On Fantasycon 2011

I was right to look forward to Fantasycon. Well, except in the financial sense, because boy, you don't want to go there if your TBR pile is too big and you don't want to buy another book, ever. Everybody I met, I wanted to go and and buy their books afterwards. I'll never have time to write again.

It's a very strange thing to be in a hotel around people that make you want to squee like a fangirl and realise that they are normal people. Well, on the cool end of normal, actually. SFF writers know how to have a good time.

Brighton was bizarre and wonderful. I can't think of anywhere else you would walk past a group of drunken stormtroopers on the way to the restaurant. Darth Vader was out for the count on the pavement. It is a place where you can expect to see guys heading for clubs wearing pink furry boot covers and stockings. Better than television.

And the best, absolutely the best thing, for me, was that the people I was around were proud to be SFF authors. No genre shame here, no 'I wrote a book, but it's just fantasy, a bit embarrassing really but it pays the bills'. They write amazing, imaginative books with the brakes off. They made me stand a little bit taller just by association. A few days before I was ready to quit, but I came back with renewed motivation to revise my manuscript and start querying. No small part of that was down to Mhairi Simpson, who is one of the nicest people I've met and tolerated my efforts to twist her YA shapeshifter romance into furry erotica (It's all about the CLAWS, baby).

I am so going back next year.