Loncon3 homework

Recent SF-community strife looks to be settling again, so hopefully everyone attending Loncon3 later in the year can start to look forward to it. (In the meantime, remember to read all Internet content in the style of Adam Buxton’s BUG. Much funnier, and far less enraging.)

My first-and-only convention to date was the World SFF conference in Brighton last year, which highlighted a gaping hole in my knowledge of the genre. (I sometimes sort-of knew what people were talking about. Although, thinking about it, I get that for pretty much everything, not just SF...)

I plan to read some of the bazillion things that I Should Have Read between now and August, but this is an exercise I’ve done before.

Then, things went just-about-OK, but there were plenty of classics that I found myself shrugging at, bored by, or thought were just plain bad.

Problem is, I find myself short on patience these days, but still find it tough to stop reading a book I’m not getting on with. Reading through gritted teeth (erk) is not fun. The last to suffer this fate was Wolf Hall, which I loved until about half-way, when all my reading momentum seemed to vanish and I had no real desire to continue. (I think the not-my-cup-of-tea nature of the topic finally caught up with me.)

Books I love, I’ll read in two days. Books I hate, I’ll persevere with for weeks, until the tears set in.

Horrible truth of reading, that I spend most of my life reading books I don’t even like.

It doesn’t help that I’m a slow reader. At the World SFF con, one panel member spoke about how long a typical book might take people to read, and gave the upper bound at around six hours. I looked around the room hoping for raised eyebrows – my own rate would probably make it at least twice that.

This effectively makes novels twice as long, so I need to focus on my main preferences and hunt for the Ten Most Readable Great SF/Horror Novels Ever.

Suggestions welcome. Yes, even from you, Google Web Crawler.

Offence is good

He’s a great big kid without an ounce of tact, he’s overpaid, and he’s married to the second-coolest woman in the universe. He’s also had the outrage of the Internet poured over his head.

Why Jonathan Ross should give zero shit about the SF community’s self-harm.

 

Wow, it’s been a busy day in British SF fandom.

Of course, to most of the world that’s means as much as a discussion on what font to use when writing about, say, milk, but please. Other things have been happening in the world besides Syria and Ukraine.

Anyway, the story is short: the Hugos (SF fan-voted awards nobody outside SF has heard of) were going to be presented by Jonathan Ross (British chat-show host and general geek celeb).  One of the committee resigned in protest citing Ross’s prior hosting controversies. The resignation was entirely heartfelt. Supportive Twitter outrage followed. Ross stood aside. Twitter counter-outrage followed.

It was slightly creepy to watch, at first, as Ross was depicted by some as a broadly unacceptable misogynist and hater of minorities, then abused by people who had never even heard of him. Whatever your feelings of Ross’s talents, he’s a genre champion with wide (British) recognition. The (let’s face it) entirely obscure Hugos - and indeed the fairly obscure SF genre - could have done with the press.

Part of the problem was the perceived chance of Ross causing offence.

Now in any community of reasonable folk, there’s a group that is morbidly averse to causing offence. With SF fandom currently embroiled in regular batches of soul-searching disarray, that group seems to have become the loudest. Those in the middle seem to feel the pressure to keep schtum, lest they be accused of a heinous whateverism and lumped in with the loud-as-always whateverists.

Yet offence can be good. Offence can be healthy. Say something funny, and get the audience to agree: wasn’t that a little close to the bone? Wasn’t that too much?

It’s not easy. It’ll likely go a bit wrong. Even if it’s done well there’ll be a degree of apoplexy out there, amplified beyond measure in the destructive way the Internet does so well.

But if you remove all chance of offence, become so timid that any potential for it is murdered at birth? That, I would suggest, is actively bad, actively unhealthy.

It’s also - to the rest of the world - self-righteous, po-faced, and hilarious. This may not be the best face for any community to present.

Irony looms large in this story. A genre champion with huge media recognition and a massive Twitter following has been hounded out by a minority mob preaching liberal values while lobbing invention and misrepresentation. (The initial post that started the ball rolling based its damnation of Ross on him being excessively sweary in a previous hosting role, and on a Daily Mail (!) collection of prior controversies that included his observation that not enough black people were presenters on the BBC. Damning stuff!)

It’s broadly a failure of sense. No sense of proportion, and no sense of humour.

And with Ross kicked off in such a dramatic fashion, there may well be media interest. It’s a great story, after all! Maybe in a roundabout and negative way, the Hugos will get some of that much-needed press.

So, whoever gets the gig in the end, please. Please.

Offend. Wittily, affectionately, mercilessly, offend. The genre community is in dire need of it.

 

 

Origins

With the paperback of The Reviver being released on Thursday, it’s a good time to look back at how the book came about.

There are plenty of people who deserve my thanks, but the two most directly responsible for the birth of the book are bestselling British crime author Peter James, and American master of Gothic, Edgar Allan Poe.

It was back in 2004 that I joined a writing course run by Peter James, and the homework Peter gave us at the end of the first lesson was this: write the first page of a scary novel, introducing your protagonist and a murder weapon.

He’d spent much of that first lesson drilling into us the importance of grabbing your reader on page one, so I knew I needed something different. We were going to be reading our work out to the rest of the class, something I hadn’t had to do since I was at school, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I had a week to get it done, but it wasn’t going to be easy. By ‘first page’, Peter meant the first 250 words – the first page of a manuscript that a prospective agent or publisher would read. And, unless you got their attention, it could well be all that they would read.

It’s a great writing exercise, because 250 words is a lot shorter than you might think – by the time you’ve read to the end of this sentence, you’ve already read over 250 words in this blog.

Days passed, and I’d come up with nothing. The idea finally came when a friend showed me Wikipedia’s entries for specific dates, letting you see who you share a birthday with. That’s where Edgar Allan Poe came in: we were both born on January 19^th. The thought of Poe brought back two of his most memorable tales: Murders in the Rue Morgue, widely considered to be the first modern detective story, and The Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar, in which a man hypnotises a terminally-ill friend who then continues to speak after dying.

The image of the detective in the first story talking to the corpse from the second flashed into my head, and I had my opening! When I came to read it out, the response was fantastic.

Over the rest of the course, that one page became the first chapter. The reaction and encouragement I got from Peter spurred me on: to continue with the story, complete a novel, then hone it until the time came to send it to an agent.

It took a while, but it finally happened.

Now the paperback is coming out, appropriately enough, in the same week as Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday.

And if you want to read that first page? It’s there in the Amazon preview, and it’s hardly changed since I first wrote it.

2013

The end of a big year, one that saw my first published novel, and me going full-time as a writer.

The UK paperback edition is ready to go:

With the new cover and a tweak to the title, it’s going for more of a crime look. Out 16th January, the same week as Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday. It also includes a short story that was previously only available with the ebook version, called ‘The Death of Never Geary Will Be Televised’. (Which does not, be assured, feature the death of Never Geary.)

Remember, if you’ve read it and loved it, tell a billion other people! Or thereabouts.


Busy year ahead. I’m currently finishing off book 2, then I’ll be getting stuck in to the novelisation of French TV hit The Returned before rounding off the Reviver trilogy with – yes! – book 3.


So at this point of reflection, do I have any plans to change my ways in the coming year?

Well, I could vow to use Twitter and my blog more – AGAIN – but we both know where that ends up. I’ll vow to at least try and think about it. Take it, it’s the best you get.

I certainly vow to read more than I managed last year. I may have actually got the hang of stopping reading books I’m not getting along with. I still feel bad about doing it, but I finally realised that books I love I can read in two days, while books I don’t take weeks, meaning the majority of my reading life has been spent on books that just aren't for me.

That’s something I plan to change.

Finally, I vow to fit in plenty of messing about with stuff that is great fun and in no way helps to get the writing done. It always helps to commit to something you know will happen anyway.

Have a great year!

Childhood dreams

When I was a kid, I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to write novels or write games.

Neither was likely, I thought, and by the time I was in my twenties I was pretty damn sure I didn’t have what it took to do either. Writing prose, I discovered, was tough, and I didn’t have the discipline. Meanwhile, the games industry only had room for the supremely talented, the ones who lived and breathed coding.

By the time I hit thirty, though, games were big, and the studios had grown. A coder no longer needed to be an obsessive genius, the studios needed us ordinary folk too. I thought: what the hell. Why not give it a try?

Half a dozen interviews later, I had a job at The Creative Assembly, a studio that had just released Shogun: Total War. I would stay there for the next thirteen years, and I loved it.

I worked on Rome: Total War, and the BBC and History channel programme Time Commanders; Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2, and Rome 2 followed. I was lucky enough to be one of those who picked up a BAFTA, representing the whole team, for Shogun 2.

There was something else, though. Landing that job, and fulfilling a childhood dream, had made me try my hand at writing again. It was in 2004, just after the launch of the original Rome: Total War, that I started writing Reviver. It took me a while, but in June 2013, it was published, and I had a further two novels in the series to write. Thing is, working in the games industry isn’t easy. It’s hard work, and it needs dedication. At times, it takes every piece of spare time, and every drop of energy you have. It was nine years from starting on Reviver to publication, and suddenly I had to finish a book in a year.

Then, last October, Legendary Pictures bought the movie rights to the novel, and things changed. I handed in my notice, with the longest notice period they’d ever had: I’d see Rome 2 through to release, and then I would go full time as a writer.

It was all a bit of a whirlwind, of course. The ‘every piece of spare time and every drop of energy’ rule had come into play for Rome 2, and as a result Reviver Book 2 was running late, but then, suddenly, it was time. My last day was Friday 13^th, exactly thirteen years after I’d joined. No omens there!

I bade a fond farewell to my colleagues, and wished them the best of luck with all future projects. As a leaving gift, I got a giant bag of jelly babies and a bottle of JD the size of my head.

I wasn’t a game developer any more, but one childhood dream had been replaced with another: I was a full-time writer.

And I had a bottle of JD the SIZE OF MY HEAD.

This may not have been a childhood dream, but... maybe it should have been? There can be no downside to that one.

Review update!

First, to those asking for updates on progress with Legendary's REVIVER movie, the script is currently being written. Patience! The folk at Legendary are a little busy with Man of Steel, Pacific Rim and Godzilla at the moment.

Second, I've not posted up any review links since launch day, so I thought it was about time to round a few up...


www.impactonline.co/reviews/1346-the-impact-review-reviver

"gripping and unique... Reviver is one hell of a fantastic ride, an amazing first novel. I’ll be keeping my eye on Seth Patrick; he’s bound to rise high in the genre."


www.guardian.co.uk

"a skilfully plotted and compulsively readable supernatural thriller"

 
www.lep.co.uk/what-s-on/reviews/books

"From its arresting first sentence through an opening chapter that is so irresistibly and hair-raisingly seductive and into a story bristling with originality and descriptive excellence, this is truly a book to savour.

...melds crime and the paranormal in a cracking, page-turning thriller.

An impressive, intelligent and exciting debut."

 

readerdad.co.uk/2013/07/12/reviver-by-seth-patrick/

"Crackling pace, believable science and characters worth spending some time with make Seth Patrick’s debut a must-read for fans of horror, crime, science fiction, noir.

Without doubt, one of my favourite books of the year from an author whose novels are sure to become a regular feature on my bookshelves. You can’t afford to miss it."


　
zombiehamster.com/reviews/books/reviver-seth-patrick-2/

"walks the line between criminology thriller and supernatural fantasy exceptionally well"


　
 www.milorambles.com/2013/06/09/reviver-by-seth-patrick-book-review/

"Impressive, intelligent and well crafted.

If you’re a fan of the supernatural, horror or the crime thriller genre then I think you’ll love this book. For some reason I couldn’t get Michael Koryta out of my head when reading Reviver, it’s that good!

Dark, accomplished, exceptional and rare."

Total War: Rome 2 Takeover

REVIVER author by night, games developer by day, that's me.  And given that I'm in the final few weeks of getting Reviver Book Two finished while also in the final few weeks of development on Creative Assembly's latest game, I'm VERY BUSY.  More coffee!

That new game is the massive (in every way!) Total War: Rome 2.

I've come full circle: nearly thirteen years ago, when I first got a job with Creative Assembly, it was to work on the original Rome game.

The world's gaming media were there for the Rome 2 preview event that was held earlier this month in Cinecitta Film Studios in Rome.  Within a huge marquee in the middle of the vast set of HBO's Rome, journalists were given the first taste of the new game, playing through the Prologue Campaign.

I was very lucky to be one of the developers attending, ready to give help when needed, and I thought I'd share some pictures of the event to whet your appetite. No spoilers, mind you - you'll have to wait until the likes of Gamespot, IGN and Eurogamer give their take on what they saw.

It was a great day. Incredibly hot, and our nerves were going as the temperature in the marquee soared, but even though some of the PCs got hot enough to melt lead, we had surprisingly few failures, thanks to the top notch IT support we'd brought with us.  All those sacrificial offerings had paid off!

Arriving in Italy, we soon learned that Sega (who own Creative Assembly) also happens to be an Italian slang word for, er, masturbation. A quick change of T-shirt was in order for some, who'd been wandering through the airport and the hotel lobby, oblivious that they were wearing shirts with WANK on 'em. Luckily I'd been wearing my REVIVER shirt. Shameless self-promotion never did anyone any harm...

Here I am, just to prove I was actually there:



Sprawling back streets with genuine Roman graffiti...



Note the authentic ancient Roman fire extinguisher, the Romans being famous for their insistence on Health and Safety. You can never be too careful when there are pigs around...

 

 



The game awaits...

 

 

The troops assemble outside ready to drill. "Ctrl-A attack, lads!"

 

Night falls, and the traditional Ancient Pink Lighting kicks in. Ale from all conquered lands is summoned!

Total War Devs, ogling genuine old stuff in the actual real world. WHAT! GET BACK TO HORSHAM AND WORK!

The Colosseum part of the set, very impressive. Hang on...

Pantheon-like temple on set... and how everything looks from inside, when you fall through what you thought was stone.

The actual Pantheon. Bigger, and more made-of-actual-stone.

 

Well, that's it for my Preview of the, um, Total War: Rome 2 Preview. I have to go and work on my book, now. More coffee!