What I did on my holidays...

Happy birthday to sammywol

First here's a rec; ffutures is writing a BtVS/Harry Potter crossover, incorporating Season 8 and Deathly Hallows canon, and is doing an absolutely marvellous job of balancing the two ‘verses. Delightful stuff. Fourteen chapters completed so far. Dead Trouble.

Last weekend I was at the Writercon UK Midi-Meet. I had a great time. It was wonderful to meet in real life my friends from on-line; and people who I hadn’t known before turned out to be delightful also.

I did two presentations. My talk about fight scenes was flawed, I’m afraid; I hadn’t been feeling well in the week leading up to the trip and, as a result, I hadn’t done as much preparation as I should have done. My original intention had been to write the whole thing down in detail so that I could read it out prior to the event and time the result. curiouswombat said that she thought this would make it into a very dry lecture and persuaded me to abandon that plan. I shouldn’t have listened to her; working from only very sketchy notes meant that I had no idea of how long it would take, and it was too easy for me to be distracted. I spent far too long on one little side issue and omitted three points altogether. It seemed to go down reasonably well anyway but I know that it could have been better.

For the Drabble workshop I gave a very brief talk, showed a few examples of my points, and then filled in the rest of the time by forcing everyone to write drabbles.

I wrote a drabble beforehand to use as an illustration of one of my points. It didn’t quite come off, alas, because I had expected people to have heard of a particular small town in Norway and it turned out that most of the attendees hadn’t. The town in question is extremely tiny, with a population of only 352, but it is quite famous anyway – although not as famous as I’d thought – and people from all over the world go there and make a point of sending postcards home. Another strike against the drabble was that a quote from a recent blockbuster movie turned out not to be as widely known as I had been led to believe. I’m posting it here anyway; some of you might like it, although it’s definitely not one of my best.

It’s one of a strange sub-set of Buffyverse fics in which Buffy and Spike, sometimes accompanied by one or more other Scoobies, visit the Scandinavian Arctic. Despite the obscurity of the subject I’ve read at least 4 examples of the genre (although they may be the only 4 examples!). This is 100 words (of course), rating PG for mild swearing.

( Snow Patrol )

What I did on my holidays...

Happy birthday to sammywol

First here's a rec; ffutures is writing a BtVS/Harry Potter crossover, incorporating Season 8 and Deathly Hallows canon, and is doing an absolutely marvellous job of balancing the two ‘verses. Delightful stuff. Fourteen chapters completed so far. Dead Trouble.

Last weekend I was at the Writercon UK Midi-Meet. I had a great time. It was wonderful to meet in real life my friends from on-line; and people who I hadn’t known before turned out to be delightful also.

I did two presentations. My talk about fight scenes was flawed, I’m afraid; I hadn’t been feeling well in the week leading up to the trip and, as a result, I hadn’t done as much preparation as I should have done. My original intention had been to write the whole thing down in detail so that I could read it out prior to the event and time the result. curiouswombat said that she thought this would make it into a very dry lecture and persuaded me to abandon that plan. I shouldn’t have listened to her; working from only very sketchy notes meant that I had no idea of how long it would take, and it was too easy for me to be distracted. I spent far too long on one little side issue and omitted three points altogether. It seemed to go down reasonably well anyway but I know that it could have been better.

For the Drabble workshop I gave a very brief talk, showed a few examples of my points, and then filled in the rest of the time by forcing everyone to write drabbles.

I wrote a drabble beforehand to use as an illustration of one of my points. It didn’t quite come off, alas, because I had expected people to have heard of a particular small town in Norway and it turned out that most of the attendees hadn’t. The town in question is extremely tiny, with a population of only 352, but it is quite famous anyway – although not as famous as I’d thought – and people from all over the world go there and make a point of sending postcards home. Another strike against the drabble was that a quote from a recent blockbuster movie turned out not to be as widely known as I had been led to believe. I’m posting it here anyway; some of you might like it, although it’s definitely not one of my best.

It’s one of a strange sub-set of Buffyverse fics in which Buffy and Spike, sometimes accompanied by one or more other Scoobies, visit the Scandinavian Arctic. Despite the obscurity of the subject I’ve read at least 4 examples of the genre (although they may be the only 4 examples!). This is 100 words (of course), rating PG for mild swearing.

( Snow Patrol )