SFX Weekender: Work Hard, Play Hard

Howdy all,

So after a slight break to go home and life a semi-normal life, onto part three of the Solaris SFX Weekender blog post: Work Hard, Play Hard...

(Check our The SFX Weekender, or What the Hell Happened, Mr. Moore? and The SFX Weekender: The Talent for the first two instalments...)

It wasn't all just cosplay, dismantled TARDISes, novelty biscuits, panels, authors and wacky hats, you know. Jenni, Ben and I were there, as were our chums from 2000 AD, and we spent much of the time, as previously mentioned, flat out like a lizard drinking.

Actually, that's a bit of an Australian idiom. We were dead busy.

And when 8pm rolled around, and we'd exhaustedly dragged some food into our mouths (including the most farcical attempt at sorting out a curry on Saturday night you have ever seen, which ended up in us giving up and having crappy burgers from the stand in Pontin's), it was time to start drinking immoderately and meeting some fine people.

Let the games commence!


Books! That's right, we do books. We were there, in fact, selling books. Here are some books we were selling. We brought about twelve boxes with us, and took about four boxes back. Which was good going.


Keith and Pye on the 2000 AD stand. You may be aware that Pye (left) also does a load of our covers for Solaris.


Then drinking! Here's Jenni, some of Pye, a friend of mine called James who pitched in and helped us out for a lot of the weekend, and the hair of a woman from Simon & Schuster we'd met called Emily. Emily, it seems, did not like having her picture taken. Or really wanted to do a Cousin It impression for us.


And it's the next day and we're selling books again. I'm employing a psychological warfare technique based on talking breathlessly at you until you cave in and buy one of my books. We worked out afterwards that once I made eye contact with you and started talking, you had about an 8% chance of leaving without a book. To be fair, in one case I talked at a guy for around twenty minutes until he cracked, but crack he did. They all did, in the end.


2000 AD's Leigh Gallagher sketching for the fans.


And back to the pub! This time with Leigh and Forbidden Planet's Danie Ware. Note my expression of abject terror. Or I was trying for terror, anyway; I was a little the worse for wear by this point.


And here's Pye, Leigh and another woman we met at the event, Celeste from Live Nation.

So there we are. Our labours, our joys, our authors, our panels, weird cosplayers, and some excellent people we were very privileged to meet and take a cup of drink with.

We had an absolutely blinding time (literally; my vision actually grew a little hazy at one point), and are properly looking forward to next year.

Many thanks to our hard-working authors, our friends, and the SFX crew.

Cheers,

David
.