Bluelemur.org.uk

This post is essentially meant to annoy my brother.

I went to see Jonathan Coulton play in Manchester on Weds (supported by Paul + Storm, who I’d not seen before). It was a pretty good gig. I didn’t think it was quite as good as the one in London at Easter that I went to, because that was just JoCo playing so he did more songs, to a bigger audience. But the Manchester gig had a special guest appearance for the encore.
They played the first verse and chorus of “Creepy Doll”, then stopped and Jonathan said it just wasn’t creepy enough and it needed something else. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he said, “if there was someone in the audience who was perhaps an internationally famous author of creepy stories, who could come up on stage to help us?” This is what happened next:

Neil Gaiman complained in his blog that it was difficult to find your way around the convention hotel. Evidentally, other people agreed:

I went to a few other good talks and panels, plus I caught the second half of the show by comedian and musician Mitch Benn. He was excellent, and very funny. Some of the stuff he did had a geek/sci-fi theme, so it was the right audience for it. And Monday night I spent drinking far too much in the real ale bar with other random people.

It was a good weekend (well, two days), and I’m definitely planning to go again next year, especially as it’ll be just down the road from me in Bradford.

Multi-award winning author and all-round nice bloke Neil Gaiman giving a talk at the Orbital Eastercon. He’s possibly my favourite author, so he was one of the main reasons I came to this (although it’s pretty good, I’ll probably go next year even though he won’t be there). He read a short story, called “Orange”, and part of the first chapter of “The Graveyard Book”, which he’s just finishing off at the moment. Very cool.

I’ve also been to a panel on “Writing the Near Future”, where some authors discussed the problems of trying to predict developments that will probably be proved true or false within their lifetimes. Interesting stuff, went into quite a few different areas. Robots seem to be the answer to most things…

I popped down to that comics exhibition today. It was pretty interesting, there was quite a range of stuff there. Melinda Gebbie’s work didn’t seem to be there (might still be arguing with Great Ormond Street about the Peter Pan copyright) but the others, including pages of Joe Sacco’s Palestine, were well worth seeing. I might go back and spend a bit more time there if I can.

Met up with crazy peoples from the NaNoWriMo website forums this afternoon. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word novel during the 30 days of November. I’ve attempted it for the last four years and failed every time (although I’ve done a bit more each year, so I’m on track to do a full 50,000 by the time I’m about 70). The Leeds + York regional group arranged a meet-up in Leeds, so I thought I’d go along. Was quite good, lots of very different people there, but all slightly mad cos they’re going to try to write a novel in a month. I’ll probably attempt it again, but since I’m busier than I’ve ever been at the moment, I’m not sure if I have much chance. And I don’t have a fixed idea yet, but there’s over a week before the start.

To aid me, I went and made a few purchases from Borders that I’ve been meaning to get for a while, not just for this. The Oxford Dictionary of English, and the Oxford Thesaurus of English – two hefty tomes of burglar-stunning weight and proportion. And Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, the essential guide for writers. Suppose I’d better use that a bit, I’m sure my punctuation is getting increasingly erratic.

Yes, it’s time once again for NaProcraMo, or National Procrastination Month, also known as National Novel Writing Month. Wherein I do many, many things in order to avoid writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.
So I’ll probably be posting on here occasionally.