So I’m off to Follycon tomorrow with Angry Robot. It’s the 2018 edition of Eastercon – the finest annual SFF convention in the UK. This year we’re in Harrogate, 30 March – 2 April. It’s going to be pretty damn cool – we’ve an incredible thirteen authors in attendance, plus me and Penny Reeve. Lots of interesting people to meet and chat with, fascinating panels, and there is much drinking to be done. I’ll be selling Angry Robot books at a table in the Dealers Hall, so do come by for a spot of babble, and buy a book! I’d love to chat with people about SFF, the books you’re writing (we’re always looking for submissions), what beers are best and if anyone wants to chat about Lego and Transformers I’d be super-psyched…
Improv Comedy Workshops at Follycon
Even cooler, I’m finally contributing to a con programme! I’m running a pair of improvised comedy workshops, one for kids and one for adults. People might well be wondering what’s involved or why they should definitely participate.
I’ve been improvising for the best part of twenty years with MissImp: Improv Comedy Theatre Nottingham, teaching and performing around the UK in cool places like the Edinburgh Fringe, Nottingham Playhouse and The Glee Club, as well as splendid upstairs rooms at pubs. Improvisation is the art of making it up as you go along; it’s a collaborative theatrical form which relies on listening and paying attention to yourself and the people you’re on stage with. Improv is especially good for teaching us to find the next step, and is helpful to a lot of folk just for public speaking and general confidence.
We’ll be playing suitably daft games and exercises to get into the spirit of the thing, followed by scenework and more fancy stuff. It will be a bit silly, and it will be a lot of fun. Everyone can be funny, everyone can find stories to tell, and over the weekend I’ll help you to do it too. If you have any reservations, or questions, feel free to drop me a line by Twitter, Facebook or email (or just pin me in a corner at the con!)
Saturday 31 – 1:30pm
Improv Workshop for Children | Syndicate 334 | 1 hour 15 minutes
Sunday 1 April 12:00pm
Improv Workshop for Adults | Dance Studio | 1 hour 15 minutes
0 thoughts on “We Have A Problem With Books”
I’m with you on all counts.
This is an amazing post and one that I feel I could have written, minus the humor, readability, and references to A levels. Interestingly, we also have very similar reading tastes and opinions. While I haven’t read everything that you have, I agree with all you said about those I did read. The only place we diverge is that I live in an apartment and had I not decided long ago to get rid of some books when the sheer volume of them reached a critical mass I would surely be dead, crushed under a huge pile of heavy tomes. Although I do miss certain editions I once had, overall it has worked out pretty well for me.
A couple of notes. The Doctor Who book was likely Planet of the Spiders (a less inspired title I can not imagine) and while you’re right about the later Hitchhiker books, the sequence at Milliways in the 2nd book is my favorite part of the “trilogy.”
And lastly, I also still have my copy of the Hardy Boys Survival manual and once tried to make a survival kit like they describe in the book. However, I much prefer an earlier Hardy Boys spinoff, The Hardy Boys Detective Manual, in hardcover, which came out a few years earlier, and had so many great detecting tips. all sadly useless now in the internet era.
We clearly are the finest of people! I have recently declined the opportunity to take all the books I left at my Dad’s house when I left home. It was difficult, but partly from not having seen them for years I managed to get it down from 400 or so to a mere hundredish. I don’t know where I’m going to put them…
Ah yes, that sounds exactly as terrifying a title as I recall. I seem to remember that the cover of Planet of The Spiders was too horrible for me to even want to touch. You make a good point about Milliways. It’s possible I’m conflating several of the THGGTTG books into one.
Ah! I had no idea they did more manuals. I don’t know where I got the Survival Manual, but I suspect it was a marvellous second hand bookshop in Burton on Trent that had a charming Dachshund named Carl who would bark until stroked.