The papers this morning were extremely good. I was particularly impressed by Finnish scholar Jenni Tyynelä who compared the philosophy of multiple worlds used by Diana with the philosophical doctrines of David Lewis. We ended up pretty certain that Diana had read Lewis, and quite a bit about quantum mechanics as well.

Caroline Webb’s paper got me thinking a lot more seriously about the Chrestomanci books, and about how what Diana says about identity might be compared with Judith Butler. I may write something about this eventually.

Sadly today also saw the one poor paper I’ve attended all weekend. Here’s a hint for you, people: if you are giving a paper at an academic conference, don’t spend most of your time reading from your own fanfic. Just don’t.

The feedback on the conference was uniformly positive, with many people commenting that the quality of the papers was extremely high. Aside from the general suckage of the university’s internet service, nothing went wrong. The rain even managed to fall only during panel sessions. It was as close to flawless as such an event can be. Lots of people were asking for another one, but Charlie and Farah are wisely suggesting we wait until 2011, because the community of DWJ scholars isn’t really big enough to support an annual event.

(It is worth noting here that out of around 70 attendees we had people from 14 different countries. That’s great, but international travel is expensive.)

Hey, maybe by 2011 I will have read enough of Diana’s books to be able to give a paper myself.

I’m planning to do a proper con report as well. However, I need to get turned around and headed off for Finncon on Tuesday. There’s also a Worldcon looming. How do people ever have the time to get bored?

I spent the evening in Bristol in the company of Joanne Hall and Andy Bigwood who are part of the local group looking to set up a regular convention here. It was a very positive meeting, and I like what I’m hearing from these folks. This year’s con will be very small, but the plan for next year is to do a whole weekend and I hope that people will give this year some support so they’ll feel encouraged about next year.

I’ll have more to say about this in a few weeks when we have more information on line. In the meantime, however, I should point out that Andy has won the BSFA Best Artwork prize for the past two years, so whatever else happens we should have a kick ass art show.

So, here I am in Bristol – at the University of the West of England campus at Frenchay to be precise. I have a room, I have mobile broadband (because the university Internet sucks) and I have a convention. So far so good.

Charlie Butler opened the convention with an extended metaphor about food and apologies for Diana’s non-attendance. The poor dear is very ill, and isn’t going anywhere much right now. We do, however, have the very wonderful Sharyn November in her place. Sharyn has cut her hair, which means that now she only has about 5 times as much hair as I do, rather than 50 times as much. I’m still jealous.

Deborah Kaplan opened proceedings with a paper about age confusion in DWJ’s books. Apparently publishers have a bunch of silly rules about what kids will and will not read. They bear a remarkable resemblance to the well known rule that teenage girls will always buy magazines aimed at an age group 1 or 2 years beyond where they currently are. That’s pretty much true for the magazines, but it isn’t anywhere near true for books. Diana understands that, but even so it is quite surprising that kids take to a book as complex as Hexwood.

Two interesting things came out of this. Firstly the age recommendations on Amazon are often wrong. This isn’t Amazon’s fault — they take feeds from publishers, but the people at the publishers apparently often key in the wrong information about books.

Secondly it was heartwarming to hear Sharyn say that US publishers don’t worry much about what adults will think, or about attempts to ban books, they’ll place a book in the YA market if they think it will sell better there. In other words, the Americans have a solid commercial focus — it is places like the UK where publishers get more nannyish about what they think kids should read.

Tui Head won me over straight away by introducing her talk in Maori. There are people from all over the world here. Tui is from Wellington (and therefore complains bitterly about British coffee). I have also met people from the US, Australia and Japan. I’m sure there are Europeans here too.

Tui’s talk was about girls in adventure fiction. It was a bit unpolished, but it did throw up some useful thoughts. It appeared pretty much agreed that Diana doesn’t like adult women much.

The final session for today was a talk on Diana’s life by Nicholas Tucker, who has known her ever since WWII. He was very entertaining, and I very much liked his suggestion that the traditional British children’s adventure story is actually designed to prepare the kids for being sent away to boarding school.

I’ll have more tomorrow, and some time during the weekend I am going to interview Andy Sawyer about the new John Wynham novel I saw at the London Book Fair. If you want to keep up with the panels as they happen, follow me on Twitter.

Over the weekend I shall be at the Diana Wynne Jones Conference in Bristol. I’m not a great expert on Diana’s work, so I thought I’d ask you folks which papers sound most interesting to you. You can find the schedule here. Which ones would you most like me to report back on?

New Zealand fan, Joffre Horlor, has produced a lengthy report on ConScription, including a lot of pictures. You can read it here. I’d like to quote a few short bits. First:

Julie [Czerneda] came across as having irrepressible enthusiasm for science and for explaining it to kids.

Oh my, yes she does. Julie is magnificently enthusiastic. And secondly:

The committee organizing next year’s convention, Au Contraire!, gave a spirited talk. The committee consists mostly of women under the age of 30, and they started off by asking a question that I’d wondered at myself: given that there are clearly thousands of people in New Zealand interested in Star Trek, Buffy, paranormal romance and other genre works, why do so few people go to cons? So the committee has set themselves the ambitious goal of reconnecting SF&F fans with the convention circuit. They plan to do this by keeping the registration fee very low, but actively promoting the con, and by shifting the emphasis of the con from guests towards the fans themselves, by covering activities such as fanfic.

Wellington next year, everyone. Let’s give them plenty of support.

Yes, seriously, there is going to be a convention here in the UK that is almost local to me. And I’m not talking about the Diana Wynne Jones conference, which is an added bonus, this is an ordinary fan-run convention.

Details: the date is Saturday September 26th (that’s the weekend after FantasyCon). It is taking place in the Mercure near Temple Meads Station, which has lovely function space (it was used as part of the Comic Expo). The con will be very small – just four panels, followed by an evening ceilidh. The local fan group has wisely decided to start with something simple and build on that. Then again, it is also cheap: £20. Some of the people running it are Firefly fans, so the dance has a Firefly theme and there will be a separate showing of Serentity on the Friday night (£5). You can register by PayPal here. The convention is being run on a non-profit basis with excess income being donated to Equality Now (which I recall is a favorite charity of Joss Whedon).

I’m apparently on a panel about whether UK SF is better or worse than American SF…

Obviously if you happen to live locally you should plan to come along and show support. If this event works, next year should see something bigger and better. But because the venue is so convenient for Temple Meads (about 10 mins walk) the con is actually very easy to get to from all sorts of places. Authors should note that there’s a largish Forbidden Planet in town as well as a big Waterstones. As the con is afternoon/evening a late morning signing might be a good idea. Con runners might want to come and look at the venue. Mad people thinking of the next UK Worldcon should come and meet the Bristol group.

The Facebook event page is here, and a bunch of you are about to get invitations.