Drafting stats and growing plants

Saturday saw me getting up at 5.00 am and leaving the house around 6.00 when wallabok and I drove down to Bristol for the day to attend an event that makes increasingly less sense the more it is written about. That doesn’t mean that I shan’t do it again next year, rather, it just looks like a daft thing to do.

We play in an online gridiron league, you see. I played in an early iteration of the game in the late 80s and early 90s when it was handled by snail mail (I Played a lot of PBMs back then. Do any still exist?). After it folded, I thought no more about it for the next 12 years or so and then, suddenly there was notification in the post that it had been resurrected as an online game and with many of the same players. So here I am, 6 years later again about to embark upon the 13th season of Gridiron (we play 2 seasons a year).

I have to say that it is an odd way of having an annual social event – of course, a lot of the attendees stay in the hotel for 2 nights, but that seems rather expensive to me, so I just travel down to Bristol for the day. That’s rather awkward by public transport but since we have moved to Ilford, I have been lucky enough to cadge a lift there and back, so we can be present while we pick our random set of statistics for the next 6 months. It’s good to meet people and to chat, but it does seem an odd thing to do even to me.

I was knackered by the time we got back to Ilford at about 19.10 in the evening. I believe I dozed in the car for a half hour or so. I wasn’t conscious of doing so (if that makes any sense), but we were listening to the football on the radio and I recall listening to the kick off and then the score was 0-3 with about 15 minutes to half time. Mulder would have approved and stopped to spray paint an X on the road. Or not; it was a motorway after all.

Yesterday saw me have a lie in followed by a planning session with Furtle, whereby we made rudimentary attempts with scribbled maps to work out what we are going to plant in the garden, where we are going to plant it and when, so that we can try and create a garden in 2012 where there is always something growing and where new plants start sprouting as others come to the end of their cycle. After that we went out and planted stuff and pulled weeds and failed plants. Over the next few weeks we will be doing rather more as autumn progresses. The focus now will be to find something that gives a bit of greenery and/or other colour over the winter.

I suppose I should do some work, now. Boo Hiss.

Vicarious exhaustion

I have just read –and spent a long time doing it – Paul Cornell’s blog about his experience at this year’s Worldcon in Reno, Nevada. If ever I was tempted to go, I think he’s talked me out of it. It really doesn’t look like my cup of tea in the slightest. Admittedly as a delegate and member of many, many panels, Cornell had his time sliced thinly, but cripes, I feel knackered just having read the write up.

The nearest I’ve come to anything like that was back in the 90s when for 8 years I went to the annual Spiel event in Essen, which I believe is (or was) the world’s biggest games convention. It was certainly Europe’s biggest. Spending four days a year there was generally more than enough for me and I only went as a punter who happened to volunteer to help with a stall for SFC Press because my friends appreciated the help (I think) and I appreciated having a base to operate from and return to when wandering around the place got too much. I didn’t have to deal with panels or any of that nonsense.

I have one friend who makes a living from writing comics and he works damned hard at it. Through him, I am peripherally acquainted with a few other people in the industry. These conventions are an integral part of what they do, because quite apart from working like a slave all the time getting the stuff down on paper, the written and drawn product is only part of it. As a writer (and presumably, too, as an artist), you are part product, too. So you have to sell yourself in order to sell your work. You may write the best things since Shakespeare, or draw the best pictures since Da Vinci, but if you can’t make people notice you, well, you’re doomed.

I can’t tell from his stream-of-conscious blog entry whether on balance Paul Cornell enjoyed himself or not at Worldcon. I suspect that when he wrote it he wasn’t sure, either. But man, he was busy. I think I should have gone postal through mental and physical fatigue if I’d been in his place.

If nothing else, the write up has given me a closer view of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of geeky fandom, particularly when it’s in a concentrated form, and confirmed my healthy respect for the people who have to do it for a living.