You've got red on you

Lady Bagehot shortly after ripping a guest's throat out

 I had the most wonderful weekend, and honestly it's hard being back here in the real world this week! "Write? Walk the dog? Get up in time to meet the door-fitter? Pah!"

I was helping run the first game in the Victorian supernatural LARP campaign, Gothic.  We've spent the last few months writing, prop-making and stressing out about it all - but it all went smoothly (exception: the fog machine didn't work) and the players were an outstanding group who threw themselves into the drama, and the response has been so positive that I'm now looking for a site for the next one!

Malham House. Don't go down into the cellar...

 

It's been decades since I reffed a weekender and I was delighted to find that some things now make it easier, like using Facebook to communicate, (OMG, that halves the work on its own!) and the incredible ease of finding props and costume on Amazon, Wish, and Ebay instead of having to make everything yourselves (tiger-skin?  mop caps? emerald necklace? certainly madame!). That's probably a good thing, since my energy levels are lower these days!

 It's incredibly validating and rewarding to run a game and I've been on Cloud Nine! It almost makes up for the prior stress 😆😆😆

"It's pronounced Batshit"

Geek Chic

Isn't this the best sweatshirt EVER?!

I've actually been on a bit of a T-shirt buying frenzy recently:

There's a certain theme...

I am confidently told that the Japanese reads "My Neighbour Cthulhu."

 Now you really can go crazy staring at my boobs 😂😂😂

"HAVE YOU SEEN THE YELLOW SIGN?"

Game on!

I've been a bit quiet on the writing front for the last six months for various reasons. First there was the house-move (which took WAY more time and effort than I'd anticipated). Alongside that came a bunch of bad family stuff which had to be dealt with. But it's mostly done and dusted now. So am I ready to get back to writing smut?

No.

As of this week, my writing has taken a somewhat unexpected detour, as I have not one but TWO new projects to tackle, and neither of them are erotica! I will be writing a horror scenario for The Cthulhu Hack over the next month or so. And when I've done that I'm hopefully going to be involved in writing for a rebooted classic games system that's going to Kickstarter - more details when it's officially revealed and confirmed.

So I am going to be WAY busy! It'll be a big change from writing erotica and hopefully a chance to stretch my horror muscles.

Of course there are still things of smutty goodness gestating as we speak. I've got two stories coming to publication via Rose Caraway, one of which, Yan Tan Tethera Methera, is large and scary enough to blow just about anybody's mind - I'm very excited about that!

But forgive me, please, if I seem a little more distracted than usual. I'm going out into the dark and I may be some time...

Dicewriting: not a review

I'm a roleplaying geek. I like dice. A lot.

I even have a gothic dice-tower to roll them down!

And what's more, I was present at the conception of this book:

Zak Jane Kier

Last year at Smut in the City: Leeds, Zak Jane Keir gave us a writing exercise where we each generated the ideas for a story using random rolls of an ordinary dice/die (a d6, as we like to say in RPG circles). It was an extremely successful workshop, and she was begged by several of us to write a whole book.


And now she has - you can buy it on Amazon!

The premise of Dicewriting for Erotica and Erotic Romance is straightforward; simple story outlines are generated by the dicerolls, but it's entirely up to your fervid imagination as a writer what that story looks like. I'm always going to tend to fantasy/paranormal for example, but you might not want to touch that with a 10-foot pole...

See what I did there?

Your mileage of course may vary, but randomised elements have always been very effective story triggers for me - our writing group, The Deadliners, used them all the time - because I naturally tend to approach plots as jigsaw puzzles, and this is a creative puzzle-solving exercise. So I can guarantee Zak's fab little book is going to get a lot of use!

Now all I want is a hardcore geek version which will allow me to roll my d10s 😉

The Expanse

"My eyes are up here"

I just want to say how much I am LOVING the Netflix series The Expanse, which has got to be the best space-based SF since the Battlestar Galactica relaunch and is kicking Star Trek's flabby ass.

And I do not just love it for Amos as depicted above, who is sort of a pit-bull in human form (complete with puppy-dog eyes). It has whole diverse cast of sexy - ahem - I mean engaging characters, and a compelling three-strand plot that twines together to reveal an epic alien threat to all human life.

There's the self-described Shit Magnets who start off as miners in the asteroid belt, thoroughly oppressed by the ever-bickering governments of Earth and Mars, and stumble onto a nasty NASTY secret:

The Designated Adult, the Pitbull, the Wannabe Hero Who is a Bit of a Tosser, and the Nerdy One

There's the Earth-based political shenanigans in the UN;

She scares me more than the Alien

And the mystery thriller plot when a crooked cop tries to track down a missing woman:

By Season Two you also get some Martian Marine characters involved in their own related crisis:

Have you noticed that this SF future isn't predominantly White? Awesome! And they have a lot of fun with languages and accents.

The setting is gritty-to-grim, with every difficult decision having even more difficult consequences, and no shying away from the moral baggage.

THIS. THIS.

And yeah,  it's sexy, of course 💖 That never puts me off!

I can't wait for Series 3!

Red Monday

This is me in my old-school Scarlet Witch costume at Nine Worlds Geekfest this weekend.

Okay, I didn't do the boobs.

Someone asked me if I was supposed to be Cheetara from Thundercats :/

The scarlet letter

I'm off to Nine Worlds Geekfest!

Been making costume...

Guess who I'm going as?
 ;-)

Dr Coloury

Hahah! Look what I've got to use my Dr Sketchy prize pencils on!

Hmm ... may need more red. Lots more red...

Oh my inner goddess

 I understand there is some movie or other out this weekend?

No, I haven't read it.
And though I hear the movie is better than the book, I think I'll stick to ...

Wearing my other hat

What do you mean, it looks like my normal hat?

It seems like months ago, but it was only last week that I attended FantasyCon 2014 in York. It's a much more book-focused affair than Nine Worlds, and I was there under my Other Name as a writer of horror stories (though there were more erotica writers there than most people realise. We are everywhere, lurking, taking notes and waiting for the moment we rise up and conquer the world....)

My latest short appears in Terror Tales of Yorkshire (edited by Paul Finch) pictured above - and so hot off the presses they haven't even got the cover up on Amazon yet.

I had a terrific time (ho ho!) and met lots of friends old and new, even if the hotel bar prices gave me the shock of my goddamn life. There was a superb panel on the professional editing process which gave me a whole new appreciation for the role of my editors - they are not just there to make authors cry and correct spelling: they are advocates and cheerleaders for your books within the publishing company so you really need as happy a relationship with your editor as you can possibly manage.

Fran Terminiello - 15th Century rapier and buckler

There was also an exceptionally good panel on the realities of swordplay and how to make it more convincing in a novel - with demonstrations from the panelists who are all keen martial artists in various disciplines.

Juliet E McKenna - Aikido

Interestingly, the two panelists who expressed an opinion both said that if they were facing a swordsman in a life-or-death fantasy situation ... they'd rather be armed with a staff or spear!
(Personally I'd go for a crossbow.)

And here below is the only (albeit slim) evidence in the whole world that I am prepared to get down and boogie at a disco, given it is Eighties enough. I blame the Gollancz Free Bar. For everything.

Photo by Annie Catling. I'm just glad it wasn't taken during "Jump Around".

Geek moment

Nine Worlds pics

Shiny!

Yes, last weekend was the 2014 Nine Worlds Geekfest - at a rather posher hotel under the Heathrow flightpath than last year. And this time round there was OFFICIAL SMUT!

Yes, this year Kristina and Zak ran a workshop on Friday night: Geek Lust: how to write a sex scene. Due to tech problems (!) they ran out of time, but we had a rundown of the different erotica genres out there followed by a really interesting exercise where we took an excerpt from one erotic genre (steampunk say, or lesbian spanking), and then had to turn it into another genre (paranormal, M/M historical romance) by changing telling detail/attitudes/dialogue vocabulary. It was a reminder that erotica is much more than gymnastics with lube - World-building matters.


The workshop  was followed by a Smut Slam in which 10 of us read from our work - and no kidding, there was a really high standard of writing. I read a previously unheard and unseen excerpt from Cover Him with Darkness ... in which Azazel does something bad. Again.

Conventions of course have lots of games and discussion panels and filmshows and presentations. Some of my favourites were:

• Choose your own documentary - an interactive real life exploration of the old CYOA gaming books ... and what happened when the documentary-maker found pages from a child's diary in a second hand fantasy book. Funny, nostalgic and moving - catch it at the Edinburgh Festival!
• Jane Fae on Policing the Internet - a journalist's exploration of the (British) legal limits and pitfalls of putting edgy material online, and a call for a paradigm shift in the laws we make. The program highlight of the weekend for me! From my notes: Did you know that anything you write in e-space counts legally as "published" and therefore falls under the Obscene Publications Act? Yes, that includes private messages, e-mails and texts! Did you know that there are approx 2000 prosecutions p.a. under the Extreme Pornography Act - of which 90% are for depictions of acts with animals - which produce only about 70 convictions annually? Did you know there are a number of activities that are perfectly legal to DO in Britain - fisting for example- but if you take or own or download a photo they can put you in prison?
• Emma Byrne on the Neuroscience of Swearing. (It has among other things, a genuine analgesic effect.)

I met friendly SF writer Ian Watson and had a feel of his tentacular staff, *ahem*.  I met up with Anna Sky and Charlie Forrest and we recorded a podcast together :-) I'll let you know when it's released!

I hung out with Jareth the Goblin King:

And Martial Law:

And suffered police brutality at the hands of Judge Dredd:

Cosplay is fantastic fun! Next year I really need to get my act together and go as as something other than "smutwriter". In fact I - like so many - am feeling the call of Steampunk...

Because who can resist the lure of tiny robots eating knitted cupcakes?