Vale LiNQ (and by the freaking way…)
This message arrived in my inbox the other day.
With deep regret I’m writing to say there will be no 2008 issue of LiNQ. The general editor has unable to gain funding, and the University has not provided staff support or other assistance. We are therefore unable to produce any further issues of the journal.
With LiNQ now confined to memory, Queensland has lost yet another literary publication and short story publisher. It’s telling that, although potential submitters for the 2008 edition have been advised of the closure, the web site remains static.
I should mention at this point that I’ve had it up to here with “the death of the novel”. Novels are doing just fine, last time I looked. You want to see the death of a literary form? Check out the short story. No one’s bemoaning its death — it’s been on life support so long most people have forgotten about it. And the power to the life support system is gradually draining away.
Does it have to be this way? Of course not!
Read MoreTwenty to ten
The title of this post is not just a time, it’s also a job. Twenty entries make up the long list in the Emerging Writers Festival Reading Room Competition. I have copies of each and my job is to take those twenty and reduce them to ten. In the best reality TV style, it’s time to cut the fat.
The job of a competition judge is a peculiar one, especially when you’re assessing completely different styles and forms as in this comp.
I’ve judged competitions before, most notably one of those 100 words competitions where I was one judge of about six or seven. The job there was to bring a shortlist to the judging meeting and start arguing. I wasn’t quite prepared for the depth of conviction everyone had for their selections and how hard each would go in to bat for their picks. I had to attempt to convince the others to agree with my choice. I don’t remember who won, but I think my pick scored runner up.
The Reading Room is a little different. I still don’t have the final say, but, being half way up the East Coast of the country from the action, I won’t be entering lock down with the other judges. In fact, I’m not even sure who else is judging. That’s electronic communication for you.
I’m already beginning to lean towards a couple of pieces, but I’m taking my time with this. I mean, how exactly do you equitably compare short stories with poems with visual art? Maybe I should go with Oscar® type categories: Best use of white space, Best exclamation in a single word sentence, etc.
Read MoreDo you heart writing?
This year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival is being held 9 – 11 May in Melbourne. A full program will be released this Friday, but in the lead up to the festival, I’ll be judging entries to the associated Reading Room competition.
The competition calls for entries responding to a stimulus image that you can see on this page.
Submissions must fit on a single A4 page. They may be, but are not limited to, short stories, essays, reflections, poetry, scripts, cartoons, street art or song lyrics. All submissions must include text.
Entries close on the 14th of April.
So, to all you writing readers, get cracking.
http://www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au
Read MoreSubmission Mode
No, the new novel is not ready for submission. This is more about distraction. The last novel is ready for another hawking round and the short stories, as always, require some attention.
This is a part of the writer’s lot that doesn’t often receive much attention. Yes, you have to write, in your head and on the page. Yes you have to edit and edit and edit. But you also have to keep your eye out for publishing opportunities, prepare manuscripts for submission, and get them out to the relevant people.
It’s the kind of process that, if you hate, will probably mean your work will never see publication at all. It requires an obsessive scouring of newsletters, web site, and the Australian Writer’s Marketplace. Then, once it’s out there, you need to keep track of what’s been sent out. To make matters worse, not all publications will actually bother to contact you back with a rejection, a bitter pet hate of mine by the way.
I was using a spreadsheet to track all this coming and going, which worked okay for me for a while, first in Microsoft Excel, then in Apple’s Numbers, but more recently I’ve been using the online Writer’s Database. You can get right into it, making the database almost like an address book. I don’t bother going that far, but I do use it to track what’s out and to log all those rejections that come back.
It’s a nice way to deal with rejections. Log them, then choose the next victim immediately. Very Zen. (Note I know nothing about Zen Buddhism. The last statement just sounded good in my head.)
And I promise next post will actually be about the manuscript. Maybe.
Read MoreWhat the hell is going on?
I’m going to pretend that I’ve been inundated with queries about what’s happening during first draft week and why all my promises of regular posts have amounted to squat.
My response? So sue me.
It’s already been a rollercoaster week. Monday was just about the most productive day I’ve had on record. It even beats the day I landscaped our front yard. I was barely pushing 39,000 words on Monday morning. By Monday evening that had turned into around 44,000.Even I was impressed. There was a fairly huge backlog of scenes that I simply had to string together, so it was a very successful first day and bode well for the rest of the week.
Then came yesterday.
Two caveats here. I’ve spent a lot of time obsessing over word counts. I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. Word counts are fairly immaterial. My estimate word counts are more like guesstimates and are based on how many words I think it will take to cover what I’ve written in the notes. Really, as long as you’re up around that 50 – 60,000 plus range, you’ve got a novel. We’re not all writing J K Rowling doorstops. The other caveat is that, Murphy’s Law and all, firs draft week happens to have coincided with catching an irritating cold from my two-year-old. Best laid plans, blah blah, blah.
So I’m using both these points to defend my poor performance volume-wise yesterday. Monday was a five thousand page turner. Tuesday was a sluggish 1,500.Bugger.Part of the problem was I fell asleep. Another part of the problem is that I’d reached the end of my notes. In fact I’d actually hit the story’s climax on Monday, hence the rush. The tidy up at the end is never as exciting.Now, I’d just finished saying that a novel sits above 50,000 and here I am languishing a good 5,000 words off the mark. Well, welcome to my style of writing.
Climaxes bring with them a whole lot of baggage that I hadn’t thought to include in the lead up. In a lot of ways I never actually know my characters properly until that climax, regardless of how much time and energy I’ve put into them previously. A whole bunch of new facts come to light. My main character suddenly has a whole new past. Another character now sports a fairly large scar on her face. Yet another character has harboured a secret desire all the way through the novel. All this is stuff I have to go back and weave into the text.
Other things also come to light when you finish the climax. The narcolepsy stuff hasn’t been properly integrated into the story yet. Each of the sections that deal with the main character’s narcolepsy are kind of hanging out there on their own with no proper reference to anything else. This again is quite a common thing for me because those bits are actually hived off from a short story.
It’s funny that on day two of first draft week, I’ve actually completed what might be considered a first draft, since my job now is to go back through the existing text and add in all the bits I’ve missed. Personally I don’t consider it complete yet, but things are looking good for a complete manuscript by Friday.
Maybe.
The job now is to do a quick run through of the manuscript with my new notes of all the story strands that need more work, with particular emphasis on the firs fifty pages.
Why the first fifty? I’ll add another post here that begins the discussion of what I want to do with the manuscript next week, since this is probably as important as the actual writing of the story.
Read MoreThe Books
