SBA Awards in London

Spent the day in London, before attending the SBA diploma awards at Westminster. Here's a picture of Sarah receiving her diploma for Botanical art.

We're staying on a camp site in Chertsey, in the caravan. It's our first time away in the van for nearly a year and it is good to be back on the road. The weather is bright and sunny. No mud. It's funny how it goes - this is our fourth time back to London in only two months. We were here, at Heathrow, for Eastercon, only a two weeks ago.

This time it's Sarah's weekend, though, and the course has been a tough two-and-a-half years for her. She's happy to get to the end but also a little sad, she says, as it leaves a big hole in her life now that the work is finished.

Mind you, I'm sure that the picture she sold in the exhibition, here, will help to cheer her up a bit. We have a bit of friendly rivalry, picture sales vs story sales, and right now she's winning by a mile.

Mortlock

Went to a book signing this weekend to see my friend, Jon Mayhew, signing copies of his YA novel, Mortlock.

Here's a picture of me getting my own copy signed.

I'm quite excited about Mortlock because I have a feeling it is going to be big. Really big. It's a fine shiny hardback, and they've done something funky with the page edges. They're black. And when you open the book the first page is completely red. It's all very very funereal and eye-catching.

I've heard some of the story already - Jon has read parts of it at Wirral Writers - and from what I've heard so far this book is getting bumped right up to the top of my waiting-to-be-read pile. It's a good 'un.

And it's not just me plugging a mate, Mortlock is getting some rave reviews, including this one in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/11/mortlock-childrens-books-review And on Saturday there were queues of eager kids winding out of the door of the shop. I had to wait my turn.

Mortlock is published by Bloomsbury.

Eastercon – Afterthoughts

Back home after a truly excellent Eastercon weekend. Stepping out of the hotel there was a certain amount of blinking and squinting at the unfamiliar sight of natural daylight, and the process of starting the car seemed to have become a complex and overly fussy operation that I barely remembered having mastered before the con. The journey home was okay, but there is a lingering and inevitable sense of displacement on re-entering the real world.

Enough of that – what were the highlights?

Top of the list was Writers and the Web, a panel that featured Joe Abercrombie, Maura McHugh, John Meaney and Mark Charan Newton. I didn't know any of these writers in advance (there are so many out there) but as a result of this panel I will be making a bee-line for their books, because they were, each one, thoroughly entertaining - the only disappointment being the moment when the hour came to an end. It just goes to show, a talent for live interaction with an audience can be so useful. (Note to me – you do not have this talent, do not try it. Ever!)

Oh, and as well as entertaining they gave out some useful advice, like keep your blog up to date. Or a least be consistent about how often you up date it. And if you can't keep it up to date, don't start one. (Bit late for that now.) And blogging is okay for a writer but it's more important to do the actual writing. Yeah, I've just noticed that scribbled note and I've strayed from the advice within an hour of getting home. So this will now be a short blog. In fact I'll switch to bullet points. Then I'll do some actual writing.

So... Other highlights:

• SF/F and social media (in which some of the veil of mystery attached to Twittering was revealed to me.)
  
• Non-Euclidean Geometry – Nicholas Jackson. (Because I almost understood some of it.)
  
• Pyrotechnics display by Stephen Miller (because he didn't raise the hotel to ground, especially as Sarah and I were in it at the time.)
  
• Fusion Power by Anthony Webster (because I have a thing about fusion, something to do with not wanting to go back to a manual typewriter any time soon.)
  
• Writing for Audio, (Jack Bowman, Paul Cornell, James Swallow, Philip Palmer and Martin Easterbrook.) I love any radio that avoids music and jingles but especially radio and podcast drama, so this was a gem of a panel. The Wireless Theatre Company is one to subscribe to. (I might even try writing a bit for this medium some time.)
  
• The Hugo Nominations (Yay, go Starship Sofa.)
  

And some honourable mentions:

• Tax and Royalties – bit close to the day job, perhaps, but could save me a few bob in the long run.
  
• GoH Alastair Reynolds' talk, especially his ability to wing it for a while when the tech failed.
  
• The little cubes of fried potatoes at breakfast. Loved these. Probably loved them too much. Probably love hotel breakfasts too much in general.
  

And now Odyssey2010 is over and I'm thinking about Birmingham next year. But I really have gone on a bit and I'd better do some proper writing – the kind with plots and grammar and some of the words spelled right.

Eastercon

Taking a few quiet moments to clear my head. I'm on my second visit to London in two days. On Wednesday I came down on the train for a meeting at work, I stayed overnight then straight back home on the train next day. Sarah collected me from the station, I dumped the contents of my case into the laundry, repacked - then, 4am alarm, quick shower and we're in the car heading down the M6 for Heathrow and the 2010 Eastercon.

Arrived late morning and we've had a full afternoon and evening of panels. Probably the best so far was the smallest – a panel about podcasting. I picked up the names of a couple of new ones I hadn't heard of before and they'll go straight onto my itunes subscription list as soon as I'm back home. (Ghost in the Machine sounds especially tempting.) All I need is about ten extra hours each day to listen to them all.

What's in store tomorrow? Oh, I don't know, I'm going to wing it. Depends if I wake up before tea time.

 

Abandoned in Italy

So, yes, Venice was very nice. We enjoyed it. But, regrettably, it will not live long in our memories. Because then we tried to go home, and that is the part that will live long in our memories. We're not home yet. Right now I'm sitting in a hotel somewhere in Northern Italy, to the best of my knowledge somewhere near Milan or Bergamo.

I'm jumping ahead. Wind the clock back 24hrs. Our last day in Venice was misty and quite cold. We watched Johnny Depp making a film near the Rialto. We bought our souvenirs. We had a bad meal that left us with the ever-present threat of that other Italian-sounding place, salmonella. Then we boarded our coach to Treviso airport and hoped we'd stay vomit-free for long enough to get home. Fortunately the food poisoning didn't kick in – a near miss.

Treviso airport was foggy. Two flights prior to ours were delayed. There were no seats because the airport was full. Nobody seemed to be flying anywhere. Nobody seemed to be telling anybody anything. But then our departure gate opened and we were sent down into the basement where the heating did not reach, the lights didn't work and information was a TV screen that said our Ryanair flight to Liverpool was delayed. Okay, delayed isn't so bad. It stayed delayed until midnight, just long enough for the public transport back to Venice to stop for the night. Then the flight was cancelled.

So we queued at a desk with a hundred others and waited to hear about our options. Those options were few. We could wait until morning and fly to Stansted, or Dublin or Alicante. Quite what we do at these places was not clear, and it was not clear what would happen if the fog didn't lift, which it showed little sign of doing. It was up to us.

The best option seemed to be a flight back to Liverpool from Bergamo in two days. TWO DAYS! And it would be left to us to find our own way to Bergamo. We found a nice piece of airport floor and tried to turn it into home. It had come to this – sleeping on the floor. I thought of leaving out a little plastic cup as we'd seen so many others doing, outside churches, in Venice. Perhaps this is how they got their start in the begging career, a patch of floor in Treviso Airport.

Then someone said they'd found a coach driver who'd take us to Bergamo so long as there were ten of us, and so long as we paid 25 Euros. We paid, we went. And the financial evaporation began. (Mind you, not to the extent of one of our fellow travellers who'd had his wallet and possessions stolen from his room immediately prior to the flight fiasco.)

We arrived at Bergamo airport at five am. We went to the check-in desk and tried to get onto an earlier flight. Nothing. But here we picked up a useful snippit. We had to print our boarding pass prior to arrival at the airport tomorrow OR RYANAIR WOULD CHARGE US 40 EUROS EACH! This is a kind of fine to discourage us from not using the internet properly. So that's 80 Euros. Seventy-five quid! A penalty for not taking a printer with us as part of our measly 10kg baggage allowance. Need I rant more?

So, is there a hotel nearby?

Oh yes, a couple.

Can we walk there?

Easy. Five minutes. One is just opposite the airport.

Yes. The one just opposite the airport is on the other side of a motorway (autoroute? Autostrada?) Whatever the word it was an invitation to death.

So we elected to go by taxi, and being unwilling to call a taxi to take us across the road we chose the other hotel that was "only five minutes away." It took the taxi quarter-of-an-hour, and he barely let his speed dip below 100. It cost us 20 Euros. 20 Euros for a "five minute" walk!

This is where things improved, though. They allowed us to check in at 6 am rather than noon for our single night. We suspected we'd have to pay for two nights. We were willing to pay it. We wanted sleep.

We slept.

We rang our respective employers and told them why we weren't in work. We rang our families. We bought food. Money evaporated.

And now here I am. Somewhere in Italy. In the lounge of a vast hotel with no other guests. There is nowhere to walk. The road outside is long and straight and fast. We've walked both ways and there's nothing to see in either direction. There's a mozzarella cheese factory, and a petrol station and a small grocers' where we bought chocolate just to practice our Italian. The two shop girls were friendly. They seemed excited to meet two English people. I don't think they'd ever met English people before. Or was it that they never met pedestrians?

It's frustrating. We can see the Dolomites, topped with snow. I'd love to go there and walk. But we haven't got a car. And it's a long walk.

And we wait and see what more delights Ryanair have in store for us tomorrow. Liverpool airport, also, is a long walk.

Venezia

Here I am in Venice. Me and Sarah took a budget flight for a weekend away. I was a little dubious about using any airline that uses a harp as part of its logo, but all was smooth and hassle-free, and the pilot seemed to find his way here okay. Arrived in Venice in the dark and managed to find the hotel without falling in any canals. Venice is mind-blowing. Everything is strange and strangely familiar. Okay, so it’s been in a few movies, but more than that, it’s been in a few paintings. Old paintings. And it hasn’t really changed much since then.

What you need here is hard feet. Walked miles today and the old legs are suffering tonight. You also need a hard grip on the wallet. The state that sterling is in at the moment means you don’t get many Euros to the pound. About one. So eating out is... eek!

There are odd things, like the only public toilets in all of San Marco cost one Euro fifty per pee. (about £1.45 so you’ve got to be really desperate). There’s a turnstile and you have to have the exact change. But here’s the thing, there’s a man in a booth who gives out change - but he’s on the other side of the turnstile. The side you can only reach after you’ve paid. We had only one 50 cent coin so one of us had to go first, get some change, then pass the change through the railings so that the other could go also. How weird is that? Only in Italy? (I dunno, I’m still smarting after that sixteen quid car park in Reading.)

Came back to the hotel on a Vaporetto, a water bus, when the legs gave out. Just can’t keep away from public transport, can I.

London, trains and art

Sarah just got three paintings accepted for the SBA's annual botanical exhibition in London. This is a big deal. It also means we get to go down to London. Again. And it means that if she sells any of them I won't be able to describe her as a 'talented but penniless artist' in any of my writer bios any more.

Two weeks ago we had to deliver the pictures (five in all) to the Central hall in Westminster. The cost-saving plan was to stay a couple of nights at a swanky hotel just outside Oxford, and between times we drive to Walton-on-Thames to pick up a train to Waterloo. No need to go to any great lengths with the bubble wrap and cardboard because Waterloo is only a ten minute walk from Westminster. What could go wrong?

So we hit the queue for London before we even reached Reading. We parked on the M4 for an hour. I swore a bit. Then we devised plan B.

We drove into Reading, parked the car, and picked up a train from there. Why hadn't we planned to do this in the first place? – much easier and only a few pounds more expensive. (Except for later when we paid for the car park - over sixteen quid for just half a day. OMG!)

We had to stand up on the train, but then that's UK train travel for you, you pay for a seat and then you stand up for forty-minutes, but then as often as not you don't get a train to stand up in, either, so we were still on a winner.

So, good plan. Adaptability is the key. Think on your feet.

Except the train from Reading went to Paddington, not Waterloo. We had to get the Circle Line to Westminster. So did a million other people. Only they didn't have five, quite large, quite fragile, glass picture frames with them.

We went through Monopolyesque places like Notting Hill Gate, South Kensington and Sloane Square, and every time the tube stopped more people squashed inside. We gritted our teeth and hoped that a glass catastrophe might be avoided through the power of jaw muscles alone.

And of course, jaw action prevailed. You already know this, because, as I've said, three out of the five have just been accepted.

I hope Sarah sells them. Because if not, in March, we have to bring them back again. But we'll take more bubble-wrap with us next time.

 

Postscript – we also got to visit Oxford the day after. Fascinating city. Lots of good book shops. Lots of history. We especially wanted to see the Ashmolean museum, but according to the guide book it is closed on Mondays. Also closed on Mondays, said the book, is the History of Science Museum that had a Steam Punk Art exhibition that would have been worth seeing. What kind of town closes it's museums on a Monday?

So we went home.

Then, when we got home I realised that it was Tuesday.