Speculation, Fact and Fiction

The June/July calendar sees me doing a good deal more teaching than usual.

As I've already mentioned, I'm doing a workshop at the Winchester Writers' Conference, over the weekend of 27th-29th June. The way that's going to work is a session Friday evening, me doing some one-to-one meetings on the Saturday and then another session with the workshop folks on Sunday morning. Okay, that'll be a local variant of the tried-and-tested workshop/seminars I've run for a few years now, for lit fests and conventions.

New to the diary is the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education who've invited me to be their prose fiction tutor on this year's creative writing diploma summer school. That's going to keep me busy 23rd-25th June. As well as individual tutorials, I'm going to be teaching four sessions - so I've decided two will be covering plot, as in 'what' and then 'how and why'. Then I want to look at 'who' and 'where'.(Which will obviously refer back to the what/how/why given the way these things all interact.)

I have a fair amount of material already but would be interested in any particularly good McGuffins, plot devices and twists anyone has come across lately, also any passages that are particularly effective in conveying character and voice, and in creating atmosphere and sense of place. Not just from SF&F books, but from other genres and y'know, taken from yer actual literature should you happen to have any examples to hand.

Finally, I'm giving a lecture on 11th July on Oxford and Fantasy, for a cohort of foreign language students. Perhaps inevitably, the brief I've been given is Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, CS Lewis and Pullman. Which will all be fascinating and should be good fun to research etc. Mind you, I can see I'll be flagging up the way that all of these authors's writings owe so much to places that aren't Oxford! See Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot and the various biographies of Tolkien and Lewis for more on that.

The thing is, I want to flag up as many other SF&F writers who have ties to Oxford as possible. For eg, Brian Aldiss, Diana Wynne Jones, Lisa Tuttle, Dave Langford, Chaz Brenchley and er, me. That's just a list of names that immediately leap to mind. Anyone got any other suggestions?

So, all contributions gratefully received. In the meantime, I had better crack on with the writing of Blood in the Water, so the prep and doing of all this additional stuff doesn't derail the deadline!