(Yes, I know that Twitter is excellent for doing this sort of thing as it happens.  While I am on Twitter now  – @FullyNocturnal, if you’re minded to seek me out there – I don’t have a smartphone and wasn’t updating for a while.  I even got a reminder email from Twitter pointing that fact out.)

Anyway.

A good smooth run into Sydney after an early departure on Friday afternoon.  Pretty decent roadburgers at Goulburn, and better-than-expected traffic in town.  I’d been bracing for a horror run with pre-long-weekend, pre-Grand-Final-weekend, school-holiday Friday night traffic but the worst that happened to us was finding we couldn’t turn right where the GPS wanted us to and had to take the next turn, whcih it’s hard to get uptight about.

When I signed the paperwork to check us in at the Marque D started joking about a “Do not murder your girlfriend on the premises” clause.  We turned that into a running gag that appeared to slightly disconcert the front desk staff.

An uphill march through the early evening pub’n’party crowd to the Town Hall and then past to the Games Workshop that was hosting Graham’s signing event.  Had to take on faith that he was somewhere on the other side of the big crowd at the far end of the shop, but had a good time meeting Phil Kelly, chatting to Anthony, Jacqui and Mal, as well as catching up with Jo, Craig and both of the Justins.

Graham eventually surfaced.  A march to Chinatown (or limp, as the case may be, Graham having hurt his foot).  We passed a Star Hotel on the way – anyone know if it’s the same one as from the Cold Chisel song?  (Rebuilt, presumably, since the song was about its demolition.)  Sat next to Alan Merrett at the monster Chinese dinner.  Attempts to open negotiations re Demiurg unsuccessful.  So far.

There were drinks afterward for the less jetlagged of us in the pub across the road from the hotel.  The conversation tended more to sport than gaming.  I explained Roller Derby scoring to the visitors, and Alan described the demographics of the Rugby codes and how this influenced which one got played in which Commonwealth country.

And then, the following morning:

I don’t remember the alarm going off but somehow we still managed to be downstairs in time to form up and travel the one station-hop with the rest of the crew.  Venue was the Redfern Technology Park, a former locomotive factory/workshop for the nearby railyards.  Perfect venue for this: lots of concrete and raw brickwork, arches, girders, big damn machinery jutting up out of the floor.  Excellent antique/industrial vibe.

Bacon not so excellent, to the point of actual non-existence.  Some of the others had been there the previous day and spoken of a maker of epic bacon sandwiches somewhere on the premises, but we never did find who it was.  Yogurt for breakfast instead.

Screens and controllers set up for people to play the new Space Marine game.  Lovely opening cinematics, but my gameplay didn’t do justice to them.  I suck at using controllers.  The guys from the Design Studio table were shouting instructions over my shoulder but I didn’t have a clue how to do what they were telling me to do.

Also, the game is set on Graia.  Can’t take a trick, can they?  They’ve already got a moon full of Tyranids and now the orks as well.

"Paste da humiez! Hur hur."

The theme for the day was piracy, it being launch day for Dreadfleet.  Many folks around in tricorn hats (some with Jack Sparrow dreads attached) and one in full pirate garb roaring “YARRR!” into the PA every so often.

Yes, I bought a copy. No, I haven't played it yet.

Big prop chainsword on hand as a prize for later in the day.  We took turns having our photo taken with it.  Each time someone new picked it up, the person who’d just put it down went “cool, now someone else is the last one to handle it so it’s their fault if it breaks”.

More shouting, this time from the doors, and suddenly there were running gamers all around us.  I think they were making for the Forge World stall behind us, FW queues from earlier Australian GDs being rather legendary.

Signing picked up slowly.  For us, at least.  Graham had a dozen-strong queue from nowhere within heartbeats of the doors opening, or that’s how it seemed.

I had a spot on the other side of a girder from Anthony, next to a spot for Henry Zou.  No actual Henry Zou though.

Although the organisers were kind enough to supply a Phil Kelly, plus hat.

Signing for me was almost all Enforcer omnibuses.  They seemed to be a fairly even split between people bringing well-thumbed, crease-spined editions (several people told me they were on their second or third reading) and people bringing shiny copies bought minutes before.  A few people had the older, separate volumes; one or two had Tales of Heresy.  I also got asked to sign a lot of programmes, some White Dwarfs and a lot of the special hardcover Games Day anthologies.  Nobody was worried that I didn’t have a story in said collection, although I felt that it was only fair to point that out to make sure nobody got a signature on mistaken premises.  Note to BL staff: if you do these again it might be worth including several blank pages at the back, since a lot of people were using them as general-purpose autograph books.

Oh, and one person’s Kindle.

Mislaid bag check tokens will result in summary execution.

A pleasingly large number of people said they had writing aspirations, and I provided what advice I could.  I had a few conversations about writing the Arbites, and the sort of thinking I’d had to do about how cultures and values shape laws and politics and what that meant for Imperial law and how it was enforced.  One of the more interesting conversations was with a serving police officer who had some interesting front-line perspectives on that.

The Black Library Q&A drew a small but interested crowd with a range of questions.  The crowd got bigger for the Design Studio Q&A, which I sneaked into an audience seat and sat in for.  Phil and Adam were reluctant to go into detail about specifics but had some fascinating stuff to say about how the design teams interacted and how the rule and game creation processes work.

Back at the signing tables, we had been brought lunch packs with a little baguette, a cupcake and juice.  My lunch was nice, but there was that other cupcake sitting next to me, and the other person’s cupcake always looks more tempting than one’s own, does it not?

A rather excited gentleman who was apparently just off the plane from Japan and kept apologising for his jetlag (which was not evident) and was bouncing around talking about the Calpurnia books.

By this time D, who is a hands-on, take-charge sort, had a staff T-shirt on and was helping out with the sales on the other side of the BL stand.  We managed to break off a little later in the afternoon and sit on the balcony looking out over the venue to sip some tea.

And wave hello to the occasional daemon.

There were auditions going on in the other half of the park for a reboot of the Young Talent Time show.  Out in the foyer there was an amusing mix of GW gamer-types and gussied-up young girls with numbers pinned to their torsos (and I do mean girls, I don’t recall seeing any male auditionees).

Would have been cool to get some of them in a picture with the Games Day cosplayers, actually.  As well as the staff with their pirate accessories I saw a couple of Imperial missionary types, three or four Commissars, a lady in a flowing white Bretonnian-style dress and an Adeptus Astra Telepathica adept.  Slightly to my embarrassment I misidentified the emblem on this last fellow’s staff at the final Q&A and asked him why he had an Aquila on his chain but an Eye of Horus on his staff.  You’d think I’d remember what the insignia looked like.

Still no Henry by early afternoon.  I found myself wondering if he’d show up to defend his cupcake if I made moves toward eating it.

"Hell of a thing, eatin' a man's cupcake. Takes away all the confectionery he's got, and all the confectionery he's ever gonna have."

I think I’m making all this sound rather sedate, but it wasn’t.  There was a real crackle in the air, watching people at the gaming tables, or at the Q&As, or coming up to talk to the authors or designers.

There’s a real carnival atmosphere to Games Day that reminds me of the early CanCons I went to as a teenager.  The echoing acoustics of the venue, which I’d expected to be annoying, actually added to the feeling.  My voice was feeling rather knackered by the afternoon, but a good supply of water helped with that.

I dunno.  Eating another author’s cupcake.  There’s a kind of “point of no return” vibe to an act like that, isn’t there?

Oh, for the record and while I remember it, D now wants a Chaos Reaver for her birthday instead of the loyalist one we saw on display at Warhammer World.  This guy had a name, according to one of the staffers, but I didn’t write it down.

Not so much "Let the galaxy burn" as "MAKE the galaxy burn".

From where I was sitting I had a pretty good view over the shoulders of the people playing Space Marine on the screens.  They were all, needless to say, far better at it than I was.  Which was great, because I got to see some of the game’s later levels, full of jump-pack action and much bigger guns than the bolt pistol that I emptied very early on in my attempt and never worked out how to reload.  See, even Ultramarines always need moar dakka.

(On which subject, someone on RPGNet recently observed that the only conceivable way to achieve “enuff dakka” is to every point in the universe simultaneously shooting at every other point in the universe.  Although of course Gork and Mork, being outside the physical universe, would still demand MOAR.)

Keep this handy reference guide with you.

Alright, Henry.  I did it.  I ate your cupcake.

"No, Mister Zou, I expect you to starve."

I have little to report on the Australian Golden Daemon, I’m afraid.  Most of my attention for the day was directed the other way.  There was much spirited applause and backslapping at the awards, especially for the Slayer Sword winner, but you’ll have to go elsewhere to see the details.  Sorry.

Late in the afternoon I went off to get our own swag collected and paid for.  A copy of Dreadfleet, a boxed set of Horus Heresy audiobooks for D, and a few other bits and pieces.  I only opened the Dreadfleet box yesterday but already have several people hanging out to play it.  It’s going to be weird getting out the plastic cement and paints again.

"So I sez to that Cap'n Sparrow, I sez..."

Packup time came upon us rather suddenly, as the ends of these events seem to do.  One minute I was chatting to a couple of fans and the next minute I realised we were talking over and around the clangs of the videogame arrays being dismantled a few metres away.  D and I pitched in to get the books boxed up but piked on the breakdown and stowing of the tables themselves.  We joined a procession back out of the hall, past the engine that D had rather worryingly dubbed the “Dweeb-catching machine”.

The Dead Dog party was apparently at a place on George Street but we didn’t last for it.  By that stage Games Day fatigue was settling in and even while we were just meeting at the hotel bar we realised we had just about enough energy for the drive.  The excellent roadburger establishment at Eaglehawk was closed by the time we passed it, but by the time we reached home we were too exhausted to be hungry.

And that is the slightly messy memory-mosaic of Games Day Oz 2011, in about as presentable a form as I can make it.  It was a great time at a great venue, with a party atmosphere and some excellent company.

The second big occasion of the long weekend was Conflux, the annual Canberra-based SF convention, but since we were only got back for part of that I shall instead send you to Nicole Murphy’s excellent series of con reports starting here.

Speaking of reporting, D has just put her post on the day up as well.

I’m currently on two weeks away from the day job to hammer toward a deadline early next month, so for the moment my days are very heavily built around writing.  I’ll see if I can manage at least one more post before my time off finishes.

Oh, and, uh…

…see you next year?

Peon, at Smiths Bookshop

The excellent indie bookshop Smiths is navigating the bookselling crunch by being not only an indie bookseller, but by turning itself into a hub for the sorts of cool stuff that the patrons of indie booksellers like to get out of the house and go and do. They have a coffee bar and outside tables, they do markets and readings, they’re getting a license so they can serve wine in the evenings. And they’ve got a setup in the main part of the shop that lets them rearrange the shelves and displays so that they can deploy some couches and turn the shop into a little performance space. The performers a couple of Saturdays ago were Melbourne percussion duo Peon.

I have no idea how to set about labelling the sort of music these guys do so I’ll just describe it instead. The core of the performance is a pair of drumkits, supplemented by a synthesiser, a couple of separate percussion instruments that I didn’t recognise (I asked the names of one or two of them on the night but didn’t write them down) and a laptop running a sound-mixing program. They co-operate on building up rhythms and patterns of sound on all the various instruments around them, and periodically pass control of the sound from one to the other so that at any point one of them will be concentrating on the drumming and the other will have eased off the drumming and will be using a free hand and some of their attention to add in synth notes or sound effects, and to balance the overall mix.

At first I thought that the synthesiser elements were pre-recorded, and that they built the rest of the set around a framework of sound that they’d laid down in advance, but when I got chatting to them at the interval they told me that nothing about it was ever pre-done; every single performance they do is improvised from the ground up, in every detail, every time. That put a whole new complexion on what I had thought I was seeing, and I began to really appreciate how seamlessly the two of them work together. They create a sound that rises and falls, sometimes offering up catchy rhythms that the audience were tapping their feet to, sometimes just combining their drumming to create chaotic tides of sound, and sometimes easing off to just tap out a gentle counterpoint to a sound like wind or water coming from the synth. They were joined for part of the evening by some musicians, I think locals, who added in some extra percussion and jazz trumpet to create another layer in turn.

I’ll be honest that at first I didn’t find Peon very accessible – for the first ten minutes or so I wasn’t sure what I was listening to or how much I was going to stay for. Once I’d relaxed into it and engaged with it, though, I found the sound fascinating and full of layers and patterns and changes to unpack and listen for. Not exactly mosh-pit material, but just the sort of stuff to sit back, let your eyes close and be in the moment with the sound.

Peon have a Facebook page.

Cloning the Tasmanian Tiger, at the Front Cafe

The Front is another cool little venue in Canberra’s inner north. Free wifi, couches, gallery next door, you know the sort of deal. They have a schedule of readings and launches and similar things, and the similar thing we went to recently was a gig affiliated with National Science Week called “Cloning the Tasmanian Tiger”.

The event was pretty damn interesting, but we arrived there in a slightly harassed mood on account of it being scheduled right in the middle of the homeward-bound traffic out of Civic and Barton. We got there just in time for the last minute of the jazz combo (which was a shame, what little we heard of them sounded very good) but were in time for a nifty hip-hop intro by Fenella “MC Feline” Edwards and some awesome beatboxing by Mal Webb. The main presentation was from zoologist Professor Marilyn Renfree, and was not quite about cloning the Tasmanian Tiger in that we’re not about to see packs of vat-grown Thylacines loping about the Tasmanian countryside any time soon. Which would be awesome, but will have to wait a while. The presentation talked about the extinction of the Thylacine, about its biology and what’s known about its life cycle, and went on to the way that the Professor found a foetal specimen that had had the good luck to be pickled in alcohol, not formaldehyde. (Formaldehyde apparently trashes genetic information in tissues whereas alcohol doesn’t.) They’re a long way off doing anything with the complete Thylacine genome but there was a fascinating series of slides showing how they had picked a gene out of the foetus that controlled collagen formation (collagen is a precursor to skeletal growth and is apparently a good basic gene to work with). They attached some sort of marker to it so that the gene became not only a thylacine collagen-generation gene, but a thylacine coloured-collagen generation gene, and then spliced it into a mouse embryo. And then showed pictures of said embryo with its skeleton laid out in dark blue from the dark-coloured thylacine collagen, next to a sibling embryo that had that weird translucent look that they have. Proof that they could take a Thylacine gene, put it in a new organism and actually have it activated, living and working.

The spoken presentation alternated with excerpts from a Catalyst documentary about the Professor’s work, which now involves research teams in Europe as well as here. I think she needs to get sponsorship from Cascade beer – imagine what having an actual live Thylacine as their mascot would do for them!

Ovum, the debut EP from Knights of the Spatchcock

Full disclosure: several members of the Knights of the Spatchcock are acquaintances, work colleagues, and some time training partners, and in fact I bought my CD at the desk of Brendan the guitarist. They’re all friends with each other, too, and I’m told that that’s how the band started: as a fun project by some folks who loved jamming together and one day thought “hey, you know what we should do…”

The sense of fun comes across in the band’s, well, everything. The CD art, band photos and notes are all relaxed and playful, with an integral part of the band charter being the promise never to take what they’re doing too seriously. They present a very skilful and professional CD but balance it with a lot of earthy humour directed squarely at each other: their website devotes rather more attention to reporting on one another’s bowels than is usual for a band’s PR material. I haven’t yet been to a live gig of theirs (their recent appearance coincided with the nadir of the aforementioned deadline hell) but apparently the music is supplemented by bright gold pants and a blow-up doll.

So, then, the music. A while ago I was friends with someone who was into a lot of wiccan/pagan/earth mother style of things and would fetch out the Spindlewood CDs to play at parties. The Knights put me in mind of some of that (or at least of my decade-plus-old memories of it), with a kind of olde-worlde folkish vibe given extra heft with a core of tough guitar. On a second listen, I think it’s mainly the singing style that evokes those bands for me, while the guitars have the sort of big power-it-to-the-rafters feel that I associate with The Cult. The lyrics continue the feel, particularly “In Winter’s Wake” which brings a lot of wild druidical imagery of forests and snow and the turning of the seasons.

The singing is good, the instrumentals are outstanding, and the songwriting avoids the traps of some other indie EPs I’ve heard lately which end up sounding very samey. The Knights’ songs are distinct and characterful, powerful without being pompous, and in the case of “1800 Maxx”, jocular and humourous without being twee. That one actually had me out of my chair and bopping about the flat waving a half-eaten slice of pizza in the air.

You can check out the Knights here; if I can make it to a gig I’ll be sure to report.

Alright, done for the night. Gonna try and blog up some recent reading in the next little while – well, I have to, now I’ve announced it here, haven’t I?

Yo dawg, I heard you like tags so we put a tag on a tag so you can check out the tag while you’re checkin’ out the tag, dawg!

Ahem.

I have got to see about getting to these bouts earlier.

But you’re not interested in my trials and tribulations of trying to get a seat in the bleachers, are you, you callous bunch? You just want the bout report, right?  So my search engine and link stats seem to be telling me, anyway. Right then.

So we’re getting into the pointy end of the CRDL’s season for the year – this bout, the commentators told us, would determine each team’s placing in the grand final bout at the end of October. Both teams were coming off a loss – the Red-Bellied Blackhearts were downed by the Black’n’Blue Belles in their last bout, and the Surly Griffins (who are also “Sulry” according to the bout season poster) lost to the Brindabelters. Both teams were looking to bounce back strong to land a place at the top of the finals card in the first/second place bout. In fact the Blackhearts had announced on Facebook beforehand that they were up for a game of “Biff a Griff”, but on the night the Griffins came along to dish out some respectable biff of their own.

I’m here to tell you that green and white pack was tough. The brawls saw a whole series of pileups, often with the teams barely out of the starting boxes and around the first short stretch, plenty of one-on-one hits that drew exclamations and applause from the crowd, and some brawls that at one point sent not just the skaters but one of the refs over the suicide line and into the crowd. (That one made it onto YouTube, I have now found.) I commented in my post on the bout against the Queensland reps that Short Stop took a double-team hit that made her skates leave the ground, but in the second half of this bout Blackheart captain Roulette Rouge took a hit from one Griffin coming down the nearside straight that for a moment had her whole body parallel with the floor and about a metre in the air. The Griffs’ jamming strategy was similarly aggressive: their most high-profile Jammer for the evening was Aunty Aggro, who followed up her bruising form against the Sun State team with a straightforward “outta my way or down you go” approach to her job. Also in my memory as jamming for the Griffins (didn’t take a notebook) was Rainbow Spite, veterans Doctor Hell and AmyKazee, and newcomer Ginger Nutcase who has plenty of speed and attitude and forced the Blackhearts’ best Jammers to push to the top of their form.

(Something that struck me, though, even before half time came along: very few fouls and suspensions. There rarely seemed to be more than one skater in the Sin Bin. Which meant that the teams were being tough and aggressive, but precise and focused along with it, certainly in contrast to some of the much wilder matches earlier in the year.)

The Griffins started off ahead from the first couple of jams, then the lead oscillated briefly before it settled with the Blackhearts and started to lengthen. I suck at remembering scores and they don’t seem to be online for this match, but my recollection is that the Blackhearts were at least twenty points ahead by half time and accelerating away. The Griffs brought the biff and gave it some good solid packwork but the Blackheart pack was at least as good and as organised, if not quite so showily aggressive, and the Blackhearts had a good roster of star Jammers that the Griffins didn’t seem to have an answer for. Bambi von Smash’er was back on form tonight with an excellent mix of aggression and technique, and showed herself an excellent pack player and Pivot as well as Jammer. Several times on the night I saw her form the centre of a strong Blackheart wall, or be in exactly the right spot to drag her Jammer out of the pack behind her and boost her speed with a well-timed whip.

For me the standout Jammers were Fauna Cat and relative newcomer Terror Bonesaparte, two capable Jammers who seemed to have quite similar skating styles using acceleration, manoeuvre and balance. I was sitting at the third corner which was a great spot to see the different jamming tactics, since by the time they were passing in front of me the Jammers were well into the pack or just breaking out of it, and using all their best moves to pull ahead. Fauna Cat in particular seems able to slip through the tiniest gap in an opposing line – every time the Griffs pack let her get a foot or a shoulder ahead of them then it was only a matter of time.

Both she and Terror also made good use of a particular trick that the Griffins struggled to deal with, pouring on the speed on the straight and racing the Griffin blockers ahead while the rest of the Blackhearts stayed back in a tight pack. The pack in Derby is the stretch of track (I think twenty feet) with the most non-Jamming skaters in it, designated by signals from the refs, so if a skater gets outside that area she can’t engage with other skaters ‘til she’s back in. Fauna Cat and Bonesaparte both used this against the enemy blockers. Rather than trying to dodge through the frontmost Griffins and then pull away they used their excellent acceleration to start racing as soon as they were on the long straight, forcing the lead Griffins to try and pour on the speed to match them while the rest of the Blackhearts hung back to keep a tight pack. Generally the Griffs only had time for one really good block before they were out of coherency distance and had to disengage, and the fact that they were fighting to build up speed at the same time took a lot of the oomph out of the block. Both of these Jammers are skilled skaters and very well centred, and several times I saw them shrug off a block while the offending Griffin bounced off and ended up crashing to the track.

Yeah, I know, I'm recycling my photos.

Like I said, I didn’t take a notebook so I can’t quote scores in detail, but the Blackhearts had opened up a commanding lead by the end of the first half – memory tells me about thirty points or so. (Hah, yes, a check of the Twitter feed says 74-47.) In the second half the lead grew a little, shrank a little, but mostly grew a little (or a lot, in the case of one massive multiple-lap score-a-thon by Speedin’ Segal). The commentators kept reminding us that even a big lead in Roller Derby can be reversed in a couple of jams, and that anything could still happen… but it didn’t happen for the Griffins on Saturday, and the Blackhearts took the bout 144-87. Commiserations Griffins, congratulations Blackhearts, and on to the finals!

A few addenda are in order.

First of all, the decision to staff the commentators’ table with Derby skaters not actually skating that night was an excellent idea. The team on the microphones on the weekend was Peachy Keen, The Cleaver and Intensive Claire, who had confidence and wit and an insider’s knowledge of what was going on on the track that complemented the action, rather than detracting from it.

The halftime entertainment also deserves a mention: the Limitless Dance Crew, a local ensemble of street dancers who are raising funds to travel to the US. These guys apparently do a lot of busking with their dance, and they had that knack of quickly engaging with an audience that a busker needs. They were athletic, creative and often very funny, theatrical as well as just technically good. Great fun to watch, and by the cheers and clapping all through the set the rest of the crowd agreed with me.

The biggest one for last: if you didn’t know already four CRDL skaters have made it onto Team Australia, the Australian representative side that will head to the Blood and Thunder Roller Derby World Cup 2011! Massive congratulations to Bambi von Smash’er of the Blackhearts, Amykazeee of the Griffins, and King Cam and the mighty Short Stop of the the Black’n’Blue Belles.

And consider, folks: our skaters won’t be skating at their best if they’ve used up all their energy on beating up innocent Canadian passersby for the plane fare home. If you want to help Team Australia’s travel costs and avoid possible international incidents, consider dropping them a line at CRDLfundraising@gmail.com and chipping in.

The next CRDL bout is the Brindabelters vs the Black’n’Blue Belles on the 24th of next month, although tickets aren’t on sale yet. In the meantime I have a fiction deadline to chase down and properly nobble. In amongst it all somewhere I’m hoping to do a reading-related post or two – been way too long since one of those.

You can read more about the book here.  It’s coming out in the final quarter of this year.  Fantasy Flight create gorgeous books and I can’t wait to get my hands on the final product.

The following year we met up with Colin again in the UK, over a French tapas dinner and a bit of wine on a quiet evening in Bath.  Colin, Donna, James and I talked business, writing, teaching, study, the state of the world, and of course food; we were lucky enough to catch up with him again in Bristol at the William Gibson talk, where we hung out beforehand, drank beers and heard about his latest writing and editing projects.

Colin suffered a massive stroke on Monday, and earlier this evening our time we got the news he had died in hospital, apparently without ever regaining consciousness.  Our thoughts go out to those close to him.  Colin was a smart, thoughtful, switched-on, amiable and just simply decent man.  What a loss.

People who knew Colin are sharing memories of him over here on the AR site.

Rest in peace, Colin, I’m glad I got the chance to meet you.

Griznak at the bridge, plotting the next assault on the Blood Angel defences and trying to ignore the uneasy instinct that Waaagh-Ghazghkull is starting to falter around him.  Sergeant Raphael musing on the nature of humans and Astartes.  Inquisitor Kruger unearthing what’s really going on in the hives of Gehenna – but possibly too late.  Karlsen of the Thousand Sons undergoing the Dark Communion and reliving ten millennia of war against the Golden Throne.  On the fantasy side of things Bill created the iconic pair of fantasy adventurers Gotrek Gurnisson and Felix Jaeger, and chronicled their adventures for many years before Nathan Long took the helm.  Bill has also written several original-IP novels and even created another game-setting of his own, the cyberpunk/Mad Max Waste World.  He’s now back writing for Black Library with an upcoming trilogy about Lord Macharius, one of the giant figures in Imperial military history.

I also have to say that one of the high points of writing Legacy was to find myself writing about the Navis Nobilite at the same time as Bill was, and corresponding with him on getting our references and approaches dovetailed.  The first time it properly hit me that name on the stories that had fired my imagination into the setting in the first place was now showing up on mails in my inbox I couldn’t stop grinning.

Most excellently, he has a new website and a blog now, which you can find here.  There are some great thoughts on the craft and day-to-day business of writing, and speaking as someone who regularly beats himself up over word counts achieved (or not), I was very taken with the post on the importance of setting your sights low.  You might have noticed I no longer do those monthly proposal/acquittal posts for this blog, and one of the reasons was that the acquittal posts had turned, as this post says, into a demoralising head-to-brick-wall exercise that was having the opposite effect to the one I wanted.  I’ve been pondering whether to bring that exercise back in some form, but if I do it will be useful to remember that sometimes all that white-knuckled type-A achiever hype can be counterproductive.  We’ll see.

I’m also adding in the writing blog of Donna Maree Hanson, an author, long-time member of the CSFG, publisher, editor and tireless organiser and convention-runner, who also happens to be my partner.  As well as working on her own writing she’s currently putting together the 2013 Conflux convention and has been working as a reader on the Angry Robot open submission period from earlier in the year.  Her posts on the insights from such an intensive reading of submissions and manuscripts are well worth reading.

Off to chase some of my own writing for the evening.  Take it easy.

The first of those at-home matches was to the Victorian Roller Derby League Allstars, who beat the VCRs by… well, a fair margin.  I wrote up that bout elsewhere on this blog, and commented that skater on skater the teams seemed evenly matched, but put those skaters into teams and one was very obviously more than the sum of its parts.

There were definitely some changes in the CRDL’s tactics and teamwork after the Melbourne game, which was cool to see, and when the Rollers headed off for their away games they handed out a series of stunningly one-sided defeats to some of the other regional teams.  I was ready to see them take it right to the Fancy Pants and get on track for the rematch with Victoria, whenever that should occur.

Well, to get to the point, the SSRG won the bout 181-48.  The regular pattern was for the Sun Staters to shut out the Rollers from scoring while putting in a solid scoring pass or two themselves – they were adept at keeping the opposing Jammers hammered flat and/or calling the jam off completely any time the Rollers’ Jammer made it out and was coming up on the pack to try and get some points.  Their general strategy was different to the Victorian one: the latter made heavy use of trapping an opposing player and slowing the jam right down to get the edge.  The Sun Staters, while they often hung back at the starting whistle to let their Jammer blast through a slow-to-stationary pack, tended to conduct the jam at reasonable speed and made lethally effective use of “waterfalling”, heavy sequential blocks on an opposing skater to knock her ever further off course, off balance and off the track.

There were some moments of sheer brilliance from the CRDL skaters that got the crowd roaring (my throat was still tender on the Monday morning).  Bambi von Smash’er racked up the first scores for the Rollers in the first half, and then Shaggle Frock, brought out as a surprise weapon in the second half, set the track on fire with an incredible multi-lap jam that just for a moment looked like it could have been a tipping point, before the Fancy Pants got wise to who they were up against and crunched her with their blockers in subsequent jams.  Speaking of crunches, Short Stop’s reputation clearly preceded her – she spent a lot of time on the track but the SSRG laid into her with a ferocity that brought regular groans of dismay from the crowd.  At one point rounding the third corner she got hammered simultaneously by two big SSRG blockers and I’m sure her feet flew something like a foot off the ground before she landed, hard.  I honestly was wondering if she’d even be able to continue, and the hit was showing in her movements, but she was up and skating again and by hell she finished the jam and the bout.

The CRDL got in some hits of their own, and Aunty Aggro earned a lot of crowd applause when she decided in one late jam that she’d had enough, and bulldozed her way through the SSRG pack knocking opponents away left and right.  But here’s the thing: each time I talk about something cool happening for the CRDL I find I’m talking about an individual skater’s star moment, not a fantastic team play.  The SSRG worked together.  When they picked a target on the opposing team, blocker or jammer, they seemed able to throw their entire pack at it at a moment’s notice.  Throwing a block at another skater usually seems to put you out of position so you’ve got to adjust before you do it again, but when the SSRG used their waterfall the first blocker would hit the target Roller, then straight away the second blocker would be there to hit her again, then before she could recover the third blocker would already be closing in.  I saw the Rollers helping each other out with acceleration and turns but too often they seemed to be skating as individuals, with no way to form up around their Jammer or break up the precision plays that the SSRG were pulling off.

I’m given to understand that Victoria and Queensland are at the top of the Roller Derby tree in Australia, and I can understand why after seeing their form taking on a team like the Vice City Rollers.  Don’t let the downbeat talk above fool you, the Rollers are a tough, experienced team with some amazing skaters who’ve handed quite a few other regional teams their frilly, fishnetted behinds.  There’ll be a day when Canberra fight their way up to the top of that tree as well, and I’ll be cheering for them when they do.  And it was great to see that even copping the short end of a score like that one, the crowd was still hyped, the skaters were having a great time and the good cheer and energy were barely dented*.

Next match is at the end of the month, Red-Bellied Blackhearts vs Surly Griffins.  Looking forward to it already.

*Well, okay, my good cheer was, slightly.  But I’m better now.

Addendum:  Hello to all the people coming here from the Queensland Derby forums!  I’ve added the poster graphic and cleaned up some typos and run-on sentences (I typed the original post up rather late at night), so you’re getting the deluxe version of my blogging now.

Way, way late, I know.  One thing and another got in the way.  One thing and many others.  I haven’t been frittering away all my time playing with chainpikes and looking at photoshopped webcomics of Keanu Reeves eating a My Little Pony, some of it, take my word for it, has been cool stuff that I look forward to telling you about.  In the meantime, those quick and impressionistic reports I promised you, so I can clear the decks for the Canberra-Brisbane bout and then maybe talk about some other stuff.

For the last two local matches we missed my preferred spot right up high in the bleachers, ending up toward the back of the suicide seating at the corners of the track.  For those of you just tuning in, the Suicide Seating is the Derby term for the stretch of floor between the bottom bleacher and the actual skating area.  It’s called that, and restricted to over-eighteens because it’s close enough to the track for the people sitting there to become inadvertant participants in the bout if the skating gets really hard and fast.  There was at least one close call in the Griffs/Belters bout, with one skater (a Griffin, from memory) going down right on the suicide line, and a spectacular example the next match when one of the Blackhearts came right off the track and ploughed a couple of metres into the crowd.

Apart from the thrill of risking death by helmeted, fishnetted human projectile, the floor seats offer plenty of excitement: down on a level with the skaters you can see the speeds they attain and the power of the blocks they throw, hear them shouting to each other as they roar past, and feel the rumble and grind of the skates coming up through the floor as they take the corners.  Every time the pack came around to that third corner I found myself surging up and forward onto my knees with a shot of vicarious adrenaline.  (At least until my legs started cramping and siezing up.  I have to take a cushion if I’m going to sit down there again.)

On the downside, it’s harder to get the sort of overview of the developing match that the high seats give.  My bout report has to be made up of snippets and glimpses.  The Brindabelters had come back meaning business, and I remember thinking a clear sign of their new focus was that so few of them were getting sin-binned.  The previous match against the Blackhearts had seen a heavy toll of ‘Belters binned for a string of offences, one of which I’m sure I remember as being “insubordination”, which I took to mean talking back to the officials or some such.  This time they were tight and focused and in control, and the binnings were next to non-existent.  Shaggle Frock was the star of the show again but shared some of the spotlight with Freudian Slit, a very talented Jammer who got the crowd going very nicely.  While there were some committed Griffins fans in the audience…

…most of the crowd seemed to be on the side of the ‘Belters, particularly the gentleman behind us who broke into loud, hoarse shouts of “send ‘er the fuck off!” every time a Griffin managed to score any points.

In the end, the night belonged to the Brindabelters, who came back from a very tough loss to the Red-Bellied Blackhearts to take this bout in 137-131.

[I've been looking and looking and I can't for the life of me find bloggable copies of the bout posters that I was going to use for mastheads.  If you know where I can find some, let me know.]

Loaded in the other barrel we’ve got the Red v Blue bout: the first-ever meeting of the Red-Bellied Blackhearts and the Black’n’Blue Belles.  A difficult match to dress for for someone who owns fan garments for both teams, but a great one to watch, and one which brought on the much-anticipated duel between two of the League’s most high-profile Jammers: Bambi von Smash’er of the Blackhearts and Short Stop of the Belles.

Bambi von Smash'er flies the flag for the Blackhearts

Except that what’s cool about the CRDL now is that the talent pool is deep enough that it’s much tougher for the star players to have it all their own way.  The two big names got the biggest audience roars, but I’m also recalling at least one massive power jam by King Cam of the Belles, and a breathtaking high-speed double-scoring-pass jam from Fauna Cat of the Blackhearts, who’s always one to watch when she’s on the track.  And the packwork from these teams just gets better with every single match, making the Jammers fight for every pass and constantly working to outwit and out-hit their counterpart pack.  I remember seeing Bambi cornering past us to catch up with the pack for her scoring run, seeing the tight wall of Belles in front of her and simply call the jam off right there, presumably to try and reboot the pack to get a better position.

The night, in the end, belonged to the Belles, and the Jammer duel to Short Stop, whose agility and technique allowed her to get through the red pack time after time (and even taking the track for two consecutive jams, which I think is the first time I’ve ever seen a Jammer do that).  While a lot of the jams were hard-fought, the Belles were able to push out to an early lead that the Blackhearts were never able to close and the final score was 160-109 to the Black’n’Blue Belles.

The Belles form up before the match.

(Oh, and I have to mention the half-time entertainment, which this time was Knight Hammer, “Canberra’s premiere [sic] medieval-Viking-lyrical-themed-fusion-80’s-metal-prog-rock-parody band”.  A straight band set seems to be settling in as the preferred halftime act, and these guys certainly look the most at home at a Derby bout out of the ones I’ve seen.)

That brings us up to the weekend just gone, and the match against the Sun State Roller Girls.  More about that next post.