Well, Saturday was the big day, and my sister made a little video of the people speaking at the launch. I hadn't done the whole "artistic release" business or gained approval in advance from attendees to film them, so it's a video of just the emceee, Jon Marshall, the guest speaker, Sandra Wigzell of Book Expo Australia, and myself, with a short reading from Wild Thing, at the end. (From the scene that introduces Sara/Leeth, in which Dr Alex Harmon "acquires" her for his research.)
Considering that I hadn't explained how to operate the camera, I think my big sister did a fantastic job (thanks, Lisa!). The little Canon Ixus170 did a pretty good job, too: it went from completely out of focus to nicely in-focus within 20 seconds, all on its own we think. For the first 20 seconds, Lisa was getting it framed correctly, so I've replaced that portion of the video with a still shot taken by Alfred Bellanti (thank you, Alfred!) who came along with Lama Jabr (of Xana Publishing & Marketing), who has been very helpful to me, and Gabriella Kovac, Ehssan, and I think perhaps Andrew A., and others too.
Apologies also for missing the first few seconds of Jon's intro, in which he thanked everyone, and went on to say that because I dreamed up Leeth for an RPG campaign that we played for about five years in the early 90s, he'd known Leeth for a long time: longer than her age of around eighteen (by the end of Vol 2).
I've hesitated to admit the detailed genesis for Leeth, since my own experience of reading novelisations of role-playing game campaigns is that they've been uniformly pretty awful. I feel that this (turning an RPG campaign into a novel) is what lay behind the only failure(s) - to my mind - of my literary hero, Roger Zelazny. But some things from an RPG and a novel are in complete agreement - and that's the characters, first and foremost. And secondly, the world. Or at least, the feel of the world: I completely replaced the RPG world with one of my own creation.
These fictional worlds shared the same blending of magic and science, and were set in similar time periods in our future; there's even some similarities in the mix of races, and how magic works. (Which is based on real world ideas of the hermetic and shamanic forms of magic, with interesting bits and pieces of Carlos Castaneda's curious experiences stirred in to spice things up.) I think Shadowrun was a bit more dystopian than my own near-future world: for me, there are lots of good bits, too. I think of it as a "mixtopian" future.
Some games really spark, and work brilliantly; our Shadowrun campaign was like that. The character I played for some years was my most fun character ever; and his ending was as traumatic as it was dramatic. Thinking about it now, I rather suspect that Leeth was my way of coping with that loss: I set myself the goal of inventing a character who would be even more fun and original and challenging to play than Mike d'Angelo - a big ask!
I took along some "show and tell" for the launch:
- My original hand-written MS (of about 400 sheets of closely-written, mostly-A4 sheets of paper, each carefully numbered).
- A fake scientific (sociological) paper about the disenfranchised people, the cast-offs of the advanced and successful society only a few miles away, who lived in the shattered and now undesirable parts of the city. I did this half for fun, and half to clarify in my own mind how this second society functioned.
- Leeth's original character notes, and the formal "character sheet" which included an illustration of what Leeth looked like, in the persona she was operating under for the campaign. When you eventually see "Bonnie" turn up, you'll know I've finally started to delve into some of the actual experiences from the campaign! I think some of the conversations may well appear in the books. You'll then be able to judge whether or not I succeed in my approach to novelising a few parts from the game.
- Notes on the personnel and purpose of the Institute for Paranormal Dysfunction, along with a map of the building and grounds.
- Notes on the personnel and purpose of the Bureau for Internal Development (or at least, the ultra-secret Department concealed within it).
- A kind of graph or time-line which I titled "The Genesis of Leeth", in discussion with my step-daughter Leonie ("Do you think it should have a title, Luke?") at about 2pm on the day of the launch. It showed the thousands of hours of work put in to the creation of Leeth across the years, with significant events and milestones marked.
Anyway, I doubt that anyone really wants to know that much about all this. And I've probably also put this on the wrong blog: it should be over on All About Leeth, not here on my blog on self-publishing
So let's leave it at that. Thanks once again to everyone who was able to come along to the launch in person, and who made it such a happy event for me. And best wishes to those who wanted to come along, but for whom circumstances or obligations conspired against them.
