Conclave 2 Guest Appearance

I'm delighted to report that I will be a guest speaker at Conclave 2, this year's New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention (or 'Natcon'), which is being held in Auckland from Thursday 24 April to Sunday 27 April 2014. At the time of writing this is two weeks away.

I was initially invited as a 'Fan Guest of Honour', a position traditionally bestowed on a notable member of the local SF fan community. I was delighted to be asked, of course, but in subsequent discussions with the organiser it was clear that I had been invited so that I would talk about my professional work as a writer so it was mutually agreed that I should be 'upgraded' to Guest of Honour status, joining fellow guests Dave Freer and Lyn McConchie.

I'm not entirely sure the con will be like. The last time I attended one of these events was eleven years ago. I used to be a regular at SF conventions. My first was Conscience in 1989 and the last was Emoticon, in 2003. I've lost count of how many SF cons I attended during those fifteen years, but was a lot.

I have some very fond memories of these weekend-long social events. My favourite recollection is of striking up a conversation with a fellow con-goer from Auckland called Rochelle when we passed on a stairwell at a convention in Wellington. Just last month we celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary, so I have an SF convention to thank for bringing us together.

The closest I've come to experiencing a convention in recent years has perhaps been at the Armageddon expo that takes place several times a year in various places around New Zealand, but these are very different affairs. I'm always working on our Retrospace shop stand, so I encounter hundreds if not thousands of fans but very rarely get out from behind the stand to see any of the panels or other events. Armageddon expos are frantic, noisy, high-energy, media-driven events, quite unlike the more relaxed pace and social environment of the SF cons.

The main item for me at Conclave 2 will be my Guest of Honour speech on Friday, where I'll be talking about writing info text subtitle scripts for the Doctor Who DVDs and The Comic Strip Companion book.

Here's my schedule of appearances for the convention:

Thursday 24 April
7:00pm - Opening Ceremony

Friday 25 April
9:00am - Panel: The Mainstreaming of SF
3:00pm - Guest of Honour Speech
4:00pm - Panel: The Pasts and Futures of Doctor Who

Saturday 26 April
2:00pm - Panel: SF Series Seriously Sought
4:00pm - Panel: How Writers Do It!
7:30pm - Banquet and awards ceremony

Sunday 27 April
10:00am Guest of Honour Meet-Up
12:00noon Closing Ceremony

Details for Conclave 2 can be found here. Perhaps I'll see you there!

Armageddon It

Rochelle and I arrived home on Monday evening after four days in Wellington. We were in the capital city for Armageddon, a comic-con style event that takes place there once each year. Rochelle runs an online sci-fi collectibles store, Retrospace, and has a stand selling her wares at each Auckland and Wellington event.

This year was the third consecutive Wellington Armageddon we’d attended as exhibitors, and by far our most successful. The success is measured not just in terms of revenue earned and volume of stock sold, but also logistically as it was the easiest and most effortless experience we've had running a Retrospace stand at Armageddon.

In past years we loaded up our vehicle with as much stock as we could possibly cram in and drove from Auckland to Wellington. This had its drawbacks as it restricted on the amount of stock we had available to sell and also meant that by the time we arrived to set up and start selling we were already shattered from a ten-hour drive, and that's not even taking into consideration the return journey.

This year Rochelle loaded the stock into two large packing crates and booked a freight company to take them down. We enjoyed a short flight from Auckland to Wellington, arriving refreshed, and ready to set up at the TSB Arena, located on the city’s scenic waterfront.

The Retrospace stand, before the doors opened on the first day.

Unlike previous Armageddon events, which had quiet periods, at this year’s event we had a fairly constant crowd of customers clustered around our stand. I believe the attendance numbers for the show were significantly up on previous years as we were hearing reports that on the Saturday people were being refused entry for a time due to overcrowding issues, and there are mutterings about needing to perhaps move to a larger venue.

While working on the stand I chatted to a wide variety of people. Some were so enthusiastic that they came dressed as their favourite character (there were quite a few Matt Smith Doctors both male and female), while at the other end of the spectrum there were those who seemed just a bit overwhelmed by it all. Some came over to chat about Doctor Who, drawn by the large array of merchandise we had displayed on our stand. I was even recognised from my appearances on the Doctor Who DVDs and a television item about Rochelle and me that screened on Close Up some weeks earlier. It seems I have my own local fan following, of sorts.

There were some interesting conversations, most memorably a debate between several teenage girls over whether David Tennant or Matt Smith was better. I ventured that I thought Smith was a slightly better actor, and got agreement from one girl, whilst another piped up that she preferred Smith because his sonic was bigger than David’s. Size, apparently, is important.

Feeling slightly overwhelmed by the crowd...

The event had an array of guests, including Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor, Doctor Who), John Leeson (Voice of K9, Doctor Who), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck, Battlestar Galactica), and several others, but I didn’t get to see any of their talks. Even with the invaluable assistance of those helping us out on the stand (thank you so much, Chris, Wade and Kim), it was rarely possible to get away for any length of time. I expected a quiet period whilst Colin and John were talking on stage, but this never occurred and we continued to have people buying Doctor Who merchandise from us during that time.

I did however get to meet John Leeson, who is a really lovely man. We discovered over drinks on the Friday night that we share a few areas of common interest and experience. I was also chatted with John’s lovely wife Judy who told me all about her work as a production buyer on such films as The Hours, The Golden Compass, and Martin Scorese’s latest, Hugo Cabret. Given her impressive background in movies, I thought that Judy ought to have been a guest speaker at Armageddon herself, but she was having none of it.

His Master's Voice - John Leeson

I also got to meet a couple of the animation voice artist guests, namely the charming Paul Eiding, whom I introduced to drinking cider, and Michael Sinterniklaas, the voice of Dean in The Venture Bros, and who uncannily looks a little like his animated alter ego. Michael told me he’s been a Doctor Who fan for years, and seemed as impressed to learn that I worked on the DVDs as I was that he worked on one of my favourite animated series.

"Go Team Venture!" - myself and Michael Sinterniklaas

Roll on the next Armageddon, in Auckland in October!

Meeting One’s Heroes

Rochelle and I spent this last weekend in Wellington during which time we promoted Rochelle’s new company Retrospace at the Armageddon expo. Almost the entire weekend was spent selling merchandise and I found that this provided an opportunity to meet many fans that I wouldn’t have a talked to had I been at Armageddon as just another attendee. I was stunned at the number of young pre-teen and teenage girls who professed to be fans of the series and obviously knew all of the new series stories in great detail, proudly claiming to have watched "every episode of Doctor Who" (meaning of course everything from 2005 onwards) . These fans seemed to identify very much with David Tennant’s Doctor (rather than, say, Rose or Martha), and at least a couple of young female fans were dressed up as the Tenth Doctor.

One of the first people I met on the first day of the expo was a young man called Floyd. Upon sighting issues of TSV on the table, he asked me if I knew Paul Scoones. When I explained that I was he, Floyd almost exploded with delight, asking to shake my hand and have his photo taken with me. He’d read TSV since he was a boy, and really was genuinely was awed to meet me. I'm not recounting this incident in order to mock him. Although I felt undeserving of his accolades, at the same time I was also impressed that he had such respect and admiration for my work. I met many more TSV readers over the course of the weekend that had nothing but kind words to say about the magazine, but no one came close to this guy in terms of sheer unbridled enthusiasm.

Later in the weekend I got to take Floyd’s place and meet one of my own personal heroes, the Fifth Doctor himself, Peter Davison. Davison, along with Mark Strickson (who played Turlough) were two of a handful of star guests at the expo.

I had been asked by the organiser, Bill Geradts, to interview Peter and Mark in a panel on stage on both days of the expo. I arrived with a prepared list of questions covering aspects of the careers of both men, only to learn from Bill that the two actors had decided that they didn't want to be interviewed and instead preferred to take questions from the audience. I was a bit deflated at this having gone to some effort and also told a number of people that I'd be conducting the interviews, but at the same time I was also a little relieved. I’d been concerned about how the interview would be received by both the actors and the audience alike. It also freed me up to spend more time on the Retrospace sales table where it rapidly became clear that Rochelle would be swamped with customers for most of the weekend.

Photo: Peter Davison (L) and Mark Strickson (R) on stage at Armageddon.

I needed to present Peter Davison with a copy of the latest TSV issue, which contained an interview that Adam McGechan had conducted with him many months earlier. I waited around until the autograph queue had slowed to a trickle, and then joined the end of the line. The woman immediately ahead of me had a large stack of photos for Peter to sign, and I could see that although he was still being pleasant to her, that he’d really rather be doing something else.

I nipped past the woman and instead struck up a conversation with Mark Strickson, who was sitting next to Peter. I’d interviewed Mark almost twenty years earlier at an Auckland convention, and told him this. Mark understandably didn’t recall our earlier meeting, but it broke the ice and I told him that I was writing information subtitles for the BBC Doctor Who DVDs, and we compared notes on a couple of specific incidents from his stories that I’d been researching.

Peter Davison had up until this point looked to me understandably rather weary at having signed so many autographs, but as he listened in on our conversation his face lit up with a broad smile and he began talking to me, offering his own thoughts on the stories we were discussing. He asked about which titles I was working on and the three of us discussed the upcoming releases. (I won’t go into specifics as all of the titles I’m doing have yet to be announced on the schedules.)

Having gained Peter’s undivided attention, I then got to talking with him about his other roles and I told him about my great appreciation for another of his series, A Very Peculiar Practice. We shared our mutual hope that the second series would one day come out on DVD (Peter felt that the fact that it was made by BBC Birmingham had effectively shut it out of the schedules). He seemed delighted at my suggestion that At Home with the Braithwaites was his opportunity to play a raving unhinged character after having been perhaps the only truly sane one in Peculiar Practice.

I presented Peter with TSV 76, and he seemed genuinely touched that I’d gone to the trouble of handing it to him in person. We shook hands and he thanked me very much for talking to him. I think he was relieved that I’d talked to him as a fellow professional, our common ground being that we both worked on the BBC Doctor Who DVDs, and that I hadn’t asked for a photo or an autograph like so many hundreds of fans had done over the weekend.

I came away from that meeting feeling elated at having met a childhood hero. Peter Davison had been my Doctor when I was a teenage fan, and for nostalgic reasons remains a firm personal favourite amongst all of the actors to have played the role.

As I'm sure Floyd would agree, it can be a thrilling experience to meet one’s heroes.