Wigan ate my sweets

A warm feeling enveloped me at the Leigh & Wigan Words Festival yesterday as a small flash mob gathered around me in a corner of Wigan library to meet me. Mob might be an exaggeration of the quantity and an abuse of their good nature in the quality of their overt friendship. I’d come to talk about and sell copies of ARIA: Left Luggage but I wasn’t quite sure whether this was to be a simple sign and sell; move on to the next, or a reading, or a chat. No one seemed to know. Being a relatively small crowd we pulled their chairs into a semicircle with me, my box of sweets and books, facing them. I only knew one of them, Mike Hunt – the chair of the Festival committee and my friend from BeWrite Books days (RIP one of the most ethical publishing concerns). I’d met Joan on facebook but knew none of the others.

The group engaged me in interactive dialogue when I told them how I got the ideas behind ARIA with its unique concept of infectious amnesia, me being the first fiction writer to have received help from an astronaut in orbit, why science fiction allows me and readers to escape the limitations of setting our imagination on just one planet. The two hours flashed by and with great bonhomie they ate my chocs and bought my books.

A reporter and photographer from the Observer were there to quiz me for 20 minutes. Andrew Nowell was a cultured young man who recognised which Shakespearean reference is allured to in the title of my 2008 SF mystery – Exit, Pursued by a Bee. Clever chap. I look forward to reading his interview in me. All of you can when you buy the next copy of the Wigan Observer.

My nerves rattled in me for days in advance making me useless for fresh ideas and writing as well as domestic duties, but I need not have worried. Wigan Library is a fine new venue and the people are friendly – I didn’t even have to wear a rugby shirt.

I had ordered a large screen TV to show my short video trailer of ARIA but even a small screen wasn’t available. Shame. The youtube version of it has now reached 500 viewers! Go on, make it 501 now! ARIA video trailer here

Will Self drew a greater crowd and good for him, one day, one day…

A piece of practical advice which I’m told – after the event – by the chairman, is to ensure the blurb for flyers and advertisements emphasise that it isn’t just a signing but a discussion with the actual author. Apparently, more people would have attended if they knew that.

Upcoming4me has an intriguing piece about how I thought of and influences behind ARIA here.

Exit, Pursued by a Bee link is here

Suspending my disbelief

I rarely have sufficient time to read the Guardian newspaper even though it is my paper of choice for content and style. On long train journeys and Saturdays, however, I make time. This Saturday – 16^th February 2013 – there was an article by Ian McEwan in the Review section entitled ‘Am I Really A Believer’ that struck a chord. It was about how when reading fiction there are occasions when you suddenly realize you can’t suspend your disbelief and so the story is spoilt.

This used to happen to me a lot as a youngster and visits me quite often especially when reading the swashbuckling type of science fiction. There am I immersed in the head of the main character, believing in his or her motives and feeling their angst when suddenly I stop and think – someone has made this up! Damn. The plague of disbelief then spreads to other books I’m reading and worse, to my own writing.

Apparently so, to Ian McEwan. His prescriptive palliative is to reread short stories that always takes him back into that world inside someone else’s head. One such for him is Nabakov’s Symbols and Signs. I understand that. It’s been more than a decade since I’d read that short story about an elderly couple whose deranged and suicidal son is in an asylum. Sounds grim but the emotion and setting grips you profoundly. It’s also an example of the semiotics of zero: ie the main focus is actually absent. You can read it for free here. It was first published in 1947 and so I have an affinity being I was born that year. However, I cannot help but read a story as if it had been submitted to me as a submissions editor or a competition judge. Hence I find myself wanting less passive voice and pleonasms in the first third of the story. Then it takes over. Such imagery and emotion. I can see why it shakes McEwan into believing again. I get the same reaction when I read any of AL Kennedy’s short stories, or Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang. Ironically, knowing there is a cure for not being able to suspend disbelief, is a cure in itself although it might take a day or two for it to work.

In Nabakov’s Symbols and Signs the son suffers from Referential Mania in which everything around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. I can empathise with that. The boy’s attempted suicides are not to end his life and put an end to misery as it might be for others but to tear a hole in the fabric of his existence and escape to another, better one. I can see that too. As a life long lover of the skies – both academically and emotionally – I get this line in which “clouds transmit to each other, by means of slow signs…” wonderful.

Speaking of wonderment. Oliver (four years old plus a little) was in the library with mum (our daughter) choosing dinosaur books. As they were about to leave he rushed to another stack and picked out a book. Mum said You wouldn’t like that one. Oliver said, It’s not for me – it’s for Pop. (I am Pop).  Mum said It’s good of you to think of choosing a book for Pop but why this one? (It’s a Mills & Boon

Oliver and me

Romance – Captain and the Wallflower by Lyn Stone) Pop mostly likes Science Fiction like those over there. Oliver – No, Pop will like this book. It’s full of words. Look!

Last note:

Funny how twitter followers to me go down by handful each week. Is it something I said, not said? Or do those numbers represent those who give up on using Twitter altogether? If you are on twitter and would like to follow me I am at http://twitter.com/geoffnelder

About time I plugged some of my stuff on this blog thing and so

ARIA is on the front page of http://bibliophilia.org with link to trailer and buying links.

Sales of How to Win Short Story Competitions are steady. Get yours here.

Exit, Pursued by a Bee is at http://geoffnelder.com/exitbee.htm Several readers have pointed out recently that a principle notion in that book is being proved true. Ie that the universe might be chaotic but that the Earth is in a kind of bubble of stability. In Exit that stability is shaken when alien artefacts leave. Just shows that fiction might not be so unbelievable after all.

Seven times rule

At a book signing in Carlisle, UK I was told by an advertising executive that not only should I be thrusting my books in the faces of customers, and for Pete’s sake not have my books in neat piles (customers don’t like disturbing such perfection) but everyone has to have a new product told to them at least 7 times before they take notice. Hence we are here on forums, blogs, social networks and emails making a nuisance of ourselves so many times. Then yesterday a writer pal says she bought my book. She knew it was out in the summer but just needed to watch its trailer one week, read the excerpt another, catch up on a blog tour of it then be nudged again and voila. So perhaps the 7 times rule does work! So here goes 1) NEW in 2012: Suppose amnesia was infectious? Thank goodness it isn’t but imagine the ramifications if it was. ARIA: LEFT LUGGAGE is the personal story of people, the breakdown of society and yet hope for some who coped. Click on this link to Geoff’s blog, which has details including Amazon e-book and paperback.http://bit.ly/OvYGQv ARIA is endorsed by luminaries such as Mike Resnick and Jon C Grimwood.   2) Also out in 2012 is the ebook HOW TO WIN SHORT STORY COMPETITIONS. Co-authored by two experienced judges in a dialogue form and has great reviews (not written by us or our friends!) at http://www.ideas4writers.co.uk/books/storycomps.php   3) For something completely different try HOT AIR, an award-winning thriller based in England and the Mediterranean. A feisty woman witnesses a heinous crime from a hot air balloon. She’s abducted and kept in a watchtower on Mallorca until she escapes. A page turner on your Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Air-ebook/dp/B0084OZL9E/ 4) SF mystery Exit, Pursued by a Bee is exciting interest. Several unique concepts written in an accessible style with a feisty woman main character and with a beginning and end on Glastonbury Tor – festival and all. Paperback and now Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Pursued-Bee-ebook/dp/B001CQC9LY

be my twitter pal http://twitter.com/geoffnelder

Coming back home

Spent a splendid week in the Northern Lake District. Some family members warned of ongoing winter weather and we did see snow on the first full day but all it did was to enhance the look of the mountains. We walked up by Carling Knott to hike around and above Holme Wood and back along the lesser known Loweswater Lake. Cool weather but the exertion warmed us as did the views. Of course Keswick was as delightful as ever and wife enjoyed her fish and chip dinners. Sadly, we found the tea and fancy cakes at Brysons’ to be not up to their usual high standards. More hikes in Borrowdale and finding little cafes such as in Grange, more than made up for Brysons’ shortcomings.

The photo is taken on the eastern shore of Derwent Water and shows an unusual sculpture. A large rock split in half and a maze-like carving on the polished faces. It’s known as the Centenary Stone – details here

I visited a pal, Les Floyd, at his home in Carlisle where we caught up with each other’s writing news, and publishing. Good to meet again his mum and brother.

I popped into Waterstones books in Carlisle where the manager invited me back to do a book signing once ARIA is published. Also he’ll stock Exit, Pursued by a Bee – yeay!

Speaking of Exit, I found while I was away that it was the highlighted book at Beyond Worlds here  Brilliant!

Part of the holiday was for Gaynor to get on writing her Masters and me with ARIA volume 3. Both of us succeeded in both hiking, writing, and resting.

Chester on Saturday 3rd Dec 2011

If you wondered about the outcome of the Chester Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group meeting then a link to another blog is here. Alex Greene wrote that superb summary and assessment of the books we discussed and finally picked on. I dithered over whether to pick Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles for my unmissable Desert Island Book but chose in the end that strangely compelling fantasy The Collector Collector by Tibor Fischer.

I was upset on my walk into the city for that meeting. Once our own children grew up and left home I didn’t give infants much of a thought. Then grandson Oliver came along followed a year later by Amy and they’ve changed my life. I can’t walk past charity shops without popping in to rummage their toy baskets instead of just the books and DVD shelves. Yesterday, a young woman sat on a low wall with a little lad about Oliver’s age (nearly 3). The woman was unscrewing the cup/cap off a vacuum flask. I saw the clouds from the hot liquid but didn’t know what beverage it was. As I passed I thought, “Surely not…” I was wrong. A few steps later and I heard the little lad cry, followed by the woman cry. I turned and saw the woman trying to finger the scalding drink from the poor boy’s lips. Luckily, I always carry a water bottle. I rushed back to them and offered cold water. The woman was too distraught to do anthing but said, “Yes, please, thank you.” in an Eastern European accent. Not the time, and no time, for remonstration, I took her cup, emptied the still steaming contents and poured in cold water. The boy took it and bubbled his lips and drank. Hopefully, his blisters won’t bother him too much.

A few minutes later I, like so many other onlookers, watched in amazement at a man in a top hat and tails playing a piano while cycling it into the heart of Chester. I have no photograph of him but he is on YouTube playing while cycling at other events. Good for you, Rimski – here is a link. Good to see both my hobbies together – bicycling and piano playing.

Yeay, Maggie Ball, who runs the famous Compulsive Reader website has bought a copy of my SF mystery – Exit, Pursued by a Bee for her dad, who is convalescing. Let’s hope the ironic comedy, the sex in space and mysteries will pull him through. If you know someone who will hug you for a copy then go to my web page with reviews and links here.

Which SF book… oh dear

I am drawn to post-catastrophe survival stories and read three in a row recently. George Stewart’s Earth Abides, Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I’d read Stephen King’s The Stand last year and it rather like Earth Abides in many ways.

All classics in their own right but each leaving me wanting. I am a glutton for good writing – when I read a phrase and say, ‘I wish I wrote that.’ I didn’t get that from Earth Abides. And yet the courage and persistence of the main character doing what most decent men would do over the years and charting the way Nature would reclaim North American cities is admirable. It comes under that category that so many SF stories written in the mid 20th Century fall in where the protagonist is nice – and so lacks that gritty conflict modern readers want. Yet Miller does that in Canticle. Terrific writing, scary deaths of the main characters and yet amusing in a noir way. I suppose the book troubled me as it is about how faith – especially the Catholic Church in whatever morphed form it has post nuclear war – is necessary to pull Mankind through. It’s done tongue in cheek and I can still enjoy the way the story is told and smile at the characters. The Road is marvellous with grit and conflict around each dark corner yet hope is wired all the way through.

For the next Chester Library SFF book group meeting this coming Saturday 3^rd December we are having a Desert Island Discs session where we each suggest a SFF book we couldn’t live without. That is sooo hard. I am also at a disadvantage to many of the others in that although I have been reading SF for decades my rubbish memory denies me the opportunity to recall enough details to talk about most of them. Also I have been writing more than reading in the last ten years. To top that I don’t normally like to re-read books on the grounds that life is too short. Besides the fact above that I am drawn to post-apocalyptic stories, I also want to be awed by vistas new, which generally means exploring new planets or weird places. And I want to enjoy the writing style. I’ve no time before Saturday to read Gene Wolfe’s books and the many others I see listed on ‘must read’ compilations on the web. I think M. John Harrison’s Light is high on my suggestions though I may yet cause issues with some by suggesting one of the best books I’ve read for writing style and imagination: The Collector Collector by Tibor Fischer. It is fantasy rather than science fiction but imagine a story from the point of view of an ancient non-human entity, who collects souls that collects items. It was Fischer’s The Thought Gang that re-energised my urge to write. It’s all his fault!

I don’t suppose I’m allowed to have my own Exit, Pursued by a Bee as my chosen book. Ha ha.

FantasyCon 2011 – hot, hot hot

I’m suffering jet lag. Okay, the distance between Brighton and Chester is only a handful of hundreds of miles and four hours by train, but the distance in terms of literary milieu I am on the other side of the planet. A day ago I was shaking hands with Brian Aldiss. Brian Aldiss! And Christopher Priest, Ramsey Campbell, and other writer friends such as Jonathan Pinnock, Ian Whates, Robert Harkess, Raven Dane and Sam Stone. My experience became enhanced with the artists too – Steve Upham, Vincent Chong and Andy Bigwood. Then the publishers – most of whom are also fine writers but are these days mostly producing exquisite publications – Terry Martin, Lee Harris, Christopher Teague, Simon Marshal-Jones and others. My hand hasn’t been so excited for years. Loved the hugs too… thanks Sam.

Copies of my Exit, Pursued by a Bee and the Escape Velocity anthology were among other items in the FantasyCon raffle. My SF mystery might have gone unnoticed but the Mistress of Ceremonies, Sarah Pinborough was ‘tired’ by the time she had to read the title and so fumbled it. Luckily, a helper said. “Exit, Pursued by a Bee, and it is a good book!”. Yeay, Sarah can be a Mistress again!

Link to FantasyCon 2011 >>> here

Speaking of the Escape Velocity anthology, I met several of the contributors during the weekend – besides Bec Zugor (I travelled up the railtrack to Chichesterto have lunch with her and her family – excellent day). EV contributors at FantasyCon included Jonathan Pinnock, Robert Harkess, Roy Gray, Mark Lewis and Ian Whates. I also met the charming Carmelo Rafala of Immersion Press, who wrote the Mother Tongue story in Escape Velocity issue one. Jonathan Pinnock was there to launch his amazing Mrs Darcy Versus the Aliens – see the link here. I’ve known Jonathan for years on various forums and admired his writing style but I had no idea he was soooo tall. I had to stand on a box of his books to shake his hand.

I attended several literary panels including one in which graphic artists discussed cover art issues and I learned why you rarely see turquoise in digital-art covers. Thanks, Vincent, who explained it to me in detail in the bar later. Also, in a panel on the future of SF Brian Aldiss said how single-word titles work best for promotion, then quoted his own Hot House as an example. Ian Whates pointed out to him that it was two words… ha ha. But in fact it really is one word – Hothouse as it was published in 1962. Ian could have quoted his No Time Like Tomorrow title back at him. Nevertheless, a one word title does have appeal. I tend to go for two or more.

Xaghra’s Revenge is a case in point. I managed to have a quick word with the Angry Robot publisher, Lee Harris, who have had the synopsis and samples in his inbox since May. They’ve been very busy this year including having an unagented submission window with the resulting flood of novels to consider. I bought Peter Crowther’s latest book, Darkness Falling, from them. A fantasy thriller with people disappearing – unnerving when that includes the pilot of a plane you are in. Hopefully, there will be good news about XR in due course.

Besides the exuberance I went through meeting all these folk – all good people in spite of their chosen genre of unspeakable horror! – there were other moments of excitement. A burlesque show was laid on: all based on fantasy themes we were treated to playlets and delightful striptease. Of course being based inBrightonin the British heatwave (28 C shade temp in October), there was plenty of bare flesh of all sexes on display on the beach and even bikinis in the town. I thought I was inAmsterdamin some of the narrow lanes with their windows wide open and an interesting sweet aroma wafting along. I was distinctly light-headed by the time I reached the end of the lane. With that, the hot sun, the ocean, the marvellously friendly gay communities, the cosmopolitan eateries (many many veggie cafes) and the runners along the promenades, Brighton was a combo ofAmsterdam and Sliema in Malta. I hope to go back soon.

books and friends

It is time for FantasyCon again this month. The British Fantasy Society has its annual bash in Brighton at the end of the month and hanging over to October. I am there again where I look forward to meeting many SFF friends.

One of them, Jonathan Pinnock, is having a coruscating success with his unique novel, Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens. It started as a piece of fun on his blog and grew. We, at Cafe Doom, thirsted for each instalment and are delighted with his success. It is available in WH Smith in the UK and on Amazon here.You have to get one- the funniest book using a kind of fan fiction element of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. Watch out Jasper Fforde, Jonathan Pinnock is coming.

I’ll be seeing Jon at FantasyCon. They are having a raffle and have accepted my science fiction mystery – Exit, Pursued by a Bee (web page) - and the Escape Velocity anthology (see here) for prizes.

Holes keep emerging!

Holes appear in the ground scaring the living daylights out of citizens nearby. Is this happening in my SF mystery – Exit, Pursued by a Bee – or for real? Both! In Exit, Pursued by a Bee alien spherical artefacts emerge from the Earth’s crust leaving bottomless circular vents, and reality now seems to prove the fiction. See a recent article (April 2011)

http://bit.ly/eZvrNG

But, hey, this has happened before! See my blog pages from last June. Remember the perfectly circular holes in Guatemala? http://bit.ly/lTPoWe

Read the truth – kind of – as interpreted in my Double Dragon Publishing novel at

http://geoffnelder.com/exitbee.htm

Exit on Kindle, etc

My science fiction mystery – Exit, Pursued by a Bee – looks great on Kindle – even on my PC version buy it here  I need the sales!

Over the weekend I was kindly informed by someone who recently worked in the editorial offices of a SF publishing house that I should play down the original premise aspect of my Left Luggage trilogy when my agent queries to publishers. They are businesses and as such prefer to not gamble with the market, but take on tried and tested formulae. Shame. At least Left Luggage is the story of an apocalyptic Earth. The reader doesn’t know why the aliens left a pandora’s box with the virus (that’s the original bit: a disease not thought of before) that wipes out everyone eventually unless you can run and hide. It’s a story of survival, retaliation, coping and much more. Funny though, that publishers of the most creative people and ideas don’t really want to take chances on new ideas.