BWF Report

Guys,

I’m feeling a bit guilty about not posting a long and detailed description of the Brisbane Writers Festival but really, it’s hard to know what to say. The best part was meeting up with Terry and Janette and Kate (I also think I saw Marianne at a great distance and Bernadette, who flashed past with her eyes averted.)

The next best bit was attending the workshops. There was:

One cool author who talked about writing but made me mad with envy at his tale of the international bidding war that started after the first 117 pages of his first novel leaked out to agents. (From the short extract he read out, I must admit, he probably deserved it!)

One dull but worthy chap from the Ausutralian Society of Authors who convinced us with dozens of charts and tables that (a) spec fic is a bad genre to be in if you want to get published and (b) if you do get published, spec fic is a bad genre to be in if you want to make any money.

A rather pompous but famous editor who told us to follow our dream – but don’t give up the day job.

And, finally, an author-cum-academic who bucked me up no end by describing sci-fi as ‘literature that just happens to be set in the future’.

Essentally, we’d heard it all at Bribie Island. Two days of workshops just added some extra detail and a few more anecdotes to the message.

After all that, I got home to find I’d had another short story accepted (yay!). This one (‘Too Late’ is the title) is coming out in the next edition of Concept Sci-fi – a newish electronic SF magazine from the UK which I’ve been following with interest and I’m very pleased to get a piece in there.

That brings to three my fiction publications since I started this new wave of enthusiasm and I’m just, just starting to feel like I’m getting somewhere.

Meanwhile, I’m back at work on my new novel and just about to pass the 50K words mark. The end is in sight!

Graham.

Pitching a book

Dear Orbiteers,

I’ve just had an idea. Why don’t the ten of us produce our own anthology?

This is how it would work. We pick a theme and each produce up to two short stories on the theme. We critique and generally help with each other’s stories. Then we hire a professional editor to give the collection a final polish, put everything in order and so on. We take something like eight or nine months to get this far. We organise cover designs, overall design and so on using our own resources. We ask someone nice to do a foreword for us (like Marianne). Then we get an ISBN and whatever else is necessary, have it printed (either using a service like Lulu or some other POD outfit, or the good old-fashioned way) and plan the launch. Say one year from start to end. We market it ourselves through our websites and blogs, groups we belong to, our local and national newspapers, local and national bookshops and so on. (Alternatively, we pitch this whole thing as a book proposal to a publisher – but this is obviously a long shot.)

It won’t make us rich – in fact, we’d be lucky to cover the cost (a couple of thousand bucks for a short run? $200 each?) – but it would be a great experience, a focus for the Orbiteers into the future, and possibly great exposure for all of us if we can get our enterprise written about by enough people (surely Orbit would give us a mention since we’re their bastard children, as it were) and get some good reviews. If it turns out to be fun, we could do one every couple of years.

Thing is, we know we’re all good writers – that’s how we met in the first place – and we all have lots of other useful talents when it comes to producing and selling books. Shouldn’t we do something with all this? Personally, I get frustrated just sitting here hoping some kind publisher or editor will take pity on me.

Graham.

Indigestation

Hi gang.

Well its been just about 4 months since Bribie, and I haven’t written a single word of my second draft. It’s not like I haven’t been thinking about the rewrite, on the contrary, I’ve been doing a shiteload of pondering. Massive amounts of thought and consideration have gone into the blank space that follows the words “Chapter One” in my second draft Word doc. I poured sooooo much information into my skull in the months that followed the retreat, from reading other books to studying writing guides to going to festivals to scanning blogs to plotting sequels to rerereading the first draft that I suddenly had to stop. Let it all go in, and down…. 

Am I the only one?

Jeremy