I’ll be at Geysercon in Rotorua Queen’s Birthday Weekend, Saturday May thirty-first and Sunday June first. If you happen to be there, please stop me and say hello.

I am on two panels. The first I’m the moderator (so hopefully I’ll shut the face up and let the panel members do the talking), and the other I’m a panel member.

I’m moderating the panel To Boldly Go: Ships in SFF featuring Kodi Washere, Dave Hadwin, Carleton Chinner, and Guest of Honour Alena Van Arendonk. Fortunately, having been in touch with the others, they know their spaceships and their SF way better than me. I feel privileged to be along for the ride.

I’m a panel member on Scripts to Screen. So I’m relatively inexperienced on this one, so we’ll see how it goes. I offered to be on the panel since I have licensed the film rights to one of my stories. That’s exciting, though I am very conscious that it’s a long way from rights to sitting in a theatre watching a finished film. I’m excited by the director and his energy for the project, but it is very early days right now. We’ll see.

That story is “Ventiforms” which appeared in the January/February issue of Asimov’s. The story is available as a pre-order ebook, with full release on the first day of conference. From Amazon and various other retailers. Also available as a nice little print book on Amazon too (actually available right now, since I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to do a pre-order with the print versions). I will have a few print copies with me at the conference.

The other two panelists, Jean Gilbert (moderator) and Claire McKenna, have far more experience than I do. Expect starry eyes from me there.

I have been a fan of film since I was a kid. One of my day job bosses years ago loved film too and he had this cool way of rating a film. Any number from one to fifty-two. A film with a rating of fifty-two was for films that people who see a film a week should see. A rating of one was for films that people who go to a film a year should go and see. As in, this is the ‘film of the year’.

Me, I usually saw more than fifty films in a year. And I still do. The arrival of Netflix has upped that number. Whew.

So I like to think that I have some understanding of the process of short story/novel to script to film. As in a novel is a different medium to film, so things don’t necessarily work interchangeably.

The example I like to use is how in Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the entire third act of the film is an extrapolation of a single sentence in the book, in effect.

Similarly, whole tracts of novels’ storylines are left out of films based on them.

As well as “Ventiforms”, there will be copies of some of my other books on sale at the convention bookstore. And please do introduce yourself if you’re there.