Heroes and Butties

My Weekly Column is up on Jessewave’s Blog – come and discuss heroes and anti-heroes!!  (here’s the picture free version for those with bandwidth problems)

I just spent 12 hours in bed. I got hit with an ophthalmic migraine (I’m so pleased!! – I found out what the damn things were CALLED after all this time!) early afternoon and knew that it was going to get worse, so went to bed before it did. I obviously needed it as I slept for almost 12 hours solid and feel so much better today.  I have Optrex and dark glasses on and am girded up against the day.  I love perfect English summer days like today (24 degrees with a nice breeze) and refuse to let the hayfever get me down.  When I was a kid, incidentally, I had ponies and horses and my doctor advised that I give riding up. I said, with no hesitation that I’d rather “give up you” than riding.

Lili is happy because there is sun and is currently boiling her brains in a patch of sunlight.

Also I have bacon butties which is pretty much perfect, in my eyes.

I must finish the edit of Frost Fair today – I did most of it yesterday but still have another 80 pages to do.  I heard today that Samhain (despite the fact they were supposed to keep the books in play until the end of the contract) have pulled the books from just about everywhere, sigh – why am I not surprised… – but Amazon will probably still have enough copies until the relaunch in August.  However, I much recommend that you hang on and get the new spiffy cover.

I started to watch Twilight yesterday. Oh dear lord.  More on that later when I’ve seen it all. I’m afraid I could only watch it for a little while. Perhaps that what caused the migraine!!!

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UK Writers’ Conference – thoughts please?

One thing the UK has a dearth of, it's writers' conferences.  There are a few fantasy and sci-fi ones and the Historical Novel Society has one every couple of years but there's no general one, no romance (unless you are a member of the RNS) nor a GLBT one.  We have tonnes of "literary fairs" but they are invite only affairs where only celebrity authors are allowed and there are few locations where you can simply set up a table and pimp your books.  I recently inquired about the price of a stall at one of the large Gay Pride events and a single stall was £1000!!!

So, seeing as hall rental for a day would probably be a LOT less than that,  (I've found places which are £50 a day) and I'd ask everyone to bring their own tables, would there be any interest in doing an informal conference of some sort for 2010?  I feel that unless someone does one, it won't get done, and if we start small, then that's ok - it can only get bigger - and it would be great to at least connect with other writers, even if not many readers come.  Thinking inclusive at the moment too, not "just" m/m or "just" romance.

Depending on interest, there would be a few panels, and then socialising, and signing of books. Nothing huge - no fairy balls!

Feel free to pass this along and all thoughts welcome.

On Twilight.

( thoughts under the cut )

Snowshoes!

http://taylorbooks.livejournal.com/1151.html

one of the best and funniest posts I’ve read about “writing what you know” for a long time.