Hello all… sorry for the little break in transmission, real life intervened for a brief spell. Boooooo!
I’ve had a first review! Sort of. Yesterday morning, a copy of the trade magazine The Bookseller arrived, and they’ve picked out Wiffle Lever To Full! as their “Top Title” in the humour section of their new titles, describing it as a “highly entertaining field report-cum-misty-eyed childhood memoir about the weird parallel universe that is the SF, cult TV and film conventions”.
Which is nice. I’m facing up to these things with a mixture of anticipation and utter terror, though. I’ve never done anything in my life before worthy of being officially “reviewed”, and I’m not sure whether to duck and cover when these things start appearing. I like to think I’m a bluff old cove who can laugh off criticism, but I’m a sensitive soul at heart. I get paranoid if someone laughs at my trousers (which has happened so often that I should really be used to it by now).
I’ve also noticed a couple of people seemingly concerned that the book might be a merciless mickey-take of sci-fi fans and the way they act at conventions. Which I’m kind of keen to address, really. Yes, the book’s meant to be funny, and as such it does have some stories of delightfully eccentric behaviour and oddness at these conventions. And such behaviour often comes from myself.
But what I was really keen to avoid (and I hope I have) is a kind of “pointing at the geeks” exercise. I haven’t written this book as an outsider’s perspective on fandom, I wrote it from the point of view of someone who was going to these conventions anyway, as a fan. I genuinely love all of the TV shows and films that I covered, and didn’t go into them all with the outright intention of writing a book. That idea gestated as I went to more and more events, and I only started writing and looking for a publisher once the whole trip was done and dusted. So while there’s a lot of humour and eccentricity in there, I hope it’s seen to have all the affection that I intended, rather than anything more cynical.
I like to think that most fans have a sense of humour about the things that they do, and in fact I’ve even been contacted by one Robin Of Sherwood fan who was keen that I made them look like “a PROPER bunch of weirdos” rather than trying to dress things up nicely! Although, ironically, most of the fans I met at the Robin Of Sherwood convention were dressed up nicely, usually in medieval wench’s costumes or nuns’ habits.
And that was just the men. I thangggyou.
Wiffle Lever To Full! 
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