WriterConUK

[quinara]

I have just signed my life away up for this year's writerconuk event thing, which anyone who's around in the UK (or could be) for the 5th-7th August should most definitely come to also. You get to meet everyone, and sit around chatting with them, and drink the hotel's booze in its fancy chairs, and have rows about the most productive way to procrastinate through your writer's block, and build paper TARDISes. It's very entertaining, and newbies are always welcome (I know I certainly felt like an oldbie after only one weekend, and I think that's generally the case??).

One thing I have to say I was completely remiss about doing last year, and can't believe it's now got to May, is post my write-up of the event. There is an explanation for this! In 2009 peasant_ asked nay demanded detailed reports because she wasn't able to come. And so I wrote a detailed report! And got top marks for it! Unfortunately, I spend my life trying to outdo myself, which meant that I was working with an entirely new definition of 'detailed' for 2010 and realised I'd got to practically 2000 words of stuff before even the talks had started... And then I convinced myself even I didn't care that much, so I gave up. :/

But it is a surprisingly vivid account (at least for me!). So if you want to know what happened in a fateful Friday last August, read on (it ends on Saturday's breakfast):

It all started we me catching the train to Watford, at the frightfully early time of half-eleven in the morning (clearly I was building up to the horrifically early times that were to come), followed by another train from Watford Junction to Coventry, involving a change of about 25 minutes across town. I've walked to Watford Junction from the town centre before - and driven there a load of times, but I've never taken the Tube to Watford. However, it was about half the price of the bus and about half the travel time, so it seemed like a reasonable idea (mainly because I didn't want anything from the Harlequin - Watford's shopping centre) even with the walk. And it would have been, if I hadn't been trying to be trendy and not done up my Docs properly - as it was, I ended up with a rather deep fingertip-sized blister on my right ankle. :( (But, as luck would have it, kazzy_cee was there later with the generous offer of a plaster, so all was not lost!)

The train up to Coventry was fairly uneventful, including periods of actual unevent as good old Virgin Trains stuck to form and had us waiting in a random patch of countryside for about quarter of an hour. Apparently, so peasant_ and co. informed me later, this could probably be blamed on some recent vandalism around Reading, which I hadn't heard about, where people ripping up all the cables had left the track unusable, so they were having to re-route all the trains. Silly vandals! I'd forgotten to check the route from the station to the hotel before I'd left, but luckily the hotel was actually quite visible from the station (didn't realise this last year). It did a vanishing act when I was actually on my way there, down the charming concrete path beneath the ring road, but never mind... I found it eventually, checked in and had the slightly disappointing realisation that I was on the eighth floor, meaning I would have to go up the lift. (It wasn't until I got in the lift that I worked out why I was having this slightly grumpy feeling about the lift - I think part of me had remembered that the lifts in this particular hotel are slow as hell. They get you places all right, but then they take hours to open! And they have issues about going up from the first floor - you have to go down to Ground and then back up, almost certainly having picked up annoying drunk people on the way. Annoying...) Still, I settled into the very nice room (apparently just_sue and eternal_red had rejected it about an hour before for not having working internet, so it was actually impressively nice and neat, considering) and headed downstairs to find the hordes.

It was just gone 2 at this point, so I was a bit worried there wouldn't be anyone there - but, perhaps not surprisingly, there was a good number of people and it was all to easy to settle into chatting with daiseechain thismaz and gillo and peasant_ and hesadevil (who was interested in thismaz skirt) and kazzy_cee (whose interests went beyond the skirt to a place far more prurient...! /Marilyn Monroe). More people arrived, and some people left (for fags and home visits and other sundry issues), leaving those of us watching deciding it was something of a meta-statement about fandom - which left us terribly solemn for all of about a second. I was probably distracted by daiseechain's chips, which she generously left open to usurpation on the table (they were very tasty chips - like Burger King's before they cut out the salt). Even though the group seemed to be remaining fairly stable in size, it's worth noting that there were two other people in the bar when I first arrived - by this point we'd successfully scared off everybody who wasn't part of the group (mwahahahahaa).

When it was Time to head upstairs, a group of us went to help bogwitch with the goody bags and we found our way back to the hallowed first floor, where we could spy that the marvellous chairs of doom were still in place, and the conference room was the same as it had always been. (It was hard to believe a whole year had passed since the last time, but it was great all the same to be back.) Some earlybirds had got their raffle prizes on display, so there was a quick snoop of those before we settled into seats. just_sue welcomed us all and then we were issued with the all important goody bags (bogwitch's masterpieces), containing a notebook and a pen, a make-it-yourself magnet (I'll confess, it confused me at first), GLOWSTICK SHIPPER GOGGLES (you could build glowsticks into heat-shaped glasses - alas, I snapped the fastening off the side of mine, but they were ace), SWEETS, and - perhaps most importantly at this point - our raffle tickets, which would come into full play on Sunday, but at this point were used to split us into teams for the quiz. We were already being plied with fizzy wine and chocolates, only to then be issued with flags and party blowers!! I had a good time getting a noise out of mine (and discovered that you can get an EVEN BIGGER noise when the paper bit of the blower falls off...).

darkhavens was the glorious captain for our team, and other than me there was eternal_red, wildecate and peasant_. The format was that everyone had brought two questions (fairly general, about any fandom), which were then asked to the other teams. I think I managed to bamboozle quite a few people with my Final Fantasy questions, but not quite everybody, so I didn't feel too mean. I was pretty rubbish at most of the other questions, which added to my not feeling terribly bad about it, and spent most of the time covering myself in sherbet from my Double Dip (which was VERY MUCH APPRECIATED, THANK YOU BOGGY!). We came second in the end, respectably so, though peasant_ did try her hand at diplomacy/espionage/something after it became clear in the answers that darkhavens, who'd had to go out of the room for a lot of the quiz, had known more answers than we'd been able to ask her for later - and that we'd misheard some of the questions (due to excessive party blower-blowing?), so had been racking our brains for the name of the castle used in Merlin only to find out we were supposed to have written down which country it was in, which we all knew (even me!). Alas!

We had dinner after that, when we took a break from taking over the hotel to take over the local Thai restaurant instead. I was second from the end of quite a large table, including bogwitch, ningloreth, speakr2customrs and curiouswombat and we had several very nice conversations about things I can't quite remember anymore. Everybody else's food smelt wonderful, but unfortunately I didn't quite achieve the same level of tasty happiness as last year. As ningloreth observed, the Coke wasn't Coke, so much as brown water, and I made the rather false economy of only having a Pad Something-Something (not Thai) side dish-type-thing because I wasn't that hungry and thought I could save my money for cocktails. As it was, I wasn't that hungry so couldn't finish it anyway, but the rice noodles (which I love) were a bit thick for my liking, and I really should have realised that soy sauce and egg don't go well together. The prawns were good at least (though they did add to the slightly off-putting smell that emanated from it). I should have just spent more money on something I liked, because it still felt a bit of a waste to spend seven quid on half a plate of something I didn't really enjoy at all...

Turn up for the books, though - after that we went back to the comfy superchairs of the first floor, with a detour to the bar along with gillo. kazzy_cee and hils had warned that the bloke took about five hours to make anything, and this seemed to be true as I ordered my Blue Lagoon then waited an age for him to mine the blue (or something) in the back room, to be asked a couple of long minutes through the process whether I was being served, by somebody else. I answered with an optimistic 'hopefully...'. Gill very sensibly had a Martini Rosso, which could come straight out of the bottle - though into the wrong sort of glass, apparently. (I can't say I understand such things, since I spend my life drinking practically everything out of mugs...) It was a very tasty cocktail though, in the sense that it tasted mostly like Slush Puppy with a definite Alcohol afterbite (no more defined than that). I will be mocked now for commenting that I can't quite work out which night's conversation was which, but I think this evening's group was a fairly sprawling one including gillo, bogwitch, brutti_ma_buoni, sueworld2003 and shapinglight. Though there were a lot of conversations on those chairs over time...

It turns out (not that this is different than I remember from 2008) that Sue and I are both fairly, erm, gregarious, so there may have been a moment when Boggy tried to encourage a slightly more moderate volume, but nonetheless I think the evening was full of chatter until the remnants of our group dispersed around quarter to two, after which the mantle was taken up by darkhavens, kitty_poker1 and hils's group. Not sure when they made it upstairs! Boggy and I were (mildly) propositioned in the lift by a kebab-having drunk bloke and his mates, so it seemed easier to take the stairs from the fourth floor, but after that I glugged three glasses of water and crawled into bed.

In very little time at all it was twenty to eight in the morning, when I blurrily tried to work out how to avoid being scalded by the shower (whose degree-markers did not correlate with the actual temperature), which seemed obsessed with running hot, though it did make a handy(ish) whirring noise to let you know when it was too hot. Eventually I made it to cleanliness though, after which I headed downstairs and joined bogwitch and brutti_ma_buoni for breakfast, where I had no shame in getting myself a big fry-up with scrummy institution-made sausages and a fried egg and beans and bacon (no black pudding or hash browns :( ). I nobly decided I would forgo tea (this is mostly because I try to avoid caffeine early in the morning - it's only a small step from there to having Coke before nine/ten AM, which I try to avoid except in essay emergencies), though this was probably a mistake.

...

And a mistake it was! For if I had had that tea, this report would have been finished. Or something. Clearly you need to come this year, oh people who made it to the end, so you can see what sort of thing happens next!