"What do you write?"
Jan. 22nd, 2026 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseI went to a Blake's 7 convention once. Only once, surprisingly. It was in Bedford, and I cosplayed Avon because of course I did; while I have to say it would be rather stressful to have a coffee with him, he was undoubtedly a brilliant character. I've always said, and I still maintain, that he was a tragic anti-hero worthy of Shakespeare. (I knew Paul Darrow, who played him, to a certain extent; he was a likeable old buffer with a beautiful speaking voice, a quirky sense of humour, and a fondness for dachshunds, carpet slippers, and - of all things - garden gnomes. Some of the fans at the convention found out about this and presented him with a gnome. I knew his wife Janet a lot better than I knew him, and she was, shall we say, less thrilled about the gnome... but she was very tolerant.)
I was there with a friend who was a published writer. She wrote pulp Westerns for libraries, and several of her characters were a nod to those in B7 - "Sheriff Darrow", in particular, was (obviously) quite a lot like Avon, in the more good-aligned interpretation. (One of the really fascinating things about Avon as a character was his ambiguity. He always claimed to be totally selfish, and he would explain his apparently good actions in terms of selfishness and pragmatism; well, he certainly wasn't a classic hero type, but the viewer was always left wondering if he was really quite as bad as he painted himself.) Neither of us could manage to get to things like this very often, so we had both decided we were going to do it properly, and we had bought tickets to the gala dinner. The way that worked was that each of the convention guests would be allocated a table seating maybe ten or a dozen people, and the rest of us would be shared round them, so everyone got a chance to have dinner with one of the guests.
My friend and I got Scott Fredericks. He had played Carnell, who was not a regular character but popped up in a few episodes. Carnell was full-on evil, and the way Scott played him was a real study in menacing understatement. There were quite a few fans who really liked the character although he was so unpleasant; I didn't, at all, though I did think he was beautifully acted. So when I found we'd got Scott, I really didn't know quite what to expect.
My friend landed up with the seat immediately to Scott's left, and I was sitting next to her on the other side. She was one of the people who liked Carnell, so she was already off to a flying start; and when she's chatty, she's very chatty, so soon she was telling him enthusiastically about all her books (she had about ten of them in print at that point) and I was hardly getting a word in edgeways.
Until Scott suddenly looked straight at me and said, "And what about you? What do you write?"
I blinked. "How did you know I write?" I asked, flabbergasted.
He grinned. "It's your turn of phrase!"
I think we ended up on the right table. :-)
I was there with a friend who was a published writer. She wrote pulp Westerns for libraries, and several of her characters were a nod to those in B7 - "Sheriff Darrow", in particular, was (obviously) quite a lot like Avon, in the more good-aligned interpretation. (One of the really fascinating things about Avon as a character was his ambiguity. He always claimed to be totally selfish, and he would explain his apparently good actions in terms of selfishness and pragmatism; well, he certainly wasn't a classic hero type, but the viewer was always left wondering if he was really quite as bad as he painted himself.) Neither of us could manage to get to things like this very often, so we had both decided we were going to do it properly, and we had bought tickets to the gala dinner. The way that worked was that each of the convention guests would be allocated a table seating maybe ten or a dozen people, and the rest of us would be shared round them, so everyone got a chance to have dinner with one of the guests.
My friend and I got Scott Fredericks. He had played Carnell, who was not a regular character but popped up in a few episodes. Carnell was full-on evil, and the way Scott played him was a real study in menacing understatement. There were quite a few fans who really liked the character although he was so unpleasant; I didn't, at all, though I did think he was beautifully acted. So when I found we'd got Scott, I really didn't know quite what to expect.
My friend landed up with the seat immediately to Scott's left, and I was sitting next to her on the other side. She was one of the people who liked Carnell, so she was already off to a flying start; and when she's chatty, she's very chatty, so soon she was telling him enthusiastically about all her books (she had about ten of them in print at that point) and I was hardly getting a word in edgeways.
Until Scott suddenly looked straight at me and said, "And what about you? What do you write?"
I blinked. "How did you know I write?" I asked, flabbergasted.
He grinned. "It's your turn of phrase!"
I think we ended up on the right table. :-)
