The Supreme Dalek and an Enchanter of Words

The past 10 days have been culturally packed, in Bath, with the Jane Austen festival, and the Bath Festival of Children’s Literature running side by side. Couple this with visitors from the US and glorious Yorkshire, and you end up with sore feet, and culture spilling out from your ears.

Last weekend, amongst the 'usual' touristy stuff, Vicky and I found ourselves surrounded by people flouting poke bonnets and dresses, at the Regency fair. There was swordplay and drama and dancing, as well as bath buns and a lot of posing for photos. Next year, I have promised, we shall go in the proper attire.

Monday's event - talk and stories from 4 students doing Bath Spa's Writing for Young People MA - which I dragged several people along to, left both Rich and I musing upon the possibility of doing the same course.

I met Sarah Prineas, Mary Hoffman, and Dianna Wynne Jones on Tuesday (squee!) all of whom were eloquent speakers passionate about their writing, although none were prepared to address the role of politics/ current affairs in speculative fiction. Prineas’ (perhaps predictable, but so passionately, believable spoken) principle advice to writers was to ‘never surrender’ to rejection letters, a sentiment which she used to annotate my copy of the magic thief; a sentiment we should all try to remember. Wynne Jones seemed a little put off by some of the comments from the other authors, and almost scornful of their efforts at times. Not encouraging for the up-and-coming author. But then, I suppose, with her record she’s entitled.

Barry Cunningham, founder of Chicken House Publishers, gave a talk on Thursday. He was animated and informative, and made me want to write reams, then and there. By far the best event of the week.

And yesterday, there was the ‘Writing Dr Who’ event, which turned out not to be an informative discussion of how to break into the market, rules of Dr Who, muse, etc, but rather a gripe from the panel about how lucky current fans were, in that they no longer have to miss out on an episode if they miss its first airing. The closest it got to what was advertised was the writers saying ‘yeah, it’s a great thing to get into, Dr Who, but it’s a closed market, now’. And the Q&A was dominated entirely by kids with nervous questions as original as ‘what’s your favourite monster?’ Bah. On stage, however, sitting benignly beside the panel was the actual, rather wonderful Supreme Dalek. Apparently the Tardis was upstairs in another panel’s event, but we weren’t allowed to go up and caress see it.

Still, overall, with this week steeped in history (walking tours, regency fairs, roman baths, Celtic myth) fresh company and creative minds, I am all fired up. I now have a new(ish) project on the go, and am *almost* content with having no money and thus an excuse to stay in with my laptop.

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In addition to this, because I promised revenge for blog-linkage as incentive to properly blog, I swore I'd log how much I long to get back to the ridiculous legend of Kneeface. It's true. Bombs and gods and other adversities are all very well, but Rachel needs to write her installment and pass it on so I can write some non-serious stuff about eely pirates and seagulls, too.