know and what can we do?

Laser Malena-Webber (The Doubleclicks), Sam Fleming, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Tanya DePass (I Need Diverse Games)(M)

Science and politics of water
17 Aug 2019, Saturday 19:00 – 19:50, Wicklow Hall-1 (CCD)

Water is life. Twisting a line from Frank Herbert: ‘He who controls the water controls the universe.’ Our planet is covered by 70% water, our bodies comprise 70% water, and most plants contain 90% water. What other roles does water play in our technologically savvy world? How has water shaped our political landscape, in a time of rising tides and warming oceans? What can we do to protect our most precious resource?

Sam Fleming (M), Darcie Little Badger, Dr Tad Daley (Citizens for Global Solutions), Paolo Bacigalupi

Older characters and older authors
18 Aug 2019, Sunday 13:00 – 13:50, Wicklow Room-3 (CCD)

A decade ago, the media would label an author of 50 as ‘older’. Today, more writers are beginning their careers in their 60s and 70s. Do these older writers write and champion older characters, or is there still pressure to appeal to a younger demographic with equally young protagonists? What are the advantages and disadvantages of becoming a full-time writer at an older age?

Kari Sperring (M), Wendy Metcalfe, Sam Fleming, Faith Hunter (Penguin Random House and Bella Rosa Books and Lore Seekers Press)

Semi-obligatory 2016 awards post

I’ve noticed that it’s the time of year for award eligibility, so here is what I’ve got in the running for 2016 awards.

Zangao
This isn’t Skook, but it looks like him.

I had a slow year on the writing front, but She Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow is eligible in the short story category and available to read for free (or you can listen to the podcast). Should you wish to cast some love in the direction of Hedron, Chancery and Skook, I could bathe in the warm fuzzies like a happy baby sea flap flap.

It also turns out this marks my first year of eligibility for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. My thanks to the moderators, especially David Walton, for helping me confirm that and getting my name up on the list.

Just being on there feels like an achievement!

NOT AT WORLDCON STOP NEED COFFEE STOP AM WRITING AGAIN DON’T WANT TO STOP

This weekend I should be in London, with thousands of other writers and fans of genre fiction. I’m not. I’m still at home in Scotland, where Summer is packing up the last of his bags and preparing to head south, while Autumn stands on the threshold tapping her foot in her impatience to get onto his wonderful carpets and cover them in kipple.

Back at the beginning of April, my Dad was killed in a motor racing accident in Hockenheim, Germany. I was — am — devastated. The effect has been emotionally overwhelming. For the first time in my whole life, my hypergraphia stopped. It just stopped, as if a switch had flipped into the ‘off’ position. Other than for the day job, I was unable to find it in myself to string words together and put them down on paper. That part of me was numb, unfeeling.

When I forced myself to write, to post on social media, pen a swift report of our inaugural bike ride from Kirkcaldy to Aberdeen, or review a wine for Naked Wines, it didn’t felt like me doing it. The part of me invested in writing had gone on some kind of retreat. I could still put words together, order them grammatically, construct some kind of narrative, assay them for clarity and conciseness, but the results were neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things.

I lost that spark, without which one is not a writer.

For a while I worried this meant I had never been a writer. After all, if it were that important to me, surely I would have carried on despite the grief. Instead I threw myself into triathlon, poring over heart rate charts and race timings. I cleaned my house, decluttered, grew vegetables and flowers, polished my bicycles. Went walking, running, swimming in the sea, paddling.

I’ve hurled myself at anything that constrained me to the Here-Now-Present, because shivering on the other side of a translucent wall of stoicism is an endless ocean of sadness. It leaks tears sometimes, when something happens to bring that loss into my Here-Now-Present.

Writing fiction isn’t Here-Now-Present. It can’t be. It’s anything but Here-Now-Present, and I’ve come to realise it’s the one thing desperately important to me that can’t be condensed into a single mote of ongoing experience.

Writing fiction requires an emotional investment. If you don’t feel your writing, nobody else is going to. My emotions are bruised and swollen and sore; concentrating on physical tasks and pretending I’m fine has been the psychological equivalent of the Rest Ice Compression Elevation approach to dealing with injury.

In the last couple of weeks I have written my first complete story since it happened. It’s not my best piece of work, but it has a beginning, middle and end; conflict and resolution; a character with agency and a certain bleak humour. It’s not the worst thing I have ever written (a label I shall reserve for the Ghostbusters and Blake’s 7 fanfic I wrote when I was at school, before fanfic was a thing). I’ve also picked up a WIP and added some good words — they may not survive the edits, but they are good words. I have submitted a piece to market.

I’m no longer worried that spark is gone forever, which is a small island of relief on that shivering sea.

The lesson here is not that time heals all things — it doesn’t, but it will dull the pain if it can — but that the writer is the most important part of the writing process. You have to look after yourself, and if that means giving up an opportunity because you are not fit, so be it. No athlete would start a race with a broken leg (although he might try to carry on for a while if the injury occurred during it). As much as I really wanted to go to LonCon, I made the right decision.

I could not have coped with WorldCon this year. I am an introvert who works hard at giving the appearance of not being so when it is professionally necessary. It exhausts me. I need to be physically fit enough to tackle the endurance events Summer so thoughtfully brings each year when he sweeps up the leavings of Spring’s exuberance; equally I need to be emotionally fit enough to cope with the mental endurance event of being in the same place as almost 10,000 strangers for 5 days. I am not, and am very grateful to be sufficiently aware of my limitations that I knew better than to try.

Yet, as my writing recovers, and the hypergraphia twitches its millipede feet and considers uncurling to resume its endless meandering around my pathways and byways, I can see a time when I will be.

For that, I am also very grateful.

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