Ben and Bas in Beds

Can I come and give a talk in Wootton to the upper school reading club? said the email. Wootton, just up the road from Abingdon? Yeah, no problem. I'd just take a long lunch break, maybe half a day off work.

I'm sure Wootton only has a primary school, mused a colleague. I looked more closely at the email address: wootton.beds.sch.uk. Okay, I'm guessing "beds" isn't short for Oxfordshire. I may need to take longer.

Turned out to be Wootton Upper School, near Bedford, just past Milton Keynes if you can fight your way past the roadworks. First you have to drive through southern Milton Keynes, which is retail Mordor: vast and hideous, with towering, city-sized warehouses that you can probably see from orbit serving the likes of Amazon and John Lewis and which suck the very soul from you if you dare even glance at them. Sudden flashback to Big Engine days when it was cheaper for me to deliver my own books to Amazon than have them couriered, and I spent a happy day fighting my way past Amazon's shielding spells and wards to get a simple phone number of someone to call if I got lost.

Anyway, getting through Mordor more or less unscathed I then failed the simple little task of passing under the M1. They're converting the A412 into a dual carriageway and the whole area is a devastated battlefield with fewer signposts than the Somme. Then Google Maps lied to me by assuring me I could and should turn left into a road that doesn't exist any more, crushed into non-existence by the route of the new big road. I had already made out an invoice with mileage based on how many miles Google Maps said it should take, but I'll gift the school the extra as my bit towards easing a strained education budget. But I made it, and suddenly I was back in civilisation - a clean, airy, modern school with lovely people in it, both staff and pupils, who seemed to be expecting me:

Well, half of Sebastian was there (I only wrote books 1-3), but they also seemed quite pleased to see the whole of Ben Jeapes. I didn't do a head count but I would guess 30-40 turned up. I talked for an hour about how I got into writing; the various forms I have partaken of (my own stuff, Sebastian, the ghostwriting); agents; editors; how publishing and bookselling work; what to look for in good science fiction; and then gave readings of my favourite crank letter and (a world premiere) bits of the first chapter of the current work-in-progress. It's hard to tell how well you're doing: carefully honed witticisms may or may not be sinking in; they might be keeping silent for an hour because they are stunned by your awesomeness, or they might have tuned out long ago.

Following the hour's set piece it was an informal lunch and natter with the school reading club, me answering questions, of which there were many. Some harder to answer than others.

"Do you find working out plots hard?" "Yes." - Easy.

"I write romance stories; how can I stop them sounding corny?" - Um ...

It's not completely true that you should only write about what you know, of course: I've never captained a starship, for a start. But when it comes to writing romance I can't help thinking you probably should stick to your own experience and that really wasn't something I was going to talk about to a teenage lad I had never met before. "So, have you ... I mean, um ..." I suppose I could have told him to write under a woman's name. That seems to work.

I met some lovely young people with a real love for reading and writing, and at least two budding sf writers, which are of course the best type. I sold my first story when I was 24, published when I was 26, so give them another 10 years and I fully expect some high quality fiction to be emerging on the market. Pay it forward, guys ... (but thanks for the bottle of wine, that was a nice touch!).

Lodged at John Mason

I like all the people I know who have come or are coming through John Mason school (age range of set: 15-42). And I liked the ones I met there today when I ran a couple of workshops in the library learning resource centre.

The do was arranged by Mark Thornton from Mostly Books and the librarian learning resource centrearian – all I had to do was turn up, while Mark lurked at the back and sold books in the break. And so I talked about worldbuilding in science fiction – not (necessarily) creating a whole new planet, but a background, a setting, that all the characters will consider totally normal but which has to be explained subtly to the reader. What, your soul doesn’t follow you around as a shapeshifting animal? Weirdo!

Ben’s clues for worldbuilding, many based on examples that I rejected for Big Engine:

• If you can remove the sf element and still have a story, it’s not sf. (1)
• You can’t change just one thing. There must be consequences to your change. (2)
• The world must make sense to the people in it. (3)
• There must be limitations to your world. (4)
• Only have other races if there is something about them that could never be human. (5)
• You're not limited by an effects budget in a book. Go mad!

There were 21 in the first group, 15 in the second; mostly year 9 with a scattering of 8 and 7. Quite a few girls turned up - in fact they were the majority in the second group, which I found very encouraging. Mary Shelley, Ursula le Guin – there’s a substantial female heritage to science fiction that gets ignored all too easily.

The learn- oh soddit library already has a copy of Wingèd Chariot. One boy decided he prefers the original title and the present cover: clearly a young man of great discernment. I explained to another boy that Time’s Chariot is a slightly rewritten and generally updated version of the former. ‘Why did you write the same book twice?’ he asked. ‘That’s just stupid.’

Bless.

Photos may follow.

Notes

1. Big Engine reject: a story that was allegedly on an alien world but was basically a 1930s Chicago gangster adventure, so should have been set in 1930s Chicago.
2. Big Engine reject: a world in which the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in nuclear war; 40 years later, background radiation is so high that the race can only breed by cloning. And yet everything else is the same as now: US still a superpower, no nuclear winter ...
3. Big Engine reject: the European parliament outlaws women, making all of Europe male and gay and reproducing by cloning. A fearless underground women’s resistance army is determined to smash the reproduction centres and make European blokes hetero again. This was meant to be a dire warning about the perils of ideology and cloning but ended as merely dire.
4. ‘Frodo, you must throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Now we’ll just ask the giant eagles to fly us down to Mordor and be home for tea.’
5. Elves add nothing!