I'm no fanboy
Sure I queued in the rain to get Alan Moore's signature on my copy of Watchmen, and if I were to go through my over-large collection of books, I might find a few scribbled in by authors (I went through a Pratchett phase once, but I've grown out of it now).
I remember at school, many, many years ago, Sir Edmund Hilary came to talk to us about climbing Everest. I thought he was a jolly interesting fellow, and resolved to become a mountaineer. The fact that my vertigo made it difficult for me to even climb the ropes in PT put a swift end to that career choice, but the most notable thing I remember from the encounter was that several of my peers clustered around Ed (as he likes to be called) with little leather bound books, which he then signed for them.
Call me naive (it's less insulting than many of the things I've been called, believe me), but until that point, age about ten I suppose, I'd never come across the phenomenon of autograph hunting. Other celebrities of the time came to our school -I remember Hank Marvin turning up once - and all the cool kids had their books at the ready. The best I could ever muster was a scrap of paper, usually with a WWII aerial dogfight doodled on it. Die Nazi pig! None of those scraps ever lasted to the end of term. I just didn't care enough. I'd met the guy, wasn't that enough?
And then I got into comics. It seemed to be the thing to do - get everything you could signed by the writer and artist. To my mind this ruins a perfectly good comic, but most people seem to think that it adds to the value of the thing. Then there was the craziness of the late eighties, when you had to buy three of everything - one to read, one to get signed and sealed away, unread, as a pension plan, and one to sell after about six months to recoup the cost of buying the other two. For a while it worked, too, though I never indulged much. I have a few key comics signed, but as I lived in the sticks it was hard enough getting the damned things in the first place, let alone making it along to Forbidden Planet when one of the creative types was about.
Conventions seemed the best place to go, but there's something incredibly sad about turning up with a bagful of Uncanny X-Men, trying desperately to work out who should be signing what. In the end, my natural shyness was far greater than my desire for signatures. It was the stories that kept me coming back. And when the stories stopped being any good, I stopped buying - there's a five year gap in my X-Men collection, for instance.
Later, when I started writing, I found conventions incredibly depressing. No-one wanted to see aspiring writers, it was all about the artists (though to be fair, I sold my one and only professional, paying story at the Glasgow Con). So I stopped going to them - not difficult when they stopped holding them in Scotland and I could scarcely afford the comics, let alone the cost of a weekend in a far-flung city south of the border (the cost of vaccination shots alone could have fed me for a week).
And so, bit by bit, I've become distanced from that industry. I'm hopeless at names at the best of times, so it's easy to see how I might not try to keep up. If the story's good, that's all that matters, I say to myself. The people aren't important.
Except that they are, of course. This was an industry I was hoping to work in for a living (cue embarrassed laughter), and yet when I finally made it to a UK con and found myself with the opportunity to drink Tequila Slammers with Jim Lee, I turned it down, because I didn't know who he was, and was too embarrassed to ask. It was only later that I found out he was responsible for finding and hiring new talent for DC comics. Doh!
But the names frighten me, in much the same way as I get all sweaty-palmed and shaky when meeting strangers who might be useful people to know. It's shyness at its most pathological, and it's not a great asset to any career. I see the endless lists of names - published authors who I've never heard of, never read and probably never will - and think myself too illiterate to move in the same society as them. I read the casual conversations on people's blogs in much the same way as I used to hang around the edges of conversations at university, not having a clue who my friends were talking about, wondering how I managed to get this far without being rumbled. There isn't enough time in the world to know everything these people seem to know. And so I feel very small.
But you know what? There's tons of stuff I know that they don't. I've seen Spider McKenzie and The Old Blind Dogs play the Blue Lampie in Aberdeen; I've translated the Aenied (though mercifully my schoolboy verse no longer exists); my mother had a cat called Lord Peter Wimsey given to her by Dorothy L Sayers (who was a family friend); It doesn't really matter that I've read very little crime/mystery fiction and yet I'm trying to write it. It doesn't matter that I can't make up my mind what genre to concentrate on and that I consider myself very poorly read in all of them. Some might say that it's really rather liberating.
There was a reason to this introspective meandering, something that set the whole mind-wander off. I'd tell you what it was, but then I'd have to hunt you all down, one by one, and kill you.
I remember at school, many, many years ago, Sir Edmund Hilary came to talk to us about climbing Everest. I thought he was a jolly interesting fellow, and resolved to become a mountaineer. The fact that my vertigo made it difficult for me to even climb the ropes in PT put a swift end to that career choice, but the most notable thing I remember from the encounter was that several of my peers clustered around Ed (as he likes to be called) with little leather bound books, which he then signed for them.
Call me naive (it's less insulting than many of the things I've been called, believe me), but until that point, age about ten I suppose, I'd never come across the phenomenon of autograph hunting. Other celebrities of the time came to our school -I remember Hank Marvin turning up once - and all the cool kids had their books at the ready. The best I could ever muster was a scrap of paper, usually with a WWII aerial dogfight doodled on it. Die Nazi pig! None of those scraps ever lasted to the end of term. I just didn't care enough. I'd met the guy, wasn't that enough?
And then I got into comics. It seemed to be the thing to do - get everything you could signed by the writer and artist. To my mind this ruins a perfectly good comic, but most people seem to think that it adds to the value of the thing. Then there was the craziness of the late eighties, when you had to buy three of everything - one to read, one to get signed and sealed away, unread, as a pension plan, and one to sell after about six months to recoup the cost of buying the other two. For a while it worked, too, though I never indulged much. I have a few key comics signed, but as I lived in the sticks it was hard enough getting the damned things in the first place, let alone making it along to Forbidden Planet when one of the creative types was about.
Conventions seemed the best place to go, but there's something incredibly sad about turning up with a bagful of Uncanny X-Men, trying desperately to work out who should be signing what. In the end, my natural shyness was far greater than my desire for signatures. It was the stories that kept me coming back. And when the stories stopped being any good, I stopped buying - there's a five year gap in my X-Men collection, for instance.
Later, when I started writing, I found conventions incredibly depressing. No-one wanted to see aspiring writers, it was all about the artists (though to be fair, I sold my one and only professional, paying story at the Glasgow Con). So I stopped going to them - not difficult when they stopped holding them in Scotland and I could scarcely afford the comics, let alone the cost of a weekend in a far-flung city south of the border (the cost of vaccination shots alone could have fed me for a week).
And so, bit by bit, I've become distanced from that industry. I'm hopeless at names at the best of times, so it's easy to see how I might not try to keep up. If the story's good, that's all that matters, I say to myself. The people aren't important.
Except that they are, of course. This was an industry I was hoping to work in for a living (cue embarrassed laughter), and yet when I finally made it to a UK con and found myself with the opportunity to drink Tequila Slammers with Jim Lee, I turned it down, because I didn't know who he was, and was too embarrassed to ask. It was only later that I found out he was responsible for finding and hiring new talent for DC comics. Doh!
But the names frighten me, in much the same way as I get all sweaty-palmed and shaky when meeting strangers who might be useful people to know. It's shyness at its most pathological, and it's not a great asset to any career. I see the endless lists of names - published authors who I've never heard of, never read and probably never will - and think myself too illiterate to move in the same society as them. I read the casual conversations on people's blogs in much the same way as I used to hang around the edges of conversations at university, not having a clue who my friends were talking about, wondering how I managed to get this far without being rumbled. There isn't enough time in the world to know everything these people seem to know. And so I feel very small.
But you know what? There's tons of stuff I know that they don't. I've seen Spider McKenzie and The Old Blind Dogs play the Blue Lampie in Aberdeen; I've translated the Aenied (though mercifully my schoolboy verse no longer exists); my mother had a cat called Lord Peter Wimsey given to her by Dorothy L Sayers (who was a family friend); It doesn't really matter that I've read very little crime/mystery fiction and yet I'm trying to write it. It doesn't matter that I can't make up my mind what genre to concentrate on and that I consider myself very poorly read in all of them. Some might say that it's really rather liberating.
There was a reason to this introspective meandering, something that set the whole mind-wander off. I'd tell you what it was, but then I'd have to hunt you all down, one by one, and kill you.
Comments
The only autograph I value is one of Michael Irvin (formerly with the Dallas Cowboys) on a topless bar napkin. If you know Michael's history, you'll know why I value that napkin, if you don't know his history, it won't much imagination to fill in your own story and be very close to the truth.