Drop by the Visiting Writers Page to read their posts.
Paul Garrety
Ben Peek & Stephanie Campisi
Ian Irvine
Sally Newham
Michele Cashmore
Thoraiya Dyer
A A Bell
Lara Morgan
Paul Collins
Glenda Larke
Kylie Chan
Dave Freer
Rhonda Roberts
Edwina Harvey
Nicole Murphy
Lynne Jamneck
Dave Freer
Kate Forsyth
Cat Sparks
I think Felicity has to be the winner, as she has thought about the question in detail and also because the stories in Baggage are about Australia, which fits with her answer.
Both Chris’s answers are cool, but perhaps a bit less practical. I like Cels’s idea about meeting Jane Austen, too, but I’d be worried about being disappointed–you know how it is when you love an author’s books but it’s a shock to meet them in person.
Thanks for taking the trouble to think about it and answer, everyone! And Happy New Year for 2011, I hope it is a great Year of the Rabbit for you all.
To organise postage of your prize please email Maxine. mmacarthur(at)ozemail (dot)com(dot)au
Seeing as how Sunday is the 2nd of January 2011, I thought a post about setting goals would be appropriate.
I did a post on goal setting for the Mad Genius Club blog – see here – where I cover all the usual things about goal setting then I add:
‘All work and no play makes a writer’s creative muscle grow weak, not stronger. So as well as setting goals for completing and submitting work, I think any creative person needs to -’ and I list five things to do, to stretch your creative muscle. Last year I did number 3 in a big way. I took on a new job and learnt a whole new skill set that really stretched me and made me a better writer, because it involved telling story through film.
Over at Tansy’s blog you’ll see how she set herself goals for 2010 and now she has assessed them to see what she has achieved.
I like the way she has divided her goals into WIP (work in progress), Future Projects and Home Life (things that will make her life smoother so that she has more time to write). This seems like an excellent way to set realistic/ achievable goals.
When we do our ROR retreats we set realistic goals and dream goals. It’s funny but our dream goals all seem to involve making enough money from writing so that we quit our day jobs and write full time.Which when you think about it, means we’d rather write than take a holiday, or win tattsloto. Mind you winning tatts would mean not having to work, so we could write all day. But you see what I mean. For us, writing isn’t work!
My long suffering husband has retired and sometimes he’ll say to me, Would you like to go see a movie, or have lunch out? And I’ll say, You know what I’d really like? I’d like two hours of uninterrupted time to write! Not very romantic, I know. But, if he takes me out and my head is in my WIP, he says he can hear the gears grinding, because I get that far away look in my eyes and there are long pauses in the conversation.
So I’m going to take Tansy’s advice and do my goals for 2011, and this time next year I can assess them.
WIP: Clean up and hand in the three books for The Outcast Chronicles in May. This project has grown because I realised I’d ended book one in the wrong spot, so I chopped it off earlier, then had to enlarge on a sub plot to create a satisfying ending. This had a roll-on effect in book two and book three that I’m still scrambling to correct.
Future Project: Do a draft of book one of the new King Rolen’s Kin trilogy and outline books two and three. We’re hoping to have a ROR in September, so I’ll need to have a rough draft of book one by then. I don’t really know if this is possible, as I’m teaching an accelerated course, with assessment every 3 weeks. When those weeks roll around I have to do 12 hour days to get through the marking. But I’m certainly willing to give it a try.
Home Life: This is the area that is problematical. We’re renovating. In the first half of this year we’ll rip out a wall, pull out the old kitchen, tile, paint and install a new kitchen. There’s also the laundry and my computer room, which will be retiled, repainted and cleaned up. It will be really nice to have everything fresh and clean and organised. But there will be major upheaval in the meantime. I guess for my home life, I could say that I’d like to get the renovating done so that I have a clean/organised office to write in. I also took out a gym membership (yes, I know I’m crazy) because I was missing my yoga. So I intend to keep fit, plus renovate, plus work, plus write my books.
My last goal for 2011 is this. To be kind to myself. I really need to balance the rest, work and writing parts of my life. I don’t want to run myself into the ground. I need to feed the creative crucible so that there is a rich well to draw ideas from for my next trilogy.
So there you have it. What are your goals for 2011?
I first met the sweet, but ever so sharp, Tansy at World Con in 1999. She’d just had her first book come out and we shared the same publisher. Since then we’ve shared many a ROR and convention. Tansy’s new series Creature Court is an eclectic mix of Ancient Rome and the 1920s. I loved Power and Majesty (book one) in each of its incarnations as it came through ROR and I’m biting my nails, waiting on book two!
Watch out for the give-away question at the end.
Q: You came to writing success very early, winning the Inaugural George Turner SF Prize when you were nineteen (you were twenty by the time the book was published) with Splashdance Silver. If you were able to go back to the nineteen year old Tansy, knowing what you know now and give her advice, what would it be?
Get an agent BEFORE signing the contract! Also, don’t expect that just because you earned a living at this for one year, you’re going to be able to every year, and the ease with which you write the second book is going to be totally misleading about the effort required for all future books… and um, by the way, your publishing house will be bought out within a year and your editor will leave and you’ll lose all your support, and…
Wow, that’s a really depressing topic to start out on! I think something like “This is only the beginning, you will write better books, and this will (eventually) be your career,” is a bit more positive.
Q: You had success early, then you were ‘orphaned’ by your publisher and spent quite a few years out in the cold before being picked up by Harper Collins with your new Creature Court series. Did you ever feel like giving up? How did you sustain your creative drive?
It feels like a really long time (and indeed was a really long time) but I never really stopped. I wrote short stories by the bucketful, and worked on my craft that way. I spent several way fun years playing with small press as part of the ASIM collective. I wrote several manuscripts, and workshopped them with ROR – some were discarded, some went on to publication. I tried different genres and even tried on the hats of a few writerly pseudonyms. I only had one year without a writing credit, the year 2000 – and that was a real kick in the pants. After that I was always working on something, or getting something out there.
The first novel of the Creature Court has actually been six years in the making – I was about a year and a half into writing it when I had to put it away in the hopes of getting my PhD thesis submitted before my first daughter was born (it wasn’t). It took a lot longer to get back to it than I thought and then it only took one more revision before the novel sold. Lots of long periods of waiting – for publishers to decide, and then between the signing of the contract and the actual appearance of the book.
I never thought about giving up! Stop writing, are you mad?
Q: You have two delightful little girls now. Do you find having children has given you a new insight as a writer? And are you ever tempted to write for children?
It’s made me less precious as a writer, for a start. I remember when I used to need a WHOLE DAY to myself to write, and it always had to be at my desktop computer in the same part of the house… crazy, crazy luxuries. I trained myself to write at the drop of a hat, with a baby clamped to my leg, or in a cafe, or in the ad breaks.
I think being a mother has taught me a lot as a person, and that necessarily changes my writing. I don’t know that I’m a deeper or more insightful writer now, but I think I feel things more, and I suspect that has an effect.
I would love to write for children. If I could just get a few months to MYSELF I would run off that superhero middle grade series for girls that I have in my head.
Q: This leads on from the last question. I notice you’ve been reading and reviewing a lot of YA. Is this an area you are thinking of writing in, or do you read it for the love of it?
I long to be a YA author. I have written a few manuscripts, but nothing that has landed a bite yet. I also love reading YA for fun – my attention span has gone to hell over the last couple of years and I have found that YA is just so succinct as far as plot and character goes that it’s very enticing. I’ve been working this year to lure myself away from YA just a bit – reading some actual grown up books – but I do love it, and I really believe that some of the most exciting speculative fiction of the last few years has happened in this genre.
Q: You’ve edited ASIM, Shiny and AustrAlien Absurdities. Do you find editing has helped you develop as a writer? Do you have any advice for short story writers?
I enjoy editing although have been doing my best to give it up because it uses a lot of the same energies as my writing, but doesn’t give (me, personally) nearly as many of the same rewards. It was one distraction too many, once parenthood hit me over the head. Editing has done a lot for me as a writer – increased my critical awareness quite strongly. And it does tempt me back from time to time, but it would have to be a pretty incredible project to make me break my current stance on the matter.
As far as short story writers go – I think the most important thing to tell them is that it’s quite easy to get a half-decent short story published these days. There are so many markets, and so many editors. There’s nothing wrong with going for the cheap and easy sale when you’re just starting out. But ultimately if you want people to take you seriously, you need to look at what you’re sending out there, and whether these are stories good enough to build a reputation on. As someone who served out her “apprenticeship” in public venues, I look quite jealously at newbie authors who come out swinging, earning critical achievements and award nominations and so on with their first few published works.
This applies to novels too: a debut is a terrible thing to waste.
It was Marianne who did it! She and Lynne Jamneck had a glorious plan to edit a charity anthology of Australian urban fantasy, to raise funds for Crohns Disease. Their submission guidelines were so inspiring that I wrote a pitch straight away – because it was an anthology I decided to avoid vampires and werewolves on the basis that most people would choose them, and I decided to set it in Hobart because I figured again I was the only one who would do that!
Once I started thinking of how to turn Hobart into an urban fantasy city, it came so easily – the docks, Salamanca, seamonsters, and Nancy Napoleon standing damaged on the edge of the city, protecting it from invaders. I was so excited that I took a month off what I was supposed to be doing and just wrote the thing. They used it as part of their pitch document for publishers and it got within an inch of being accepted before the Global Financial Crisis hit, and suddenly an anthology wasn’t an appealing risk for a Big Name publisher. So sad…
But Alisa loved the story when I sent it to her next and it was published as the first of the Twelfth Planet Doubles, along with a gorgeous story by Robert Shearman. Since then – well, I have said repeatedly that Siren Beat is the story that keeps giving back! It’s earned me more critical acclaim than any of my previous writings put together, and apart from the various nominations and the lovely win from the WSFA, it’s also now earned me two writing grants to give Nancy Napoleon a novel of her own.
Q: You have a PHD in Classics and spent a month in Rome. I believe the topic of your thesis was Imperial Roman Women. Did this area of study help you develop the world for Creature Court?
Technically the series was first sparked off in my head when a mouse invaded the study in our old house! But that’s a far more mundane story of origin… my studies of Ancient Rome absolutely infused these books. I used my memories of tramping around the city to give a feeling of weight and reality to my imaginary city of Aufleur – which led to all kinds of fun and games when we got to the mapmaking part, I can tell you! Turns out the Rome in my head is nothing like the one on the page…
It was actually my Honours thesis that contributed most to these books – I was studying women’s role in the Roman religion, and one of my great fascinations is the Fasti, a poem which details the many traditional festivals of the old city. I started thinking what it would be like to actually live in a city where the economy revolved around rites and festivals – taking the old ‘bread and circuses’ concept and pushing it further. That was the essential core of Aufleur – sure, there was this whole little plot about dark, twisted magical shape-changing superheroes and the sky trying to kill them, but MOSTLY it’s a book about ancient religious calendars.
Heh okay, that’s a total lie. The festivals are purely background. But they were an important inspiration for the society, and it made me think very much about the role of festivals and traditions in our society. I say this as someone who just totally WON at Christmas, and is very smug at having all her presents bought and wrapped… apart from the 8 or so that haven’t been delivered yet!
Q: Book one, Power and Majesty is out now. When are the other two books due? Did you have the books written or planned when you accepted the contract? If not, was it a struggle with two small children to meet your deadlines?
Book Two, Shattered City, is scheduled for April 2011 and Book Three, Reign of Beasts, is scheduled for October 2011. I had always planned for there to be more of this story, though when I sold Power and Majesty I only had three paragraphs, one for each sequel (it was originally planned to be a series of four). As it turned out, everything from about halfway through Book Two was to change drastically from my initial plots. Part of the reason there was such a long gap between the sale of P&M and its publication was to give me time to write Books 2 and 3.
Words cannot express how hard it was to meet those deadlines. I have always prided myself on being professional and I was so determined to be the author who met every target with quality and quantity and a big smile on my face. I did pretty well to start off with, and even managed to get ahead of my deadlines as far as the writing went – which was totally necessary when my second baby was born! It was the editing that killed me. Juggling a school age daughter, a new baby and writing Book #3 was totally possible, but stretched me to the absolute limit of my resources. So whenever one of those essential things like structural edits, copy edits or proofs arrived for one of the other books, I fell in a heap. I resented that so badly, because I KNOW that I can do that kind of work standing on my head. But it happened over and over, and every time I had to stop writing Book 3 to edit something, I lost all momentum. It was hugely frustrating. Luckily my publishers were understanding, and there was just enough give in the schedules to make everyone happy. I know now that I need to take the fact that I have two children actually into consideration when planning deadlines.
Q: When Marianne and I approached you back in 2001 to see if you’d like to join ROR, you agreed and have been part of the group ever since. Did you find ROR helped you in developing or directing your writing and, if so, in what ways?
Being invited to join ROR was a lovely surprise! It came at a time when I was quite dispirited about my writing career, and gave me a boost that was sorely needed. To be treated as a peer by writers – all women in that initial group – who were older and more experiences than me really made me think about my future, and what I wanted from it, and how to raise my own expectations of what I could do. Also you guys were totally right about what I needed to do with the beginning of Power and Majesty!
There were times when RORing a manuscript gave me the confidence to pursue it and turn it into something great – and other times where I did just let one drop, which is also a good thing to do from time to time. More than anything, I love the time we spend together on those rare weeks away, talking about writing all night, hanging out together, and just FEELING like a writer. It’s soul-feeding.
Q: What are you currently working on?
You have caught me technically between projects! I have some editing and proofing still to do on the remaining Creature Court books, over the summer. I’ve just this week finished a small collection of stories for Twelfth Planet Press which I shall be able to talk more about in due course. And as soon as the school holidays end, I am plunging back into the world of sea monsters, kelpies and Nancy Napoleon to write FURY, a novel that I received an Australia Council Grant and Arts Tasmania grant to write. It’s very exciting!
After that, who knows?
Q: At ROR we always do our realistic goals and our dream goals. So what are your realistic goals (what are you currently working on) and what are your dream goals?
My realistic goals are to sell at least one novel a year for the next five years, but particularly to get the Nancy Napoleon series written. I have one other fantasy series that I long to write but it still requires a lot of sitting and thinking time.
My dream goals are to have a YA career in tandem with an adult fantasy career (once Jem gets to kindergarten I can TOTALLY manage this), possibly running a second writing name to keep it all straight in my head as well as the bookshop catalogues. Also, I long to judge the Tiptree Awards. They are my favourites and my best. I would also love to win one, of course, but that’s almost too dreamy a thing to long for. I want desperately to attend a World Fantasy Convention.
My dream goal used to be about earning a living from my writing, but as the mother of two kids who is also running a small business from home, my concept of “earning a living” has shifted somewhat. I have a lot of jobs right now! Having said that, I would rather like to help my honey slam our mortgage into smithereens. He’s invested rather a lot in me over the years and it’s about time I paid some of it back.
The Give-away question is: “if you could change into an animal, which would you choose and why?”
Tansy will be giving away either a copy of Power and Majesty or Siren Beat Please nominate which you would prefer to receive. The competition will be open until Tuesday of next week when we’ll announce the winner.
I first met Trent at a Vision meeting back in 97, when Marianne and I were running the Vision Writers Workshop. He was working in a bookstore and writing short stories. Trent has had over 70 short stories published and his Urban Fantasy Trilogy Death Works is being published by Orbit.
We invited Trent along to the ROR we held in Varuna, because we knew we’d all benefit from his insight and we thought we needed some input from the male point of view.
Trent is one of life’s true romantics. His stories are both wonderfully whimsical and nicely ironic.
Trent has a copy of his latest book ‘Managing Death’ to give away. See the give-away question at the end of this post.
Q: Your stories have been finalists in the Aurealis Awards many times and have won two Aurealis Awards, yet I had trouble finding a complete list of your stories and where they were available. Are you not writing short stories any more?
I really should do something about putting a bibliography on my website. I guess there’s at least thirty stories I’ve published that I’d rather never see the light of day again, another thirty that I think are suspect and a handful that I’m happy with. Which may explain why I’m not writing any short fiction at the moment.
Short stories are too easy to screw up, and I’ve had a good twenty years of writing them (I started submitting short stories before my eighteenth birthday) so I don’t think there’s a pressing need for me to be writing them. Which doesn’t mean I won’t write any more, but right now I’m happy doing the novels.
Though, you never know when a story might grab you…
Q:Your Death Works trilogy is being published by Orbit. The trilogy is set in Brisbane, based on the premise that Death is a corporate business and your main character starts out as a little cog in a big machine. The Brisbane setting is evident and lovingly defined. Was there any resistance from your UK publisher to an Australian setting like Brisbane?
As far as I know there was no resistance from either my US or UK publisher. And these books are unashamedly set in Brisbane, but, hey, not every Urban Fantasy novel can be set in New York, New Orleans, London or Melbourne.
Q: You seem to be having a lot of fun with the whole Death as a Corporation premise. Where did this idea come from? Have you worked for a faceless corporation?
I just thought it would be an interesting approach to the grim reaper. Not so much a mystical job, but a job. And with the first book I was also writing with Work Choices very much in mind, things were looking for tough for workers and Unions, at the time, and I just reckoned that it would be even tougher for someone who worked for death. Must be the time for it, there’s a bit of a reaper vogue going on at the moment.
Don’t we all work for faceless corporations at one time or another – though they’re never really faceless. It’s the faces that make corporations interesting to write about. They’re states, cults and ideologies all rolled into one. I’ve had some interesting (and eccentric) bosses in my time, and there’s a bit of (some of) them in Mortmax.
Q: It is every writer’s dream to sell a trilogy. Yours wasn’t completed when you sold it. Have you found it challenging writing a book, while editing the previous one?
Yes, I was like the dog that catches the car. What do I with it now? Writing’s always challenging, and you never really know if you can do something until you’ve done it.
With all three books put to bed now, I think I can say that I know I can do this. Though, who knows, the next books I write may not go as smoothly (please ignore this, dear publishers).
It was harder than I expected in some ways – turns out, even with calendars and charts I still have a terrible grasp of time within a story – and easier, Steve’s voice often just dragged me through the narrative.
Q:You were working as editor for RedZine in 2001 How did this come about and what did you learn as a writer and editor while doing this job?
I learnt that editing wasn’t really for me, if I wanted to write. I also learnt that you really need to hook the reader from the beginning or you lose them, which I thought I already knew before this, but editing really drove it home.
Oh, and you should really read a magazine’s submission guidelines – they’re there to help you.
Q: Around this time Prime published a collection of your stories called ‘Reserved for Travelling Shows’. What did you learn in the process of compiling this anthology and is it still available?
One, that I had a bit of a death obsession, and two that really it was too early in my career to publish a collection. It’s a journeyman collection, and while there are some good stories in there, like all journeyman collections there’s some (to put it politely) not so good stuff, too.
It’s still available, and if you put the title into Google Books you can read a fair chunk of it.
Q: You’ve taught at Clarion South, and are currently teaching Creative Writing at QUT. You were a member of VISION for many years and you’ve been a member of ROR for the last 7 years so you have plenty of experience at critiquing. What is the most valuable thing you have learnt over the years about the craft of writing?
Be interesting, that is write what interests you, not what you think should be interesting or what you think you SHOULD be writing. The rewards of writing have to come from the writing itself first, and how can it be rewarding if you are writing something that really isn’t you, and that your heart really isn’t into.
Joy, enthusiasm, and peculiarity, these things make good writing for me.
Q: I believe you have handed in book three of the Death Works series. What is your next project?
I’ve three things that I’m working on. One is something that we critiqued in ROR, a duology called Roil and Night’s Engines. Another is a kid’s series called the Players (I’ve book One written, but I’m waiting on some feedback for that one) and, finally, I’m getting some notes and scenes together for book 4 and 5 of the Death Works Series – there’s still things I want to say about that world.
Q: When Marianne and I approached you back in 2003 to see if you’d like to join ROR, you agreed and have been part of the group ever since. ROR is very different from the VISION writing group in that we critique our novels in progress and we’re all published in novel length fiction. Did you find ROR helped you in developing or directing your writing? And if so, in what ways?
The simple answer is that I didn’t have a novel published before I joined ROR and now I do.
ROR to me is part critiquing group, part family. I find every member of ROR (awe)inspiring, and it’s great to have some wonderful writers with very different approaches to writing as friends and confidantes.
Q: At ROR we always do our realistic goals and our dream goals. So what are your realistic goals and what are your dream goals?
Finish my current projects by the end of 2011, I think that’s realistic enough. As for, dream goal, keep writing what I want, but with a few less financial pressures would be nice, but if not, well, I’m kind of living the dream now.
Give-away Question:
If you were charged with organising a meeting of the world’s Deaths, where would you host it and what food would you serve?
The competition will stay open until Monday night 13th December 6pm and the winner will be announced Tuesday morning on the blog.
There’s a saying in movies that you have to grab the viewer in the first ten minutes.
Next time you’re watching your favourite movies take a look at what has happened by the ten minute mark.
By the time those precious ten minutes are up, the viewer should know who the hero is, what he/she wants and what the main thrust of the plot will be.
And they should CARE about the hero/heroine otherwise they are not going to keep watching and you’ve lost them. The same goes for books.
How far can a reader get in ten minutes? Ten pages, one chapter? How long do you have to capture the reader?
Rather than worry about how long you have, concentrate on making your opening so gripping, the reader has to keep turning the pages.
I love genre. I am unashamedly a genre writer so, for me, Story is King (or Queen if you are worried about sexism). And for me, Story = Plot driven by Character. Now that I’ve warned you about my (not so) hidden agenda, here are my tips.
When I run workshops I tell aspiring writers make me care. To do this:
Give your hero/heroine a BIG problem.
Make your readerlike them. (They don’t have to be all sweetness and light. In fact I like a character better if they have failings. Abercrombie’s Glokta is one of my favourite characters!).
Put your hero/heroine in danger.
Reveal something to the reader, that the character doesn’t know. Make it something they need to know.
Make the bad guys really bad, but with a motivation that would be logical. And if you really want to turn the screws, make your baddie a little bit likable, too.
Set a time limit.
Make your character determined to do something (even if it turns out to be the wrong thing). There is nothing so irritating as a character who vacillates.
Keep back-story to a minimum. (I know this is hard in fantasy and SF because we build these amazing worlds and societies, which impact on our characters’ motivations and life choices. But it is the PEOPLE the reader cares about, not the history). You can fill the reader in later. As a reader, I’ll take a lot on faith if I am captured by the characters and their dilemma. I can catch up with back story later.
Logic – make sure your world building is logical. Nothing breaks the reader’s suspension of disbelief faster than a logic flaw. And if there’s one in the first chapter, the book is likely to be riddled with them.
There’s lots of good advice for writers on how to make their opening chapter/s riveting. Here are Mike Gagon’s tips for writing a great opening for your books. And here at Fiction Notes they cover the basics.
For fun see here for great opening sentences from science fiction books, a post by Charles Jane Anders. And here are 100 great opening lines from all sorts of books. Andhere at About.com is a list of opening chapters (an excerpts) from novels, if you want to do some reading to compare how other authors handle this.
Those first 10 minutes, when the reader steps into your world and into your character’s shoes are critical. Do you have a favourite opening page or two, that gripped you from the start? Is there an author you know you can rely on to sweep you away?
The creative crucible. Writers create narratives built around plot and character from the intangible in their minds. You need a particular type of brain to do this. I came across an article on research in the brains of professional dancers. Turns out dancers brains are genetically different from footballers, who would have thought?
‘in order to be truly exceptional at something creative in nature, whatever domain it may be, you need to have those extreme traits that get you labeled by the DSM as meeting the criteria for some kind of a personality disorder. However (and this is the catch), in order to have those extreme, intense traits and not suffer from a disorder, you also need to have some sort of regulatory mechanism that helps to control those traits.’
‘I believe writing was the first truly verifiable and effective form of magic. Think of how it must have impressed people in ancient times! To look at marks, pressed into fired clay, and know that they convey the words of scribes and kings long dead—it must have seemed fantastic. Knowledge, wisdom and art could finally accumulate, and death was cheated one part of its sting.’
And he makes this rather wry observation: ‘Imagine this. If all of the professional actors and entertainers died tomorrow, how many days before they were all replaced? Whether high or low, empathic or vile—art seems to pour from Homo Sapiens, almost as if it were a product of our metabolism, a natural part of ingesting and excreting. No, sorry. Art may be essential and deeply human, but it ain’t rare.’
What makes the difference between someone with a good idea and an author with many books published is persistence and dedication to the craft of writing and a little bit of luck. (Creating your own luck is a topic for another post).
There are people who plan their plots and people who just grow a plot (I’m one of those). And then there are times when you are revising your manuscript and your vision for the book gets really muddy. We covered revising and editing a couple of weeks ago on the ROR blog.
While cleaning up the first book of my new trilogy (all 3 books due to go to the publisher early next year) I realised that I’d ended book one in the wrong place. This is after spending two months (snatching every moment I had free) to clean the book up and reaching near the end of the 600 page novel, only to come to this revelation.
I was not in a happy place. Well, actually it was a really happy place because I’d been having trouble with the start of book two. And suddenly I woke up (while at World Con) with the realisation that I’d ended book one too late and the last 100 + pages should have been at the beginning of book two. This would give me a much better intro to the characters and set up the story arc for the second book.
Of course as soon as I ended the book earlier, I realised I had the room and time to expand one of the View Point narrative threads and suddenly an extra layer of plot emerged.
That brings me back to plotting. The wonderful Holly Lisle has a page on her website called Plotting Under Pressure. This is a great look at how to pull a plot from almost nothing into something that makes sense, and how to do it in a very short space of time. She talks about your View Point characters, and then the word length and number of scenes.
A while ago the ROR blog covered Beware the Sagging Middle. And also Book Structure 101 . All of which brings me back to the book I’m currently working on.I’m itching to get back to it and pull the last 50 pages together, but before I can do this I need a couple of clear days so I can read it from beginning to end and ensure all the new scenes are integrated with the original chapters of the book.
So are you a planner or do your plots grow organicaly? Do you wake up with the solution to a plotting problem clear in your mind?
If you can get a mentorship this is an opportunity not to be missed. Working with a published writer, who can guide you to help you write the best book you can at this point in your career will help you avoid the blundering around the dark that we all do as we learn.
The ASA mentorship program applications opened today, Friday, October 1st and close on the 29th of October. Here’s the link to the web site.
‘The program offers 15 successful applicants the opportunity to work closely with a mentor of their choice for 30 hours over up to 12 months. Mentorships can be conducted by phone, post, email, face-to-face meetings or a combination of these.’
The mentorship is funded by CAL (Copyright Agency Limited) and it is open to people over 18 who have not had a full length literary work published. For more info, here’s the FAQs page.
Vision member Gary Kemble announced this week that he had received an OZCo (Australian Literature Board) Grant. So I grabbed him and said, Gary, please tell us how you did it!
A bit about Gary:
Gary Kemble is a speculative fiction writer and journalist/blogger/social media guy for the ABC. His two most recent credits are ‘Feast or Famine’ (Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears, Brimstone Press) and ‘Bug Hunt’ (One Books Many Brisbanes 5, BCC). The speculative fiction book he will write is set in Brisbane and is about ghosts, tattoos, police corruption and politics. Here are Gary’s tips on applying for a grant.
Gary on grant writing …
The bad news: most grant applications *aren’t* successful. In the 2010 Australia Council New Work Grant (Emerging) round there were 87 applications, of which 71 were deemed eligible and 13 were successful. The year before, there were 226 applications, but the year before that there were only 58. (http://www.asauthors.org/lib/EWG/2010/ASA_Emerging_Grants_2010.pdf)
The good news: first-time applicants (such as myself) can get funded! So take the process seriously, but try to keep your expectations in check. And if you don’t succeed – try again. You’ll be up against a different batch of applicants, so anything can happen.
I first thought about grants back in 2006, after interviewing horror writer Martin Livings . That was when I realised that the Australia Council actually funded people writing speculative fiction. Up until then, I just assumed that it was only for ‘literature’. I think at the time I looked at the eligibility criteria and realised I didn’t have enough publication credits.
I thought about grants off and on after that, and then earlier this year I noticed that the Queensland Writers Centre had a seminar on grant writing, run by CEO Kate Eltham. It was fantastic. I learnt a bit more about the Emerging Writers Grant and also a bunch of other grants, such as the Arts Queensland Career Development Grant (which I also successfully applied for and, as a result, was able to attend AussieCon 4).
But the real revelation was that the people who administer these grants *want to help you*. That kinda seems like a no-brainer now, but for some reason I imagined they were trying to figure out reasons to *not* give people money. Whereas, in actual fact, they exist to *help* writers, artists etc.
The next step was to sort out my eligibility. There’s the Emerging category, and also the Established category. The Emerging section is administered by the Australian Society of Authorsand the Established is administered by the Australia Council . It’s important to get this right, because if you apply for the wrong grant, they won’t forward it to the other body, it will just be deemed ineligible.
I’d had over 60,000 words published, but in short stories, not one big work. So I phoned the Australia Council, asked them what they thought, and they advised me to apply for the Emerging category.
A key hurdle in applying for the grant is establishing that you are eligible. This is the Australia Council making sure that you’ve got some hope of completing the project that they’re funding. In the case of Emerging writers, you have to have had (if like me your background is short stories) 10 short works of fiction published in ‘professional literary journals, edited anthologies, major newspapers or general national magazines’.
By ‘professional literary journals’ they mean publications (and this includes online publications) where there are submission guidelines and a clear editorial selection process. To give you an idea of what they consider ‘eligible’, my publication credits included Borderlands magazine, Dark Tales magazine, Shadowed Realms (online), Espresso Fiction (online), Ripples magazine, Artworker magazine, The Writing Show (podcast) and the following anthologies: London at Dawn, Zombies, The Devil in Brisbane, One Book Many Brisbanes 3, One Book Many Brisbanes 5. I listed them in reverse chronological author so the assessors could see my progression as a writer.
This process took quite a bit of digging around, even though I keep track of my publication history. They need to know the month of publication, as well as the year, so that’s something to keep in mind when you’re updating your writer’s CV.
The second part of the application process was the project description, stating what you want to do and how you propose to do it. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. I watched the Charlotte Wood case study on the Australia Council website to give me some ideas .
I decided to start with a quick (one longish paragraph) synopsis of my story. And when I say ‘synopsis’, I mean sort of like the blurb you read on the back of a book. I felt it was a strong hook.
After that, I explained how this project would help me develop as a writer – I wanted to fuse my burgeoning fiction talent with the skills that I have acquired as a journalist. I explained the challenges of finding time to devote to a project when you’ve got two small children. I can write at night, but it’s hard to find time to interview people and do research at the library.
Then I did a quick overview of my writing career, explaining both the successes I’ve had writing short stories and also the challenges in moving over to the novel (I’ve written or co-written six novel-length manuscripts) – I explained that even though none of these had been published, they were part of my journey as a writer.
I said that I wanted my novel to be steeped in Queensland history and to do that I would need to do proper research – library research and interviews. I told them I wanted to add to the growing list of speculative fiction novels set in Brisbane: Will Elliott’s Pilo Family Circus, Stephen M Irwin’s The Dead Path, Trent Jamieson’s Death Works trilogy.
After that, I threw in a short paragraph about the novel’s themes, and then one last paragraph about how I’m aiming for this book to be the first in a series.
The final part of the application is a writing sample. This can be anything: a sample of the project you want to work on, or a previous example of your work. I chose an excerpt from ‘Untethered’, the short story published in One Book Many Brisbanes 3 (http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/documents/libraries/obmb3_untethered_kemble.pdf). I did this for two reasons: 1. It’s got the tone I’m going to aim for in my new project, and; 2. I’d worked on it with OBMB editor Rosie Fitzgibbon, so I was confident it was of a high standard.
After that, it’s just a matter of bundling it up and licking the stamps!
In summary:
* Plan for the worst, but hope for the best. I’m living proof that magic happens!
* Short stories are a great way of building your skills and getting over the eligibility hurdle.
* Keep a good record of your publication history – it will save time later.
* Write a project summary that tells the panel about the project, but also how the project will help you develop as a writer.
* Choose a strong example of your writing.
Good luck!
Rowena here, I’ve applied for 2 professional development grants and gotten one. ( A nod of thanks to Arts QLD for funding my trip to the World SF Con in Glasgow in 2005). And I’ve applied for 3 or 4 grants to write new work and not gotten any. Have you applied for any grants and if so, what were they?
Before I jump in to talk about World Con, Trent, Kylie Chan, Louise Cusack, and the authors of the Johnny Marsh books were at Logan North Library today doing a talk and we had a couple of queries which I directed to this blog.
Here are some useful posts leading on from what we talked about.
Waving madly. You know who you are, the girl up the back with the list of questions. LOL
Book Structure 101 (You didn’t actually ask about this, but I’m sure you would have, if we’d had more time).
See how I’ve used a crucible for today’s post illustration? That’s because getting away with other writers, critiquing books, attending panels, being on panels, buying way to many books, catching up with old friends and making new ones will help me to restore my creative crucible!
I’ll be flying out around lunch time Sunday and then nearly all the ROR will team will be in Melbourne so the blog is going to be quiet until we get back. Then we will be bursting with news!
Trent, Richard, Maxine and I will be critiquing our books. Marianne, who is official ROR Oracle, will be coming along because she didn’t want to miss out. Imagine five writers in a room talking the instricacies of Writing Craft for 3 days solid. It would bore anyone else to tears but we get so excited by technique and passionate about obscure points of cratft.
Then it is off to World Con, where there will be panels, parties and tantrums. No. No tantrums, although there could be tears of laughter!
Here’s a New Scientist article on how Games Developers are using academic research :
‘Using data mining to study how gamers play existing titles, though, can give developers instant rewards, such as identifying points in a game where players are likely to become frustrated or bored. The insights could help to tailor future releases to make them more satisfying.’
Wouldn’t it be great if we could analyse why some books grab the imagination of a generation? Twilight, Lord of the Rings, Dune.
What makes a book memorable? Why do some book resonate with readers?
