The lesser mabinogion

Ok, where were we?…that’s right…
Monday
Monday started with “What’s your Game Plan? Marketing yourself and your writing” with Robert Stephenson, Garth Nix and Kaaren Sutcliffe.
Tessa was minding the CSFG stall in the traders room, so I went to this one under strict instructions to memorise everything. Of that, there were essentially two main pieces of advice when it comes to marketing yourself –
Write a better story.
Don’t piss people off.
That’s it!. Don’t bother trying to butter up publishers with pizza or champagne, ’cause they don’t care. Don’t tell them how great your are or your story is in your covering letter, because they don’t care. And don’t tell them the story starts slow but picks up on page 50 (Garth recons he’s actually seen that).
If you do get published, the publisher’s probably going to do pretty close to nothing in the way of promotion – so you’ll have to do it yourself. But don’t overdo it. Don’t turn up to someone else’s booklaunch and start trying to sell your book. Don’t go to a bookshop and sign all the copies of your book. Make sure you’re not stepping on your publisher’s toes with anything you plan, but don’t bug them every other day about it – arrange a meeting and tell them what you plan to do for the next few months, and get back to them after that.
All common sense stuff really. Basically, write the best story you can, polish it until they can see it shine from mars before submitting it anywhere, and be polite.
Kaaren also mentioned that public speaking was also an excelent thing to do – run workshops, try to get in on the school circuit (if your books appeal to that market of course), etc…and that has the bonus of actually paying too.
Overall, whilst a lot of stuff was fairly common sense, it was still all very interesting and thought provoking. And somethimes we need the obvious things reinforced.

Next up, the CSFG panel with Chris Andrews, Michael Barry, Mik Bennett, Monica Carroll, Maxine McArthur, Trevor Stafford – and about 99% of the audience.
This was a fairly straight forward discussion of the evolution of the group particularly as it related to the publication of their three anthologies.
I don’t think there was really anything new in it for me, having been relatively close to things over the last couple of years.

“World Building – A few perspectives” with Kirsten Bishop, Simon Brown, Rebecca Locksley, Garth Nix, Sean Williams and Russel Kirkpatrick (even though he wasn’t on the programme – looks like they couldn’t keep him away!).
This one had quite a large audience, so it was probably a good thing that it got moved to the Lake Superior room. We got in early and got a front row seat.
There was a bit of a tendency for things to focus on geography to start with – rather than world building as a whole, which probably affected some of the answers to some of the questions. There were, however definitely some quite varied approaches to things. Garth was a strong voice for story above all else and would always tend to start with a story then figure the world out later, Russell initially claimed that the world was more important – but later restated his opinion to acknolege that whilst the world is important, the whole point of a book was the story, so obviously the story was very important. He very definitely started with a world first. Kirsten said that her characters brought the world with them, which was an interesting way of looking at things. I’m not entirely sure what she meant, but I think once I’ve finished her book I’ll probably understand.
Also discussed was the other aspects of world building – history, social and economic issues, science, and the idea was put forward that world building is about building trust, and that you can get away with some smaller flaws in the world if there is at least one aspect of it that is very strong. Or maybe that was from the cartography panel. I can’t remember – someone said it sometime anyway.

Ok, lunch time…sat down in a corner and had a pastie. The funny thing about the catering there was that it didn’t matter what you were buying, whether it be drink, food or whatever – you’d hand over $10, and only get a couple of coins back….I never quite figured it out…must be some sort of bizarre hotel maths that is beyond the comprehension of us mere consumers.

Anyway, after lunch was “Young Writers Talk About Writing” with Grace Dugan, Catherine McMullen, Kaaren Sutcliffe, Chris Ticehurst, and a Ms Tessa S.L. Kum.
I can’t actually remember much of this panel for some reason….except that Catherine has been accused of having her father write her stories for her – which to me just shows how shallow and small minded some people can be – why on earth should her father being a published author make her any more likely to turn in work not her own than anyone else? Apparently she won’t even listen to advice from him (but then parents always feel this way..heh..), so there’s not much fear of her letting him write a whole story for her.

Last panel of the con – “Living off writing – Can it be done? Or is it time to diet?” with Trudi Canavan, Ian Irvine, Stephen Dedman and Richard Harland
Here we had the various experiences of the authors when it came to the financial side of writing. Stephen probably represented the most realistic postion of a professional author – write anything and everything – he writes short stories, non fiction, children’s fiction, pretty much anything, and so makes it by on weight of numbers. He provided a calculation we could apply to attempt to figure out if writing would pay the bills – but I’ve completely forgotten it now.
There was discussion of what ot expect in the way of advance for a first book, and mention of not directly writing methods of making money such as talking at schools (as also mentioned in the morning by Kaaren), and some tax related incomes, such as donating manuscripts to a university – which probably isn’t worthwhile until you have a name for yourself) and payment schemes for having books in libraries and schools.
Quite a lot there to think over – and most of it very specifically writing oriented, unlike the marketing yourself panel in the morning which could be applied to just about anything you do.

Finally, the clsoing ceremony.
The highlight of this was the auction of the original painting of Maxine McArthur’s Time Future cover.
It had been on show in the art show, with a minimum bid of more than $2000 on it, and Maxine had been lamenting the fact that she couldn’t afford to buy her own cover. Well, sometime during the day on Monday a note was put on the painting indicating that it would be auctioned off at the closing ceremony – with no reserve, and no mimum bid.
The moment this was announced in the ceremony, people started bidding – from $1..after a few of these (I think it got to $50) a serious bid was entered – $500 I think. The auction was then interrupted by a suggestion. It had been Maxine’s birthday a day or so before, and it was suggested that a group bid be put in. The audience was asked who wanted to put $10 towards a bid – to which quite a few people put up their hands, and Maxine herself said she’d put in $200. This took the total to something more than $500 – though I can’t remember what.
Then the other bidder raised it to $600.
We were asked if we could manage $20. A few put down their hands. but we managed to beat it again
The other bidder went to $650
A plea for those who had stopped at $10 to go to $20 was made, and enough must have done so, because they got to about $700. and at that point the other bidder gave in. (Tessa thinks she heard his wife hiss “let her have it” at him)
All this had both Maxine and Donna in tears – and I think there would have been quite a few of us close to it. It was such a wonderful thing to have been part of, and definitely the most well spent $20 of the con.

Afterwards we were heading out to Donna’s place for a “Dead Dog” party, and we offered to give Trevor and Grace a lift.
We had dinner in the city first, and then headed out there.
The party was a nice relaxed evening, though I admit I probably would have felt a little out of place, except that I managed to find a nice comfy chair to sit in, and listened to the music that Tony and another talented individual who’s name I never caught were taking turns playing. The couple of times Moondance was played made me itch for my Sax though….
We headed back towards Canberra sometime near oneish, first depositing Grace and a rather sleepy Trevor back at Trevor’s place before heading home to bed ourselves.

Next morning I was up at 6:00 so I could get my shower in before Tessa, so I could get her to the airport in time for her flight.
I spent most of that day staring at my screen in a distinctly zombified state.

So, all in all it was an excellent con, and I had a lot of fun. Many, many thanks to Donna and everyone else responsible for it.

It also inspired me to try some writing myself . Writing has always been one of those things that I have always just “known” I was not capable of doing. So I am endeavouring to prove myself wrong. So far I’m finding it to be a very pleasant experiment. I’m also hoping that by exposing myself to the very different creative process involved in writing, that it will have a flow on effect to my music, and perhaps inspire me in a way that has been very lacking lately.

For a far more thorough report, you’ll want to look at Tessa’s report, but I will endeavour to cover the two days I was there…

First up, I think I should actually describe the event, as it appears from reading a couple of articles in the media that the world at large either has no idea, or completely the wrong idea about SF (that’s Speculative Fiction – which includes Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror) Conventions.
A SF Con in Australia is usualy a gathering of authors and fans of speculative fiction for the purpose of celebrating, discussing and advancing the genre as well as most importantly a place to have fun and meet a lot of very nice like minded people.
It is not a place where hundreds of freaky star trek fans wander round in spock ears (Sorry to disapoint you ABC).
The staple of the con is usualy the panels, which are always very interesting, entertaining, and funny. There’s also many presentations and speeches, various book launches, readings, signings, a traders room, sometimes art shows and awards ceremonies, and plenty of parties.
Conflux had approximately 35 published novel authors in attendance, and of the rest of the attendees, very few would not have been writers of some sort, whether published or aspiring.
Rather than being intimidating for a non writer like myself, it all comes together to create a wonderfully contagious environment of creativity.
Ok now, into the gory details

Sunday
First up was “Writing in Created Universes – Just how hard is it?”, which was a discussion on the experience of using someone else’s world and / or characters. On the panel were Greg Benford, who writes for Star Trek Enterprise, Johnathan Blum who writes Doctor Who books, Sean Williams who has written 3 books in a 19(!) book Star Wars series, and Matthew Farrer who has written a Warhammer 40k novel.
There was quite a large variation in the experiences of each of the authors, as each setting had its own unique quirks. The Star Wars universe sounded the most intimidating – with Sean being given a huge tome that constituted the Star Wars Bible and being told pretty much that the story he was going to write was detailed on page xxx paragraphs 3 to 5, or something similar. However, he insisted that he still had plenty of freedom in what he could do.
From what Greg was saying about Enterprise, it sounds like the series is in quite a bit of trouble – their audience has dropped significantly and the only reason that the show continues is because they’ve put so much money into it that the stuido is determined to get to the magic 100 episode mark, which apparently is what indicates the show was a success (you don’t want to have been involved with a show that never got to 100), and is also the point at which repeats start being shown.
Doctor Who sounded fairly easy to deal with, as the nature of it is that every story is in a different setting. It’s also the only one of these that I have actually read anything of – but only one, and it was a novelisation of an episode, so it doesn’t really count….
Warhammer gave even more freedom, as being a gaming setting, it’s designed for stories to be written in.

Next I headed to “Romancing the Genre” with Trudi Canavan, Louise Cusack, Cory Daniells, Genda Larke, Fiona McIntosh and Rebecca Locksley.
This was a fairly interesting panel where the authors discussed their widely differing approaches to romance and love in their works. Some attempt was made to distinguish romance from love, but I’m not sure that any two had the same definition. All agreed that romance was an important part of the story, but the way in which it was important varied from being the main driving force behind the story, to being another component that could be put in to add depth and interest.

Immediately after, in the same room was “Cartography and the art of Maps, Can you find your way?”, with Trudi Canavan, Ian Irvine, Russell Kirkpatrick and Glenda Larke.
Probably the most signficant piece of advice from this panel was not so much about the maps as far as they relate to the story, but the more pratical consideration of getting the thing on to the small, low quality paper in the standard paperback without ending up with an indecipherable black smudge.
Overall, another interesting and entertaining panel. I’m rather intrigued by the sound of Glenda’s world in which the geography is unstable and has a habit of changing frequently, making the job of cartographer very important in her world. I might have to hunt out her books at some point.

Next was lunch, and Tessa was minding the art show, so I alternated between keeping her company, and looking at the art on display.
There was a lot of really good stuff there…I was particularly interested in a set of four silk hangings, named Winter Dragon, Summer Dragon, Spring Dragon, and Autumn dragon. Unfortunately, whilst I could have probably afforded one, I definitely couldn’t manage all four, and I kind of felt like I needed all of them or none – one would be out of place no matter where I put it, but the set would be able to make their own place.

After lunch I headed to “My blaster is bigger than your sword – mutterings about humorous SF and Fantasy” with Robbie Matthews, Chuck McKenzie, Ben Peek, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Stewart Barrow.
They are all very funny people, and it was an extremely amusing panel. Unfortunately most of it was “had to be there” sort of stuff, so there’s no way I can relate the experience here. If you missed it, then you missed out :P
I did come away with something to think about though – and that is that humour about the genre gets old fast – don’t write comic fantasy in which the only joke is the fact that it’s fantasy. This sounds fairly obvious, but I have a feeling that it’s a trap that’s very easy to fall into.

Next was the Ditmars – but I didn’t really feel inclined to sit through a 2 hour awards ceremony, so I took the oportunity to visit the Bridge Crew room, and see if I could get a game in.
For those who don’t know, Bridge Crew is hybrid Starship Simulator / live action roleplaying game based very loosely on a certain long running Science Fiction TV series.
Players take on the roles of officers in control of an inter galatic starship, under the command of a capatain, and act out various scenarios thrown at them by the GMs.
Most of the players, with the exception of the Captain sit at a computer console and basically perform the roles they would do if they really were on the bridge of a spaceship. The GMs control the other ships in the universe, and sometimes NPCs are used to add even more roleplaying to the mix. All in all its a very unique, and fun game that can seem a little daunting at first, but anyone can pick up quite easily when given a little training.

Unfortunately there was a crew in the process of being trained when I appeared, and no free spots, so I watched them for a bit and in the end decided to go see the Ditmar ceremony afterall.
The ceremony was actually quite entertaining, I entered in time to see a fairly convincing enough promotion of the use of a Cane Toad as the award trophy – and when Kirsten Bishop was presented her award for best novel – only to get an impressive looking glass trophy she exclaimed something along the lines of “Where’s my Cane Toad!”
Those present at the awards were also witness to the rare occurrence of Jack Dann being rendered speechless at being awarded the Peter McNamara award for his contribution to SF in Australia.

After the awards was “Is Dark Fantasy the new horror? Can fantasy exist without magic?” with Kirsten Bishop, Trent Jameison, Garth Nix and Simon Brown
I can’t actually remember much about this one – except that the panelists didn’t really know how to classify dark fantasy. I think I agree with Tessa’s definition, but it’s kind of hard to see what that really has to do with horror….
They got onto more familiar ground with the second part of the question, but there was still a problem with definitons, as they weren’t quite sure if magic meant spells and the like, or included “magical” creatures. The conclusion was “Yes, it can”.

That finished our involvement for the day, as we decided not to go to the masquerade – which sounds like it might have been a minor error in judgement, but the extra sleep was almost certainly a benefit.

And I’m afraid that’s all I’m doing for now. I had not expected it to take so long, and cause my wrists so much pain to write all this up, so I’ll leave Monday for tomorrow.

Well, Easter has come and gone….and so has George. I can drink my tea in peace, safe in the knowledge that a cat isn’t going to shove its nose in it the moment I set down the cup.
I’m not sure that it’s likely that I will get a cat….I think I’ve figured out, that whilst I like pets, and I have no problem with them being around, I don’t think I really get anything special out of it.
I have no ingrained need for a pet. I think I need company that I can have a real conversation with, instead of just getting a blank feline stare back…heh.

Nick came round tonight for our fortnightly recording / jaming / whatever session, and he brought with him a Gibson SG guitar that a friend of his had lent him.
It was rather interesting trying to compare it with my Ibanez S-Classic.
For heavily overdriven or distorted metal stuff, there wasn’t really much of a difference. We tried recording the same riff on both guitars to compare.
But if you back off on the distortion a bit, then the SG seemed to have a slightly fuller sound – at least on the lower strings – particularly in the attack. The effect was less noticeable on the higher strings though
It was a pretty nice guitar, but I think after playing it a bit, that I prefer my Ibanez. It’s lighter for a start, and I kind of prefer its more elegant, subtle shape. It also seems to have a more predictable tone.
Of course, I’ve had my guitar a couple of years now, so I’m pretty used to it, and that was the first time I’d seen that one – so I’m probably fairly biased.

I’ve been re reading Lord of the Rings now that all the movies have been and gone, and the books weren’t going to ruin my enjoyment of them.
It’s probably been 15 years since I last read them – I did make an attempt about 7 or 8 years ago, but for some reason I didn’t like the writing style the second time around, and gave up.
However, this time I have no problem with it, and am enjoying the books quite well – even the Frodo and Sam bits.
But there’s one little thing that’s kind of bugging me –

Why the hell does Eowyn revert to Thees and Thous whenever she gets emotional?
No one else in the books talks like that..not even the elves or the men of Gondor (and they be pretty uptight at times), and even she doesn’t do it most of the time, only when she’s not getting her way.
I would have thought that if your speech was going to change when you got upset, it would be to revert to something more simple, rather than some pretentious formal idiom that no one else uses.

I’m looking after a friend’s cat over Easter. His name is George.
Yes it’s a rather odd name for a cat, but that’s a different story ;)

Anyway, George is still a fairly young cat, and has yet to have learnt from the book of Garfield. To George, eating and sleeping are mere distractions from the important things in life.

The important things being bolting up and down the hallway as fast as he can, and wrestling with a network cable.
Or jumping up and down the bunks in the spare room.
Or doing who knows what that seems to involve a lot of thumping and knocking things over, but somehow doesn’t leave any evidence…..
Overall nothing too alarming, afterall, we’ve looked after him in the past.

However, at night, he’s a complete sook.
I woke at 1:00am to the sound of meowing and yowling. I try to ignore it, but he’s fairly persistant, so I get up to make sure he hasn’t got himself stuck somewhere.

But no, what he’s really saying is “Play with meeeeeeeeee!”, “Pay attention to meeeeee!”, “Rub my tummy so I can bite your arrrrrrrrrm!”

So I go back to bed in disgust, and eventually manage to get to sleep again…only to be woken in the same way again at 2:30….and again at 4…and again at 5:30….

definitely not the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had.

Well, I’m sitting in my hotel room, with a copy of Underworld lent to me so that I’d have something to do…and I discover that I never installed any DVD playing software on my laptop.
Bugger.

I thought I had…but either I must have uninstalled it…or I’ve had to reinstall Windows since then.
Oh well…watched a sensationalist current affairs show and a reality show.
Saw people being outraged by stuff on the first, and people being backstabbed and voted off on the later.
Remebered why I don’t watch TV.

I’ve been spending most of my time over the last week or so trying to get my new server up and running. There’s so many little things here and there to do, it seems like it’s going to take forever.
However, this is what I have currently managed to do:

* Install postfix and cyrus with webcyradmin, SpamAssassin and Anomy Sanitiser.
* Set up virtual hosting with Apache, and move my blog to stuartherring.com (in case you hadn’t noticed)
* get awstats working to give me pretty graphs of the virtually non existant traffic
* Find a way of doing nightly backups.
* Set up webmail (horde / imp).

The backups in particular were a bit of a battle. I currently use bacula to do automated nightly backups at home, so I figured I’d just install the bacula file daemon on wishmaster, and add a new job to the configuration. But no!. it’s not as easy as that.
It seems there’s some weird 3 way thing that happens between the director, the file daemon, and the storage daemon, that means that the director sends the address of the storage daemon to the file daemon, which then attempts to connect back to the storage daemon.
The problem with that, is that since the director and storage daemon are both in my private LAN, the file daemon gets sent an address it can’t possibly connect to.
My first solution was to define a new storage record in the director config file that gave the outside name of my firewall as the storage daemon, and then do port forwarding on the firewall. But that didn’t work, as the director also wanted to connect to the outside address, and I’ve never managed to figure out how to get port forwarding that works externaly, to work internally as well.

Anyway, the final solution was to rysnc the stuff I wanted backed up to a local directory on my backup server, and have the nightly job back that up. That took a bit of fiddling with rsync, ssh, chroot and the firewall before I was happy, but it seems to work well enough, and should be secure enough too.

Most of today was spent working on a little java program to analyse the performance of Spam Assassin. You point it at an IMAP folder with spam in it, and it gives you stats on the tests that matched, for mails flagged and passed by SA.
I’m intending to extend it so as to be able to give it a folder with good messages as well, and have it parse the SA config file to get the current scores, enabling you to experiment with different settings to see what effect they would have on your current mail.
I’ll probably make it available up here somewhere when I’m done with it.

I’ve also been experimenting with Zope and Plone over the last week, but I’ll talk about it later, as there’s probably a fair bit to say, and I need to go to bed right now, as I have to drive to Sydney tomorrow.

#1. Never start reading a new web comic just before bed.

Well, apparently we just had a client ask us to make sure write access was enabled on the CDs we burnt for them.
It seems that the database software they use requires that files they upload to it be write enabled.
I figure we should have told them to use a hole punch to take a notch out of the corner. It works for floppys!