Pratchett Prize Evening, London and other fun

Well, at long last I have downloaded my cousin's pictures and I'm able to put together an account of the Pratchett Prize evening at Waterstones Piccadilly.

The bookstore itself is mind boggling.  It is apparently the largest bookstore in Europe and I'm not surprised. Five floors of a great Art Deco-ish building housing as many books as you could ever want and a lovely restaurant and bar on the 5th floor.  The 5th View was the venue for the party.
We - my wife, the kids, my aunt and uncle - met up with my cousin and one of her sons and hung around the bookstore before the reception.  Normally I would have been eagerly drifting along the shelves looking for something new to read, but I was a tad distracted.  Finally we headed upstairs and enjoyed a cup of tea before folks started drifting in for the Pratchett Prize.

As stated in an earlier post, we sat with Michael Logan and his lovely wife  Natalie.  It was tense, but there was also, I think, a collective sigh of relief from all of us, shortlisted authors and friends and families (perhaps especially friends and families who have put up with us since the shortlist was announced) at the announcement being so close at last.   This one was taken prior to the announcement.

Marianne Velmans, Publishing Director for Doubleday UK started the announcement with a brief blurb about each of the shortlisted entries and spoke about how difficult the decision had been.  When Michael and I had spoken before the announcement we both assumed that the decision must have been made better than a week before, so it was a surprise when Marianne told us that they were still deciding leading up to the party.

Each of us was asked, in alphabetical order, to come up and get our swag.  I'll show the swag in a bit.

On the left is Marianne and that's Sir Terry Pratchett handing me my stuff after shaking my hand.

After each shortlisted author, or their representative if they were unable to attend, was introduced, Sir Terry spoke a bit about the variety of stories and the difficulty of the decision.

At last the announcement was made with the Logans - Michael and David - splitting the prize.

I must admit that it was a great disappointment, but one I hope I handled with good grace.  I licked my wounds quietly for a few minutes and returned to the table with my family.  I spoke with everyone - except my uncle.  He had apparently disappeared.  It was later I found out he was speaking to Sir Terry about nuclear physics.

A short time later Marianne came over to the table to speak with me.  We had a wonderful conversation about the prize, about my book and the other shortlisted entries.  We also spoke about publishing on both sides of the ocean.  She told me a bit about the selection process.  By this time Suzanne Bridson, Marianne's Editorial Assistant and Transworld's Senior Press Officer, Lynsey Dalladay had stopped by, too.  Between the three of them I found out that the selection process was nothing like I imagined.

I thought that there would have been a handful of people, twenty at the most, reading the submissions for the contest.  Not so.  There were approximately 500 initial readers to sort through the 500 plus entries.  After each novel was read, it was assigned a score out of ten.  Those that scored 5 or more advanced to the next round.  And so on, until the six shortlisted novels were selected.  From my conversations, it looked like everyone in the room connected with Transworld had read each of our novels.  It was a pretty stringent selection process and any of the novels that made it through had to have been liked by a good number of readers to make it that far.

While speaking with Marianne and company, Terry Pratchett made his way over.

What a gentleman.  He started off by telling me that he enjoyed my novel.  Then he said, "Might I offer you a few words of advice?"

When a guy who has sold over 65 million books asks if he can give you some advice about your novel I believe the answer is always yes.

"Please," I said, "I'd be a fool to say no."

And then he gave me some pointers - and good ones, too.  We spoke for about ten minutes - mostly him, but I elicited a smile or two of my own from the Discworld  creator.  Although I didn't win the big prize, those ten minutes were worth the price of the trip.

After congratulating Michael once more, it was time to grab my swag and get some food into a pair of very hungry kids.

What's that?  Oh, the swag...

Here it is.  A nice official certificate, a bottle of champagne and a Transworld fabric bag.

I joked with my wife that the bag was so that I could carry home each and every little fragment of my shattered dream.

She said that wasn't very funny.

Radio Silence

Sorry for the delay.  I know last time I promised details the following day, but we kind of got busy with the rest of the vacation.

Here's a little something from the Pratchett Prize evening.  It was a great time.  The judges said it was a difficult choice and one that was not actually finalized until the day of the award.  In the end there were two winners.

Pictured here are Michael Logan, Sir Terry Pratchett and David Logan.  Here's an article from the Guardian that talks about the award.

Before the award my family and I spent some time with Michael and Natalie, his wife.  He's a great guy and if I couldn't win, I'm glad it was him.  We compared notes about what being shortlisted meant to us, nervousness leading up to the award and how much we both love telling stories.

I'll have a more detailed account of my conversations with Marianne Velmans, publishing director of Doubleday UK and of course with Sir Terry, but I'll save that until I get some accompanying photos from my cousin Sara.


After the award, the kids were starving (they didn't think much of the trays circulating at the awards which weren't much geared to a child's palette).  Here were are at a nearby restaurant:

Oh, and look over there across the way.  There's my aunt, uncle, cousin and her son:

After the meal, the kids were thrilled to find this:

Will you look at that - a mini-TARDIS in the heart of London!

Renewed Focus

I have to admit that the first few days of April are a blur to me.  The 31st of March was a daze and the first of April I spent buzzing off the walls.  The next few days I was pretty hyped but reality was easing in.

Now, I'm back to Herne.  I did some math and realized I don't have a whole hell of a lot of time before the end of school for the kids (The equation for 'a whole hell of a lot' is extremely complicated, so I won't go into detail here).  I'm hoping for a solid first draft by the end of June.

Other things have been happening.  BT Corner, the little park that our local Heritage Committee has been working on is getting ever closer to completion.  Last week metal face plates for concrete plinths and custom benches were installed

The custom benches set the right balance between function, beauty and style and mirror the industrial history of the Beatty Brothers to whom the park is dedicated.

.

These sandblasted stainless steel plates not only cover the faces of the unattractive concrete plinths that will each bear information panels on their opposite sides, but they send a message.  

Family.  Community.  Industry.

Yeah, that's the town I choose to live in.

And look at that - 

the benches even work...

Shortlisted!

What a day.   And it has everything to do with this:

That's The Platinum Ticket - all printed out for editing.  That's the novel I was working on before Christmas, leading up to a New Years Eve deadline.

I am thrilled and honoured with a bit of news that arrived in the electronic in-box today.

Around lunch time I was informed that I have been selected among the shortlisted authors for the Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now First Novel Prize.  You can follow the link to see the press announcement.

The Terry Pratchett Prize

I was going to cook fish for dinner tonight, but something tells me we're dining out.

Time to crank it up to 11

'cause it's one louder, right?

That's been the theme around here anyway.  2011 - the year to crank it up.

I look back at the last post and realize it has been a while since I threw something new up here.  Well, Christmas has come and gone.  The Old Year ticked away and the New Year crept in the door.  My daughter had her birthday (but not her party, that happens this weekend).  The family braved the 6 1/2 hour journey (each way) in the car to visit with relatives up north.

December is typically a busy time of year for the Beynon family, made especially so this year because I was writing a novel straight through the holiday season.  There was a hard deadline - Dec 31st  - to enter the novel in The Pratchett Prize.  I took the framework of a novella I've had kicking around for a few years and expanded it into what I think is a really good novel.  I was literally writing down to the wire.

Leading up to the holidays I was   plugging away at a respectable pace.  The week leading to Christmas was spent putting in full days at the keyboard while my wife kept a pair of excited children busy.   I did, of course, take some time for tobaggon rides and snowman building, but mostly I was in the basement trying to get the story out.

I wrote on Christmas eve.  I wrote a bit on Christmas Day and a lot on Boxing Day.  I even wrote in the car the whole way up north while my wife drove.   Over the 29th and 30th I disappeared into my father-in-law's office each morning, came out for meals and to say goodnight to the kids and kept writing until the wee small hours.  I finished the actual writing around 4:00 pm on the 29th.  Then editing.  Usually I'll spend weeks on editing.   There was no time.  With the help of my wife, who went through a paper copy of the manuscript as I was writing, I was able to get a very fast edit done by 2:00pm on the 31st - just in time to e-mail the manuscript off before the deadline.

It has been a recovery week here.  The kids have gone back to school and I and my Golden Retriever companion have been edging into something like a routine.  I am currently musing over what major project to tackle next.   Before that, I have some more editing to do.  A short story I submitted for an anthology has come back with suggested edits and a request for a revised manuscript before the 15th.  I am putting the finishing touches on the edit and will probably get the story out over the weekend.

That's it for now.  All the best in 2011 - truly a year to crank it up.

T.V. Vacation continued...

Well, here it is over a month without the satellite signal streaming into the house and we're none the worse for wear.  I imagine the vacation notification I sent to Shaw is about to expire on Monday and we'll once more have the lulling, magical warmth of broadcast TV coming once more into our home.

But not for long.

We've decided to cancel our subscription to satellite TV.  We've come to realize, through its absence, that we have better (and less expensive) ways to fill our evenings than to sit and bath in the TV's warming glow.  Oh, we've watched movies and some on-demand TV (via the internet) but no where near the volume as before.

We've been doing a lot more reading, individually and as a family.  We're two thirds of the way through the last Harry Potter book.  JK Rowling is a masterful storyteller but you don't appreciate how clunky her writing can be until you attempt to read some of her twelve line sentences aloud to your kids.  Try it - you'll see.

What else?

Summer has bled away into Autumn with the chilly mornings, great sunsets and changing leaves.  The days grow shorter and shorter and I haven't a clue anymore when we'll see daylight savings slip back to standard time.  The bounty of our little garden has been harvested and mostly eaten, but a few vegetables lurk in the root cellar waiting for just the right meal.

Writing goes well.  My vampire story is finished and submitted - waiting for feedback from the editor.  A while back I was doing a little research into early onset Alzheimer's.  I came across an article and video of Terry Pratchett who presented  one million dollars to the Alzheimer's society.  I followed a link to his official website and came across this.

This is what Terry Pratchett has to say about The Pratchett Prize over on his website:

Anywhere but here, anywhen but now. Which means we are after stories set on Earth, although it may be an Earth that might have been, or might yet be, one that has gone down a different leg of the famous trousers of time (see the illustration in almost every book about quantum theory).

We will be looking for books set at any time, perhaps today, perhaps in the Rome of today but in a world where 2000 years ago the crowd shouted for Jesus Christ to be spared, or where in 1962, John F Kennedy's game of chicken with the Russians went horribly wrong. It might be one day in the life of an ordinary person. It could be a love story, an old story, a war story, a story set in a world where Leonardo da Vinci turned out to be a lot better at Aeronautics. But it won't be a story about being in an alternate Earth because the people in an alternate Earth don't know that they are; after all, you don't.

But this might just be the start. The wonderful Peter Dickinson once wrote a book that could convince you that flying dragons might have existed on Earth. Perhaps in the seething mass of alternate worlds humanity didn't survive, or never evolved -- but other things did, and they would have seen the world in a different way. The possibilities are literally endless, but remember, it's all on Earth. Maybe the continents will be different and the climate unfamiliar, but the physics will be the same as ours. What goes up must come down, ants are ant-sized because if they were any bigger their legs wouldn't carry them. In short, the story must be theoretically possible on some version of the past, present or future of a planet Earth.


I read the above and thought immediately of The Platinum Ticket, a story where a brown-skied world about to be abandoned by humanity is transformed into a green one by a well-meaning time traveler and the problems that arise.  The Platinum Ticket is a novella  - around 25,000 words.  As it stands, it is the barest skeleton of the novel it can be.  I have started to add flesh to that skeleton and am pleased with how it is beginning to fill out.  The contest's deadline is the end of December.  I honestly don't know if I can be done by then, but the novel is worth the effort either way.


Back to work....