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.