At FantasyCon 2009

Finally back from the British Fantasy Society convention (FantasyCon) in Nottingham. It was there last year, so I have started to get a hand on the layout of the place. I know where the Pizza Hut, Subway and Forbidden Planet store is now. I’m so cultured.

I spent the Friday afternoon helping to load up the goodie bags that get given away to the convention attendees. The first hundred got two free books in the bags.

The first convention panel was ‘Zombies, Werewolves and Mummies: Traditional Monsters Fiction and Film.’ Anthologist Stephen Jones, said the stories should treat the monsters differently and always try to do something new with them, or make them more interesting.
That was the only convention panel I attended that evening, as I was busy chatting to friends in the bar. FantasyCon has always had this informal atmosphere, which does help newcomers I think.

A thought about breakfasts in hotels. For most of us, I think there the only time that we ever have anything approaching a full English breakfast. Usually we have to go to work in the morning so we settle for toast and/or cereal. Or it’s the hassle of getting out the frying pan and cooking the meat while making sure you don’t set off the smoke alarm. So breakfast is usually light. But you get into a hotel with a breakfast buffet and it’s the opportunity for a bout of gluttony. Mushrooms, bacon, tomatoes, baked beans, sausages, eggs, black pudding. And you’re paying a set price anyway, so it doesn’t cost you anything. I’ve no doubt people with stronger wills could resist, but I am not one of them.

The first panel that I went to on Saturday was on the resurgence of the popularity of vampires. Apparently Stephanie Myer accounted for 5% of all book sales this year. This moved on to the association of vampires with the recently created genre of ‘paranormal romance’. The drawback being that romantic vampires are not as scary. This lead into the discussion of ‘Let the Right One In’ by John Ajvide Lindqvist. (Personally I regard this book as the best vampire novel of the last 10 years. Feel free to disagree with me.) Another interesting point made by author Raven Dane, was that male writers tend to see the vampire as a hostile force, but women writers often focus on the sensual portrayal. The panel concluded with the thought that vampires will always adapt to the times and the next portrayal of them, is likely to be with them as bankers.

After that, I watched the interview with the writer Brian Clements (television series ‘The Avengers’, ‘Thriller’). This was interesting, because it was in glimpse into an era that has disappeared, when projects could be commissioned on a handshake from Lord Lew Grade. While this had its faults, it’s had not to romanticize it, when commercial television, seems to come up with anything but ‘The X-factor’.

After I went to a sandwich bar for lunch, I went to the Jasper Fforde interview. I was surprised to learn that his original day job had been a focus puller on films. It took him ten years to get published. Fforde went on to say that once he realise that he was writing books about books and reading the scope became limitless. He also pointed out something thing that I found interesting from working on his next book ‘Shades of Grey’. In post-apocalypse worlds, people want the first few years after, but don’t think about what happens 600 years later when nobody can remember anything different.

The next event that I went to was a panel entitled The Green Man and Other Legends: Bringing our myths up to date. The discussion began on the subject of how folklore had emerged as explanations for things that had not made sense at that time in the world. This moved onto the notion that the tooth fairy had a line of descent from the figure of Puck. The Green Man is actually a term that was invented in 1939 to describe the foliage covered heads and figures on church carvings.

Author Kari Sperring pointed that archetypes always appeal, but the reference and interpretation change with the time periods and society. Graham Joyce pointed out there is a vast repository to draw on. But it’s one thing to just rewrite them and another to look at how they reflect our lives now. Recasting myth for contemporary values is where it can be fascinating. Robin Hood is another version of the myth of the wild man of the woods. One version of the myth has Robin using the hood to hide his face.

Graham Joyce continued that for him, the Green Man is a figure representing nature in flux, with a face made of leaves from different seasons. Also the idea of the woods could represent the subconscious mind. The Green Man could then be a male version of the muse figure. (Personal sidetrack, a recent reinterpretation of the Green Man is the DC Comics character Swamp Thing. Although I can just see an academic paper coming up on how Hagrid counts as a wild man of the woods figure.)

Writer, comedian and magician John Lenahan, said that he had researched the Indian rope trick. He’d found cross-cultural myths of climbing into heaven, such as a Chinese one about stealing peaches.

The discussion moved onto the softening of old folklore in the way it’s used, as has happened sometimes with elves and unicorns. Author Storm Constantine described this as the ‘fuffyfication’ of myths which strips the primal out of them. The conversation them moved onto how in the West, we have become removed from nature. A lot of myths come from when the forest was a dangerous place to go into.

I did decide to book for the World Horror Convention in Brighton in 2010. As I’ve never been there before, the trick is to find all the places to eat around the hotel before the convention starts. I wonder if lots of people are going to home wearing ‘kiss me quick’ hats.

After the convention banquet and the British fantasy awards, there was an attempt to do a panel game, which didn’t quite come off. Then there was a very entertaining show by John Lenahan. I would have liked to have gone to the panel on end of the world stories after that, but I am not really able to stay up past midnight a lot of the time.

The first panel that I saw on Sunday was new writers telling their stories about how they got published. I noted down the advice that you need to be writing stuff that the editors want, so you need to be looking at what’s new and hot. You also need to be committed to writing as some publisher’s want 2 books a year. You also need to a lot more self-publicity and get a website. Good places to start getting noticed with short fiction (although editors don’t want anthologies) are online magazines. It also helps to try and get a good cover for your novel. But if you are good enough, you will get there.

The next panel was discussing the use of Archaeology in fantasy fiction. Mention was made of the tendency of the Victorians to just bring stuff back from overseas. The influence of the Indiana Jones films was a popular topic. There is apparently a joke in archaeology, that if you can’t identify what it’s for, it must be for ritual use.

The final panel discussion was the editor’s perspective on stories written to a theme. These anthologies are popular as they provide some kind of selling point. Apparently there has already been one on the theme of werewolves at Christmas. (I wonder if it was called ‘Ho Ho Howl’?) Editors don’t like it, when a story has been made to fit the submission guidelines, just by changing the names. Some useful advice came up from the panel. Keep covering letters short. Say if you are unpublished. If not, just stick to the most recent credits you have. Don’t get the layout wrong and the make the opening paragaph gripping. Look at the deep structure of the theme; don’t just do a twist at the end. The theme has to drive the narrative. Some editors will want a synopsis of the story in the guidelines. Others will want pitches.

This was the last major event of the convention, after lunch, it was just a case chatting with everybody while they headed back. I didn’t leave until the Monday, so I had the chance to have a look around the Forbidden Planet store there before going.