I’m organising the second Writing Industries Conference (having organised the first one in 2008). A chance to meet agents and editors and get information from the horses mouth about the writing industries. If you are in the East Midlands region or happy to travel a little way, then take advantage of our early bird ticket offer whilst you can. See you there!

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Writing Industries Conference 2010
Saturday 6th March 2010, Loughborough University
A Literature Network, Writing East Midlands
and Loughborough University project.
http://writingindustries.com
Twitter #wic2010

The second Writing Industries Conference will be held on Saturday 6th March at Loughborough University. The conference will bring together writers from across the East Midlands with professionals from the writing industries to share knowledge, develop skills and forge new contacts. 200 writers from the region will have the opportunity to hear from and meet with professionals from the writing industries in a variety of settings:

• Agents and editors in one-to-one sessions with selected writers, giving advice and support in their area of expertise.

• Panel discussions exploring specific areas of writing, from breaking into commercial publishing to working in the community.

• Writing industries fair featuring stalls from local publishers, funders and other organisations involved with the writing industries.

• And of course there will be plenty of opportunity to meet and talk with other writers over a coffee.

The full programme including details of how to apply for agent one-to-ones will be announced soon.

EARLY BIRD TICKET OFFER
The first Writing Industries Conference sold out soon after tickets went on sale. This year we are have increased the number of tickets available and are offering a limited number at the Early Bird Price of £34 (Full Price is £42). Limited availability.

Buy tickets online here.

If you have any questions regarding WIC 2010 or would like further information please contact:

Catherine Rogers
catherine@writingeastmidlands.co.uk

I spent most of this Sunday evening planning out a talk I’m giving tomorrow on the subject of The Entrepreneurial Writer. Part of this talk could be called ‘How to get ahead in the cut throat egotistical world game of being a writer’, but mostly I am talking about how writers are important to communities, and how the online world is changing how communities work and how writers contribute to them (for the better in my thinking)

So it was timely to run into Clarkesworld magazine’s call for Citizens. You might call this a creative and original way to raise funds, which of course it is. But it is also an acknowledgement of the role that a online magazine like Clarkesworld plays in forming and maintaining a community of people. Like any community, Citizenship comes with both rights and responsibilities, and those who take on the later get more of the former. I could imagine Citizenship becoming the defacto method of generating support for many online communities.

Writers do not live in sync with the rest of humanity. Normal people have free time. Writers have time when they should be writing. This weekend I have been trying to combine the two. I’ve been on a tour of the new cultural institutions around my city, including the Fabrika independent arts centre, Phoenix Square cinema and The Curve theatre. I’ve drank a cup of tea at each, met three friends randomly I had not seen for some time, and written about a thousand words on the second draft on The Hundredth Master of Ninja Assassin. Both productive and relaxing…the only down side is that my hands are now shaking from caffeine overdose.

Now work with me here. I know its a leap, but I’m starting to think that the hit television show Madmen is a work of science fiction.

I’ve been geeking out over Madmen season two for the last fortnight. And when I say geeking out, I mean obsessing. Having watched season one three times (friends kept wanting to see it, so I had to rewatch it with them) I decided it was time to move on to the second season. Partly its the soap opera aspect of the show, once you get me hooked on the life stories of a good ensemble of characters, I’m likely to keep coming back for more and more. But Madmen goes a long, long way beyond the simplistic writing of most soap operas, and even exceeds the spate of recent excellent TV series including The Sopranos and The Wire. In an era when the TV series has become our strongest storytelling vehicle, Madmen is telling the best stories of all.

It’s on the thematic level that Madmen really triumphs. Through the lens of the advertising industry, Madmen is able to look at individual facets of our modern, ever more materialist society. Each character in the show is in someway complicit in the construction of the amoral society that they are also a victim of. From the lead male Don Draper who harnesses the pain of losing love to sell products even while his own family is slipping from his grasp, to junior copywriter Betty Olsen who understands every sin she is committing even whilst she is committing them. As a beat poet charcater says to draper in season one, the characters in Madmen ‘are making the lie’, and then they have to live in it.

And its because of its critique of materialist culture that Madmen is creeping over some line in my thinking to qualify as science fiction. Not in the rockets and rayguns way of course. No, Madmen is a much more interesting kind of SF than that. Imagine if Philip K Dick had been given free reign to write a television show, with the provision that it had to be entirely realist and mainstream. And imagine that J G Ballard and Harlan Ellison were asked in to consult. They might have come up with something not dissimilar from Madmen. There is a thread of paranoia and hyper-realism threaded through the show, as though the materialist reality the characters are inhabiting is actually some artificial projection a la The Truman Show or a PKD novel like Ubik. In season 2 the show introduces an overt discussion of god and morality, which culminates in the heavy symbolism of catholicism and the tarot playing out to the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis, as though some greater power is trying to commune with the characters. Its tempting to think of madmen as the most subversive kind of science fiction, one that works by treating reality itself as the biggest fiction we have ever created.

I’m saving Madmen season 3 for a rainy day, so now what the hell do I watch?

Today was the official public opening of Phoenix Square, Leicester’s new independent cinema and digital media centre. As a mobile worker my main demand of any new cultural centre in my city of residence is that it provide a decent place for me to sit and answer emails, and I’m happy to say that Phoenix Square succeeds nicely in this regard (or will do on days when the bar hasn’t been turned into an early 90’s rave). I’m certainly going to love having two well equipped cinema screens showing the kind of movies that don’t make into the multiplex. And the digital art programme seems genuinely interesting, to judge by tasters on offer at launch (except for the 90’s rave DJ’s, who can and must be banned from the building).

If there is a major negative it is that the area around Phoenix Square is truly dismal, but then one aim of the project is to regenerate that quarter of the city, so that is too be expected. Phoenix Square is a tremendous gift to the city, especially after the disappointing failure of the Curve theatre to engage the local community in any meaningful way (lets hope they put that right soon). I will certainly be a frequent visitor.

You should never judge a book by its cover, but should you judge a story by its title? If the recent success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is anything to go by, then for many readers today the answer is yes. Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling mash-up of Jane Austen and George A Romero became one of the most pre-ordered titles this side of The Lost Symbol, based solely on a zeitgeist-surfing title. And if those readers came to the story expecting an obvious joke stretched thin over 316 pages too many, they were not disappointed.

Read more on The Guardian book blog

Today I observed a pattern in my writing. I have been working on a story that goes by the working title of Clocks for some months now. It is one of those stories that emerges by accumulation. Every so often I add another paragraph, or a sentence, or even just a word. It is now 1800 words long, and into that small linguistic space I have condensed three point-of-view characters, at least a dozen scenes (some only a few words long) and enough angst to power a small work of literary fiction. Which gives me a choice. I can leave this dense narrative nugget as it is, or I can treat it like a seed from which, with care and attention,  might grow a real story. In the case of Clocks, I think I’ll take the second option. But I have realised that I produce these Story McNuggets quite frequently. I know at least one other writer who seems to work this way, but I’m wondering if there are any more of you out there?

Things that I like…

The Guardian interview Neil Gaiman about the experience of being buried alive under a huge pile of awards.

Electric Velocipede announce recent fiction purchases including me and my two Clarion friends Keffy R. M. Kehrli and Monica Byrne.

Sarah Crown over at The Guardian book blog today asks readers for their top books of the noughties. Unsurprisingly my picks are quite speculative in nature, and there are so many that I eventually gave up trying to list them all. It was also complicated by the fact that many of my favourite books read this decade were not published this decade. So here goes my top 10…the first 9 in no particular order (and not all SF!).

• Perdido Street Station by China Mieville – a book with many great parts and more than a few awful ones, but done with such ambition that it has to be applauded.
• Look to Windward by Iain M Banks – the last of the real Culture novels and for my money Bank’s best, especially if read with Consider Phlebas.
• Pattern Recognition by William Gibson – this book had an incredibly profound effect on me. Probably the only book I’ve read that captured the detached nature of being twenty something in the twenty first century.
• Hey Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland – a read this in a night then had to take a sickie from work because I spent all day crying. Darn you Douglas Coupland.
• Light by M. John Harrison – this is the book I give people who don’t think SF can be literary. Or just when I want to deeply, deeply disturb them.
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link – if you don’t like Kelly Link then I question your membership of the human race. So there!
• Shriek by Jeff Vandermeer – I just love this.
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang – if you don’t like Ted Chiang I question your status as a sentient entity of any kind.
• Micah by Laurel K Hamilton – for personal reasons this will always be in my Top 10 Books of All Time.

I’ve probably left many of my favourites out and will have to revise the list tomorrow when I remember them. And my Number 1? Well it probably comes as little surprise that Neil Gaiman snags that spot for American Gods. I’ve read it three times, and listened to the audiobook twice, so what else was it going to be? It also wins in terms of influence. Contemporary fantasy would be a very different genre today without this book.

A couple of slightly interesting links…

The Everything is Nice blog link to my post on bookshops. I appreciate the detail they have gone to in their response, but don’t agree with their points.

Geoff Ryman edits an anthology of real science fiction, using real scientists and everything!

I will be giving a talk next Monday on the theme of The Entrepreneurial Writer as part of the New Ways With Writing series of talks organised by Writing School Leicester. Come along. The talk is about succesful writers are part of and contribute to many communities. I think it costs a few quid to get in.

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The Entrepreneurial Writer – Damien G. Walter
Leicester Adult Education College, Wellington Street
23rd November, 7pm
Building a career as a writer takes energy, determination and an entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of waiting to be recognised by editors and agents, many now famous writers got started by setting up their own projects, from spoken word nights to small press publishers. But what separates the projects that succeed from the thousands of such projects that fail every year? With so many writers competing to be heard, is it the writers who listen who ultimately succeed?