I have finally made time to write my monthly blog post about my fiction writing efforts for the previous month. I have been extremely busy writing, editing, critiquing and being sick. Yep, my ulcerative colitis has come back at the wrong time, but when is a good time for it?

Fiction Writing.

I continued writing my novel, adding another 8549 words. I am very close to the end of the first draft, so it was with great reluctance that I stopped to write a short story I had committed to finish by the end of August.

I started the short story on the 17^th of August, hoping to finish it before attending the Melbourne Writers Festival at the end of the month. At the end of August, I had written 5,582 words, and it was still nowhere near finished. The story is for a Christmas anthology created by members of the Australian Writer’s Forum.

So, all up, I wrote 14,031 words for the month, which is not quite the average of 500 words a day that I am aiming for. I met my quota of 500 words a day on only 23 days. I have now written about 129,000 words of the novel.

Critiquing.

I critiqued another story for critters.org and then committed to critiquing a whole novel on Critters. Fortunately, the writer writes much shorter manuscripts than I do, with it being 66,000 words. By the end of the month, I had critiqued the first six chapters, about 10,000 words.

Reading.

I finished reading the very good classic; I am Legend, by Richard Matheson. It is one of the original apocalyptic novels. In it, a virus decimates the population, leaving one lone survivor to battle vampire-like creatures. It was made into at least two films, one recent one starring Will Smith and the much better The Omega Man. The novel is very different from both films. Although written 60 years ago, the story still packs a punch. I then started reading Dust, the third book in Hugh Howey’s apocalyptic Wool series.

Melbourne Writers Festival.

I went to the festival for the third year in a row. The only science fiction author I saw on a panel kept apologising for his book being science fiction, so I did not buy it. I learnt a bit from a panel with the editors of Peter Carey and Jonathan Franzen (I’ve read several of both author’s books.) The best author talk I went to was by mistake. The festival organisers changed the venue without telling me, but my ticket still got me in to see Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket). He was there promoting a novel for adults called We Are Pirates, and with a title like that, I just had to buy it. Overall, the festival was not as good as the two previous years. I hope to write more about it in upcoming posts.

Divine Writing.

I had one non-fiction article published on Divine this month, about a casting call for an Australian web-series Aliens Vs Crips, where four people with disabilities try to survive an alien invasion.

At the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, I attended two sessions with climate change and the future of the planet at their centre. One of the sessions was called The Science of Survival, a discussion of the book The Sixth Extinction, written by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. The book’s main contention is that the Earth is currently experiencing a sixth period of mass extinction. The other session was The Politics of Climate Change, academic Phillip Chubb’s account of the failure of the climate change debate in Australia. 

The Science of Survival.

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist and author on the environment for The New Yorker magazine and National Geographic. She discussed her new book, The Sixth Extinction, with Australian agricultural scientist Dr John Williams. The moderator for the session was Australian malaria scientist Dr Krystal Evans. 

The Sixth Extinction says there have been five periods of mass extinction comparable to what is currently occurring. Kolbert said that the current extinction rate of flora and fauna could be as high as that of the last mass extinction, 66 million years ago. A meteor caused that mass extinction, while humans are causing the current one.

She said one of the main reasons for this mass extinction period is ocean acidification caused by too much carbon dioxide entering the oceans. She said the Great Barrier Reef will cease to exist by the middle of this century.  Another reason for the decimation of flora and fauna is the introduction of new species by humans, such as those flushed into foreign waters from the ballast of ships. Humans are great at introducing pests into new areas.

Williams said humans had transformed 40% of the Earth’s land, and there wasn’t a river that humans had not altered.

Kolbert warned that the dominant creatures did not survive in each of the last mass extinctions. So, will humans survive this one? 

The Politics of Climate Change.

Phillip Chubb is a Walkley Award winner who was the editor for the National Times and an investigative journalist for The Age. He was also executive producer of the 7.30 Report. He is currently Head of Journalism in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University.

He said Kevin Rudd was the primary reason for the failure of Australian politicians to tackle climate change.

Chubb said that before the 2007 election, John Howard’s emissions trading scheme was not dissimilar to Kevin Rudd’s scheme. There was a consensus between the political parties to implement a scheme. But after the election, Rudd used climate change to undermine the then leader of the opposition, Brendan Nelson, and then Malcolm Turnbull. So we ended up with Tony Abbott, and consensus on climate change was lost. Chubb thought if Rudd had not played politics with his emissions trading scheme it probably would have been introduced.

Chubb said Rudd went to the Copenhagen climate change conference thinking Australia would get the world to do something about climate change. But the conference failed to do anything. Chubb said Rudd then had an emotional breakdown.

The Senate voted on Rudd’s emissions trading scheme in 2009. Two liberals crossed the floor to vote for the scheme. If the Greens had voted for it, it would have passed. Chubb said the primary reasons the Greens voted against the scheme were the high levels of compensation proposed for brown coal users and the low 5% emissions reduction target. But both of these measures were in Gillard’s carbon tax legislation which the Greens voted for.

When the Greens blocked Rudd’s emissions trading scheme, Chubb said Rudd should have gone to a double dissolution election. Everyone in Labor wanted a double dissolution in early 2010, but they decided not to call one because they thought Rudd was emotionally incapable of running an election campaign.

Rudd shelved this scheme, and then there was a devastating leak about that shelving, to which Rudd reacted appallingly.

Rudd, Wayne Swan and Penny Wong were the driving forces behind climate policy. Gillard had not had much to do with climate policy before she became leader. She had been busy working on other issues. When Gillard became Prime Minister, she made mistakes by coming up with a scheme to have 150 people chosen from the election roll to help decide the government’s carbon policy. And, of course, she said there would be no carbon tax under her government.

One practical thing Gillard did was to create a multi-party committee on climate change that included the Greens and the independents. She was much more consultative than Rudd. This enabled her to get the carbon tax legislation passed in 2011.

Chubb said non-government organisations had failed to push the cause of an emissions trading scheme or carbon tax during the last six years. He mentioned the “Say Yes” campaign that involved Kate Blanchett. He thought the negative publicity that Blanchett received scared off many NGOs.

I had read in The Age and heard on the ABC much of the politics around climate change that Chubb mentioned during the session, but I had failed to join all the dots, so it was worth having it all laid out for me. No doubt others, especially Greens and Rudd supporters, will strongly disagree with Chubb’s view of why the CPRS and carbon tax failed. And, of course, there are those ignorant and selfish fools who think we should do nothing about climate change.

After reflecting on the sessions, it seems that if we are going through a sixth extinction, Australia will do absolutely nothing about it.

For the second Melbourne Writers Festival in a row I
attended a session involving three debut authors. The session was free and held
in a much larger room than last year’s session. The audience was young,
probably many were aspiring writers.

 

The authors were Holly Childs, Eli Glasman and Melinda
Huston. The session was moderated by Sam Twyford-Moore, the director of the
Emerging Writer’s Festival.

Holly Childs was up first. She is an art magazine editor,
artist and curator. Her debut book was a novella, No Limits, published by Hologram Books. It’s set in Melbourne in
2012 where the main character’s plane to Auckland has been delayed due to
volcanic ash. There is an apocalyptic vibe in the air as Ash bounces from raves
to internet cafes to…

Childs nervously read at a rapid pace from her novella.
It had a lot of jargon, I had no idea how much was currently in use and how
much was made up. The scene involved a group of youths wandering the streets of
Melbourne after leaving a rave. 

Her novella was published after it won a competition. The
competition was for novellas about contemporary themes. Authors had to be under
30 year of age. Childs said she had not written much before she wrote the
novella.

Childs said her characters were one third her, one third
other people and one third made-up. She also based some on characters in other
literature.

She is off to take up a residency for writing and art in
Europe.  

Has a creative writing degree with honours. He blogs a
lot. His debut novel is The Boy’s Own
Manual to Being a Proper Jew (Sleepers Publishing). It is about a
homosexual boy in the Melbourne orthodox Jewish community. Either the section
Glasman choose to read or his rapid monotone delivery failed to spark my
interest. But Twyford-Moore assured us it was beautifully written.

Glasman came out during the session, saying he was not
gay, which was a surprise. I have to wonder how many straight authors would or
could write a novel with a gay central character.

He used to be obsessed with the age an author’s first novel
came out, but not anymore. He is 28. Originally, he sent a story to a publisher
who liked it and they asked him to write a novel, but his first attempt was
terrible. So he tried again and was published with a different publisher.

He kept many journals as he grew up and uses pieces from
them in his writing. When he started taking anti-depressants memories from his
past cropped up, he used them in his novel. He said he workshopped the first
10,000 words of the manuscript and then knew he was on the right track.

 

Has written news and celebrity profiles, and hundreds of
book, film, food and bar reviews. She is currently a TV critic and columnist for
most Fairfax newspapers and for radio 3AW and 2UE. She wrote young adult
fiction in her twenties, but couldn’t make any money out of it so gave up.

Her debut novel, which she described as chick lit, is Kat Jumped the Shark, published by Text.
It is about a reality television program where the contestants have to live on
the streets of Melbourne for the duration of the show. She read a humorous
section from it. She was the most accomplished performer of the three writers.    

She said her role as a TV critic had her analysing how
stories work, and she used television’s three act structure in her novel.  She wrote the first draft of the novel, gave
it to a friend to read and then rewrote it.

No agent would take her on. She sent it to every major
publisher, they said they loved it but didn’t think it would sell enough copies.
Text eventually accepted it.

Melinda is constantly asked which people in the media her
characters are based on.

She is currently writing a sequel. 

Whereas last year’s session left me thinking that who you
know had a lot to do with those three writers getting published, this years was
a bit different. The manuscripts of these writers seemed to be selected more on
their quality and appeal to the publisher than them having a friend who knew a
publisher.

I ended up buying Childs’ No Limits.

My next post will
be about two sessions about the future of the planet.

One of the free sessions I attended at this year’s
Melbourne Writers Festival was a discussion by three of Australia’s largest independent
publishers about the current state and future of the publishing industry. The
participants were Michael Heyward from Text, Chris Falk from Black Inc and
Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe.

The discussion was moderated by Sophie Cunningham who is
a writer, but was a publisher with Allen and Unwin for a decade. There seemed
to be some underlying tension between Heyward and Rosenbloom. The session was
conducted at the Wheeler Centre.

Scribe publishes about 60 books a year, mainly serious
non-fiction. Text publishes about 80 books a year with half of them authored by
Australians.  Forty people work for Text,
seven of whom are editors. Black Inc is distributed by Penguin. 

One Successful Book 

The publishers stressed how one successful book can make
all the difference to a publisher. The Rosie Project by Graham Simsion has been
very good for Text. Allen and Unwin has been built on the back of Harry Potter
whose profits were used to build a big Australian list. Text prospered from a
book that Scribe rejected. 

Current State of the Market 

Sales are decreasing in Australia, for example, in the
four weeks to mid-August 2012 sales were $26 million, in the same period in 2014
$18 million. Currently sales of 3,000 for a debut novelist is considered good
very good. In previous years the average sales of a debut novel were 3,000
hardback and 5,000 paperback.

Over 20% of Scribes sales are ebooks, below 20% for Black
Inc, 30% for Text. Ebook sales are not increasing as a percentage of sales at
Text anymore. In the US and UK, ebook sales have plateaued as a percentage of
book sales.

 

The UK Market 

Text and Scribe both publish in the UK market. They said
that market is very bad because of Amazon. According to them Amazon have about
70% of the book market in the UK. They said Amazon sells so cheaply because
books are only a small part of their business and they can afford to lose
money. According to Scribe, Amazon is now bigger than all the main publishing
houses combined.

Hardbacks are priced at paperback prices in the UK
because of Amazon. Scribe said they were forced to publish in the smallest format
at lowest price in UK. Black Inc says the local market is much better because
many of the books they publish don’t have cheap Amazon editions to compete
with. 

An audience member asked the obvious question: if the
market in the UK is so bad why are Text and Scribe there? They said it was so
they could offer both Australian and UK rights to an author and compete with
the UK publishers who were offering UK and Australian rights to authors. 

 

My Overall Impressions 

While optimistic about the future of their own publishing
houses, the publishers seemed to have real fears about the future of publishing
overall, mainly due to Amazon. But not so much from ebooks, whose initial rapid
growth seems to have stalled. Perhaps the publishers are all hoping a mega-seller
is waiting in their slushpiles that sets their companies up for years. 

 

The Slush Pile 

Text said the slushpile is very important to them. At 4pm
on Fridays they all down tools and go through the slushpile. They find only one
or two manuscripts to publish among the 1000’s they receive. (So if you are
sending a manuscript to Text, make sure it will excite the tired mind of a
reader who is distracted by their plans for the weekend. Perhaps a novel about
a weekend of sex and debauchery would excite their jaded minds.) The other
publishers also said the slushpile was important to them too. 

 

Boycotting Amazon 

Their discussion about the Amazoned UK market was the
final straw for me. I had already read that Amazon pays no tax and are
therefore a parasite on society, and treat their warehouse workers appallingly. From now on, I will only buy ebooks from Amazon if the ebook cannot be
purchased directly from the author or publisher or another site. I had already stopped
buying print books from Amazon and its subsidiary the Book Depository. 

My next post will
be about a session promoting the debut novels of three Aussie authors.

I went to the second weekend of the Melbourne Writer’s
Festival. I am still not sure about its relatively new venue of Federation
Square. It seems so sparse and sterile when compared to the crush of buzzing
crowds at the Malthouse complex.  I had a
good time though. I was entertained as I was informed about writing, publishing
and the future of the planet.

Once again, the free sessions proved just as good or better
than the paid sessions. So if you’re a broke writer in Melbourne I suggest you
have a look at the guide for the free sessions when next year’s festival comes
around. As there didn’t appear to be any science-fiction authors at
this year’s festival, I choose sessions on subject matter, not on the authors. But
I was in for a surprise when I attended a session titled License to Thrill. 

The blurb in The Age for this session said: 

Best selling writers Lauren Beukes (The Shining Girls) and Terry Hayes (I am a Pilgrim) reveal the
trade secrets of what makes the perfect thriller and how they master intrigue
and suspense on the page.

Nothing about science-fiction there, but when I attended I discovered
that South African Lauren Beukes won the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award for her
novel Zoo City. And her new novel The Shining Girls has a time-travel
element.  While Australian Terry Hayes
wrote a novelisation of the movie Mad Max,
co-wrote the script for Mad Max 2 and
wrote the script for Mad Max 3. He
was also nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for best screenplay for From Hell.  But most of the elderly female audience were probably there because he wrote the two iconic mini-series: The Dismissal
and Bradman.  

Australian crime author Angela
Savage was the chair for the session.

Both of the featured authors have grizzly deaths in the
first few pages of their new novels, and the reader knows who the killer is
very early on. They both had problems with writing whodunits because readers
are at different levels in their deductive abilities, so some work out whodunit
too early. A whodunit has to have a great ending, a great reveal. Hayes says he
was not confident of writing the great reveal.

Hayes said novels should show what is going to drive the
narrative in the first ten pages. If a novel he is reading doesn’t he will stop
reading.

Hayes mentioned a comment by Alfred Hitchcock who said
suspense is where you expect something to happen and it does, whereas surprise
is when you expect something to happen and something else happens. Hayes aimed
to have the suspense and surprises increasing in intensity, with no let-up in
tension, as his novel went on.

To help increase the tension and suspense they both used
short-sharp chapters and roving POVs, often having an incident told from
multiple viewpoints.

Beukes said working in children’s animation has lead her to enter
a scene as late as possible and exit it as soon as possible. Hayes said each
scene has to have its own clarity and do what it is meant to do.

Novels need strong characters with motivations other than
just being evil. Beukes said a plot without character development results in a
Michael Bay movie.

They both thought it hard to make readers feel empathy for male
victims. It is much easier to create reader empathy if the victim is a child or
woman. (This is probably why there are so many female victims in novels.)

Beukes set her novel in Detroit because she wanted to use
its decay as friction for the narrative to rub against. She interviewed a
number of Detroit police officers. She told one police officer the evidence
from her novel and he cracked the case. She also worked for a day in a homeless
shelter in Detroit. She thought she could get away with the supernatural
elements in her novel because her research had made the scaffolding of the
story real.  

Beukes said she used Scrivener and a clogged pin-board to
plot her novels. 

And if you were wondering how long a movie script should be if you want Jerry Bruckheimer to make it: Bruckheimer didn’t bother reading a Hayes script when he saw it was over 120 pages. (This formulaic approach is
probably the reason most of his movies are formulaic).

Both of
the authors were good performers who spoke with clarity and humour. As a result of the session I bought Zoo City. 

My next
post will be about a session on the future of publishing involving the CEOs of publishing
companies Text, Scribe and Black Inc.

At the recent Melbourne Writer’s Festival, six of
the authors I saw mentioned how they got their book published.

Jo Case was asked by a publisher to write her non-fiction
book Boomer
and Me after the publisher read an article Jo had written about her son’s
Asperger’s.

Graeme Simsion originally wrote The Rosie Project as a
film script. It won an Australian Writers’ Guild award for the best
romantic comedy script. But he had no luck getting the film made, so to get the
script noticed he decided to turn it into a novel. The novel won the 2012
Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. A
bidding war then broke out for the manuscript.

Catherine Deveny said she submitted the manuscript of her
novel The Happiness Show by mistake, she sent the publisher a file
containing it rather than the memoir they had contracted her to write. The
publisher read the novel manuscript and liked it so much they wanted to publish
it (Note: Deveny already had had six books published). 

A friend of Lucy Neave’s had an agent and recommended
Neave to that agent. But the agent said Neave’s manuscript of Who We
Were needed work. Neave worked on it for a couple of years and then
sent it back to the agent.

Bali Kaur Jaswal did a mentorship with an agent.
The agent helped develop the manuscript of Inheritance, but did not take her
on. Jaswal sent the finished manuscript straight to its eventual publisher.

Many publishers rejected John Weldon’s manuscript Spincycle
before it was picked up by an independent publisher. Weldon (pictured above) said that about a
year later, a major publisher finally got back to him, but they were too late. Weldon
didn’t have an agent.

Obviously the chances of getting
published greatly increase when you know someone in the right place in the
publishing industry. Those of us who don’t know anyone (yet) can take a bit of
heart from Jo Case, John Weldon and Bali Kaur Jaswal’s experience. But note: Jo Case worked in the book industry as a reviewer and still works as a senior writer and editor at the Wheeler Centre. Lucy Neave, Bali Kaur Jaswal and John Weldon all teach creative writing. And Catherine Deveny had a long history in writing for a major newspaper, television and radio. So the only route open for those of us who aren’t working in the business could be winning awards like Graeme Simsion did.

 

At the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, Max Barry asked
why do audiences sit around and listen to authors reading from their books at writer’s
festivals? Shouldn’t they instead be watching authors write? A few years ago,
he attempted to put that thought into action. He set himself up in the
concourse at the Melbourne Writers Festival so people could watch on a big
screen as he wrote. He said it was the worst writing experience in his life, as
every murmur or giggle from those watching had him thinking he had made an grievous
error. So he now much prefers to do readings from his books.

I heard him and a number of other authors reading from their
books at the festival. Some of them had me wanting to buy their book, while
others did a good job of convincing me not to buy their book.

If you are an Australian writer and haven’t heard about
Graeme Simsion and his book The Rose Project, then you haven’t
been paying attention. Simsion has now sold his romantic comedy to 40 countries
for around two million dollars. He is in negotiation with Hollywood studios to
have it made into an A-list movie. The novel is about a scientist who sets out
to find a mate, with a 32 page questionnaire. The main character, Don, has some
of the characteristics of Asperger’s Syndrome.

At the festival, Simsion read from the start of the novel.
He read very quickly to mimic the voice of his character Don. The section he
read was very funny, getting many laughs from me and the audience. He put on a
very energetic performance, and I have since purchased the ebook of the novel. 

Max Barry

 Max Barry is an Australian whose book, Lexicon, I had purchased
the morning before I saw him read. Lexicon
had been getting a lot of good reviews from my Facebook friends, and I had very
much enjoyed Barry’s last novel, Machine Man. Both novels are science
fiction. Barry choose a section from the start of his novel, where there was a
lot of action happening. What struck me about his reading was his unusual descriptive
word choices, for example:

He didn’t understand
the question. He had run into a pole and all his thoughts had fallen out. He
groped for them and found Cecilia.

Catherine Deveny was on the same panel as Max Barry. The
panel was appropriately called Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard, because Deveny
tortured her reading to death. She had selected a section from her novel The
Happiness Show, but she spent ten minutes, at least, trying to set up
the scene. She then interrupted her reading with more background explanation. Her
reading, which I found neither funny nor memorable, was cut short by the
moderator so the other authors could make a contribution to the one hour panel.
If there is one thing I will take out of the festival it is that if I am ever
doing a reading from a novel, I will choose a section that requires minimal
backgrounding.

John Weldon is a first time novelist. He was on a panel with
two other first time novelists. He had a big Aussie personality, much like the
character in his book, Spincycle, where a man who recently separated from his wife. In the
section John read, his main character needs to wash his underpants, but his
wife took the washing machine. The section was humorous in a blokey way, not
really my cup of tea. It also didn’t seem appropriate for an audience of 80%
females. But if the rest of his novel was like his reading, then what choice
did he have.

Choose a section from near the start of the novel where the
hook is, and where the assumed knowledge about the plot and characters is not that
great for the reader/listener. Choose a section with humour in it, as laughter
from the audience is great feedback. Mimic the voice of characters if you can. Put
some energy into reading it, so you sound like you are proud of what you have
written.   

Recently I attended the Melboure Writers Festival. I went to a panel called The
Future of the Novel. Most people would expect a panel with that title to be a discussion about the demise
of book reading in the near future. Refreshingly, that was not what this panel
was about. Instead the panellists were concerned about the effect social media
could be having on what novelists write.

The
panellists were an impressive intellectual in Nigerian born American novelist
Teju Cole, who wrote the much lauded Open City. The other, much quieter panellist,
was transmedia creator Christy Dena.

Cole began
with the proviso that anything he had to say about the future of the novel was likely
to be wrong. He then tried to describe what makes a great novel. He said a
novel was a place where life slows down. He said great novels always had
something wrong with them, and this was a good thing, because in their
wrongness they managed to create something unique. He then asked, in a world
full of social media and its instant feedback, would this wrongness continue?

Let me
explain. The panellists felt that writers who used social media extensively,
which is most of us, now receive instant feedback on anything they post. In our
attempts to increase the number of hits, retweets, and friends, most writers seek
to avoid offending their readers. They also endeavour to write positive posts
as no one likes a whiner.  Many writers
like to look busy to, as though they are leading pro-active lives. So writers adjust
what they write on social media based on the feedback they are receiving.

Before
social media arrived, a writer might worry about offending their mother with
their writing, but now they risk offending the twitterverse. So social media could
lead to writers, tooled in its rules, writing sanitised versions of their novels
as they impose social media learnt self-censorship.

I found
this self-censorship concern interesting in relation to another panel I
attended: Healing Words. The panel was about how reading and writing can
help the healing process. It was about how reading about someone who had gone
through similar health problems, could be beneficial or console the reader. But
what if the reader is reading a sanitised, self-censored version of what really
happened?

Another
panel I attended, On The Spectrum, was about writing about Asperger’s Syndrome.
Jo Case was a panellist who had written a non-fiction book about bringing up her
son who had Asperger’s. I have nearly finished reading her book. In it she says
she blogged a lot about her son. The book itself reads like a lot of blog
entries. She said she received a lot of comments on her blog, a lot of empathy
for her situation. Then finally some bloke made a comment that her son might
have Asperger’s.

I have to
wonder how the blog feedback she received influenced the writing of her book.
As it is, the scenes in the book seem to go a bit like this: Leo doing
something strange and then Jo or someone else doing something that, for the
moment at least, causes Leo to acknowledge or modify his behaviour. There are
very few dummy spits in the book by the author.

Feedback
from social media might also affect how novelists write their self-censored
novels. Most writers try to write easy to read blogs and tweets in order to
make them as accessible as possible. This might lead to a lack of
experimentation by writers. So the future of the novel could be bland,
unchallenging, self-censored writing.