Tag Archives: EasterCon

[Vampire Month] A nail in the coffin

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

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Well, that is all for Vampire month for this year. Join us again next year for more excitement, adventure and creatures with big fangs and strange accents.

this is what they do look like

This is what they do look like

It has been an excellent collection of writers this month so please take the time to check out their posts and visit their blogs and so on. They have worked hard this month to entertain you (as have I, March is always more stressful for me) and so deserve some love in return. Give them all a huge round of applause.

This year our celebrations were only interrupted by Eastercon and there will be more on that very soon (once I finish processing the photos from the weekend…).

If you want to contribute to Vampire month (or indeed any aspects of this blog) feel free to get in touch – leave a comment, send an email or visit me on Facebook or twitter (links to the side of this blog post).

[EasterCon] Panel discussion

20 Sunday Mar 2016

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 Taking a brief break from Vampire Month while I talk to you about what I am doing over EasterCon…

The programme for the weekend is now live and can be seen and downloaded here:

https://www.mancunicon.org.uk/whats-on/programme/

On there you will see the following:cuv8kshxiaakb4a

True Love and Trophies (Panel) 19:00 (1 hour) in Room 6

Ruth Frances Long (m), Jacey Bedford, D.A. Lascelles, Justina Robson and Kate Soley Barton

The link between SF&F and Romance. Romance may be the ultimate crossover genre, found in everything from horror to hard SF, urban fantasy to space opera. But it can be a two-edged sword — nothing makes the audience happier than True Love Winning Against All Odds, but few things can make a reader wince as much as the Shoehorned In Love Story, The Girl As Reward, or the Completely Inappropriate Time To Declare One’s Feelings. Join our panel for a discussion about what SF and fantasy can learn from the romance genre, how speculative narratives are changed by the female gaze, and how to craft a believable love story in the most extraordinary settings.

So, yes… this is where you can definitely find me over the weekend, in room 6 at 7pm talking about romance. With some pretty awesome folks by the looks of it. The rest of the weekend I will be in and out, checking out other panels and generally meeting people. It is looking like it might be a  very interesting weekend.

If you are already a member of the conference then make sure you pop along to see me in my panel (and please take photos!¬ No one ever seems to get photos of me on panels and stuff).. If you are not a member of the conference already then you may be out of luck as the places are now all filled. Though you may get lucky…

If you see me around the conference make sure you say hi. I may be carrying a stock of Tea Society and Lurker badges…

I also plan to do a blog post of the weekend here, with my own photos. So check back here to see what I did and where I went and who I talked to…

Now, we can return to our scheduled programming… with our next Vampire Month victim lined up ready for Tuesday…

 

 

 

 

A time of calendars

01 Friday Jan 2016

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There was a slight hiccup with this post earlier, leading to it being prematurely posted… apologies for the confusion…

So, Christmas Dog (or Eddie as we call him) has finished obsessively paying attention to his pressies. There was one particular issue with a duck that had need for an urgent squeakectomy which our well trained canine surgeon was able to perform with the minimum of fluff on the floor…

Now that this clear emergency is over and done with (the patient is awaiting stitches in the dog toy infirmary) he has decided to come out and endorse a product for a worthy cause…

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Here he is pictured with the LARP Lyme Disease Action charity calendar… there are several reasons Eddie thinks you should buy this which I shall outline here:

  1. It is for charity. A charity supporting Lyme’s disease which, as you know is caused by Tick bites. Because my day job is a teacher of science (particularly biomedical science) I am honour bound to give you this link so you can learn more about it. But you don’t need to know more about it to do the right thing and help the charity.
  2. It has pictures of LARP in it. In case you are not aware, this is Live Action Roleplay (though there is some controversy over the use of ‘action’, some say it should be LRP, the rest are wrong). It involves dressing in costume and playing out interactive stories in fields. I have spoken about it before (in this article in fact). It is a very cool hobby and can produce some awesome photos of cool people doing cool things and looking awesome. This is your chance to own prints of some of those photos including lovely ones by Oli Facey and Tom Garnett, among others.
  3. I took one of the photos. The March photo to be precise. One of my more patriotic LRP photos. It involves a woman doing Science! In true Steampunk fashion. With men in top hats and military uniform around her. The woman in particular is Lucy, someone familiar to this blog… You can also see the wonderful Alex Campbell, who you may remember from Vampire Month as this month’s figure.
  4. I am in one of the photos. In fact I am Mr July. I am positioned on the same page as a nasty looking tick bite. In case you get confused, I am the one in the green overalls. The sexy one is the tick bite.
  5. If you come to the Mancuinion EasterCon, Manchester Author signing event in August, Odyssey LRP or any other event I am attending this year and if you can find me, and if no one else can help, maybe I might sign either of the photos for you (if you want, that is… or you can totally just say hi).
  6. Woof

There. 6 compelling reasons to buy this calendar. Of all of them number 6 is the most compelling, if you can understand the subtle nuances of dog language it really makes perfect sense. If you can’t understand those nuances, never mind. Just take my word for it, it is one hell of a convincing argument. Plus, isn’t the doggie cute?

You can buy your copy of the calendar here and see a preview of the photos in there below:

//www.lulu.com/viewer/embed/EmbeddablePreviewer.swf?version=20151027000530

Worth noting as a little aside… the copy of the calendar I have is actually a rare limited edition. It is one that credits me with two of the photos rather than just one. I noticed the error after ordering my copy and before the file was edited and reuploaded…

Linky Goodness and updates

16 Monday Nov 2015

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Two posts in as many days? Who can live at

lurkerbadge

I am in fact a lurker on my own site site…. That is indeed irony.

that speed? No, your eyes have not betrayed you, I have indeed upgraded my usual plodding post speed for this lightening fast barrage. Yesterday,I told them so about Osgood and now today you have this post with some general updates.

Though this one is your lot for now so enjoy it while you can. Posting this much is tiring and my webgoblins are exhausted…

 

So, over on LM David’s blog I have been spotlighted:

https://lmdavid54.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/spotlight-lurking-miscellany-a-collection-of-short-fiction-by-author-d-a-lascelles/

Click the link to go see what has been put there…. And maybe browse some more pages on there to see what other authors you might discover…

So, what have I been doing lately other than being spotlighted and telling the internet that I told them so about Osgood?

LurkingMiscellany-lgWell, not much really. Not doing Nano this year (good luck to all who are however) due to the phenomenal amount of work I have had to deal with recently. This is also why updates on this site have been few and far between. Hopefully that will change soon and I can get back to more regular updates.

I have been keeping up with my writing, however, and managed to make progress on a couple of projects. I am hoping to send Gods of the Deep to an editor soon and have a final publishing ready version not long after that. Maybe early 2016. I’ve also had some ideas to extend a short I started writing years ago (current working title Fortune and Troy but that will change) and allowed to languish into something more novel length. This will be a SF in the same universe as Dances with Drums and Tryptych of the Gates which can be found in Lurking Miscellany.

Following on from 2015 being the year of all the public appearances (Yorkshire Cosplay Con, MancsterCon, World Book Night) I am already booked on two events for next year. One is the Manchester Authors signing event in August and the other is the EasterCon known as Mancunicon. At the latter I have also made the foolish mistake of volunteering which means I am likely to also be on panels and may even be moderating panels and doing other stuff. So those of you who missed my rambling monologues (with visual aids and statistics) at MancsterCon can catch me at Mancunicon and see what only a select audience of dedicated geeks have seen so far…

So that is everything up to date… I’ll update again soon…