I’m really looking forward to this weekend, and not only because I’ll be a Guest of Honour alongside John Meaney, Jim Burns, Alice and Steve Lawson and Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The convention programme opens at 2pm on Friday, after the Committee and the Guests of Honour have had the privilege of meeting the city’s Lord Provost.

At 3pm Friday, I’ll be discussing how to find new authors to read and how best to get hold of their books, with Gillian Redfearn, Kris Black, Ian Whates and Joshua Bilmes.

At 5pm Friday, myself, Dame Jocelyn, Christine Davidson, Clare Boothby and Stephanie Saulter will be discussing the professional challenges that face women scientists and women writers, looking for overlap and shared solutions.

On Saturday morning, I’m running the first of two workshops on using visual references in your writing. These are sign-up items, so make your interest known at registration. You don’t have to bring any work, just a willingness to share your thoughts as we look at a selection of pictures and discuss how and where writers can find inspiration. Saturday’s looking at people, for character development, and Sunday’s looking at places, for scene-setting and building atmosphere.

And there’s a Kaffeeklatsch at 1pm on Saturday as well, if you fancy coming and having a chat.

Kari Sperring has kindly agreed to interview me so we’ll be talking about my work and probably a whole lot of other things around writing epic fantasy in this day and age from 4pm on Saturday.

Then at 7pm I compete with the other Guests of Honour Jim and John, to consign objects of hatred to oblivion in Room 101 I’ll be interested to see how the audience respond to one of my suggestions…

Sunday morning’s my second workshop and then at 1pm, I’m discussing politics in SF&Fantasy with Ken MacLeod, Nicholas Whyte, Traci Whitehead and Farah Mendelsohn.

Then at 5.30, I’ll join Paul Van Oven, John Meaney and Steve Lawson in celebrating Terry Pratchett’s work, under the sage tutelage of Edward James.

Now you can see why I cannot possibly pick a favourite item out of that programme.

Monday’s more relaxed, in the sense that John Meaney and I will be demonstrating our respective martial arts from 10am, so if you want to pick up some tips about writing realistic hand to hand/sword/knife fight scenes – or if you’re just curious – do come along.

Then there’s talk of a quiz in the afternoon… so I will try not to drop John on his head in the morning and if I’ve managed to get enough sleep thus far, I may even have a few answers myself.

This is of course, merely a fraction of the full, excellent programme. You can find full details here where I predict you’ll soon find you’ll be spoiled for choice.