Graham Storrs

Please follow the link below

2009-04-27T20:47:00.001+10:00

Take me to Graham's writing blog.

The page you are on now is an old version of my writing blog which I no longer maintain or update. The new version is where all the action is.

By all means search or browse here for old posts but these too have been transferred to the new site, so you can also find them there.

If you came here from a link on your own website or blog, please update your link to point to the new site. The new URL is http://grahamstorrs.cantalibre.com/

If you have an RSS (or Atom) feed for this page, you should update that too. (Probably the easiest way is to delete it in your reader, then go to the new site and subscribe again there.)

If you came here following a link on somebody else's blog or website, please do me a favour and let them know their link is out of date. (Thanks.)

More Added Value!

2009-03-14T07:23:00.001+10:00

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your links today.)

I just can't stop playing with my new writing blog. The Wordpress template I'm using makes everything so easy. Today, I had the bright idea that I'd add a link to an Amazon shop featuring my old, out-of-print books. They're pretty ancient now but you can still buy them second-hand on Amazon and I hoped people would be curious.

Then I thought maybe that wasn't really interesting enough. So I hit on the idea of putting up a page of sci-fi books that I thought were the most important, significant and purely wonderful I have ever read - just to let everyone know what my taste is. Unfortunately, once I'd started, I couldn't stop and I ended up listing over forty of them! (And I still keep thinking of others I should have included.)

Doing it as an Amazon shop makes it so easy to pick books and lay out the pages that it would be idiotic to do it any other way. Plus, it has the added bonus that if anyone does feel like buying one of the books I recommend, I get a small cut of the sale price!

To see the new page on this blog, click "Buy My Books" - the rightmost menu item at the top of this page. Or you could just go straight to the Amazon shop page.

(Please note, this blog has moved to a new address. If you link to this blog from your website or through a feed reader, you should update your link. If you wish to comment, please do so at the new address. Thanks.)

Say It With Words

2009-03-11T20:39:00.003+10:00

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your links today.)

There used to be an ad campaign for a florist with the tag line “Say it with flowers.” I always hated it. When relationships are getting rocky, or when you need to express something good, my view is, “Say it with words.” Do the job properly.

One of the most wonderful things about books, is that they’re constructed from words. Words, handled well and chosen with care, are the only way to express an idea or an emotion with any degree of subtlety and finesse.

Which is sad for e-books because I have no doubt that e-books will evolve into multimedia medleys with text playing a smaller and smaller part in the mix.

People will see this as providing content that is suitable to the medium and which exploits the capabilities of the device. But as e-books move farther and farther away from plain text content, they will also lose much of what makes a book worth reading. The words.

Building a Career Backwards

2009-03-08T13:59:00.000+10:00

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your links today.)

Just when I thought I was being smart and finally getting somewhere, I meet some fellow writers and have my confidence shaken.

I nearly made it to a Vision Writers' Group meeting in Brisbane last week. I travelled 250 km especially for the event and then got the time of the meeting wrong! (Which led to 20 minutes of running around the State Library of Queensland trying to find a meeting room full of people I've never met before, who might just look like writers, because the State Library keeps no record of who has booked it rooms for what periods!)

Fortunately I owed one of the writers some money, so he hunted me down and directed me to a pub just a few blocks away where the remains of the meeting was winding down in the beer garden. I must say that it was 35 degrees C in Brisbane and the hygrometer stood at 'soup'. So it took a couple of cold beers before I managed to cool down enough to enjoy the experience. But enjoy it I did - until the point where I mentioned that I've largely been submitting my stories to non-paying magazines.

My rationale for this is that I'm slowly building up to the high-paying mags, first by building a portfolio of published work in the non-paying markets, then moving up to the low-paying mags, then the mid-range ones, then the high-paying ones. It seemed like a good strategy to me and it's been working out. I've been clocking up some publications, I've been getting the experience of working with editors, and my confidence in my publishability has been growing.

But no-one else does it that way, it seems. Everyone else starts by submitting to the highest-paying mag they can find, then, when they're rejected, move down a tier, then down again, and so on until someone publishes their story. Given this, they had all supposed that I'd been rejected by every paying mag in the world or I wouldn't have been published in non-paying mags! (Someone also said that they thought I was doing myself an injustice and that my work was easily good enough for at least the mid-range mags - bless 'em.)

So, do I change my strategy, or what? If I stick with what I'm doing, I'm pretty sure my bottom-up approach will get me there in the end. If I switch over to the top-down strategy, I might get there quicker - and I won't have to endure people assuming I can't hack it in the high-paying markets. It seems like a no-brainer, yet I can't help feeling my 'work your way up' strategy has merit. Maybe it's just my working-class background making me feel like I should serve an 'apprenticeship' before I can claim to be a trdesman.

Another Baby Step

2009-03-06T16:49:00.003+10:00

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your URL today.)

Be still my beating heart! I just got a letter today from the JABberwocky Agency in New York in reply to my query letter. It asked to see some pages!

Maybe I'm getting the hang of this query-letter thing after all.

JABberwocky is a great agency, and the agent I approached, Eddie Schneider, looks like a great fit for this book (TimeSplash!) so my fingers and toes are all crossed.

When I've calmed down a little, I'll put the package together to send to him.

Thanks to the ever-giving Marianne de Pierres for the recommendation.

Is It Dangerous to Sign Deals for Self-Published Books?

2009-02-27T12:29:00.002+10:00

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog.)

I read a piece by Galley Cat this morning about self-publishing which featured the famously petite model Isobella Jade. Aparently, Jade wrote her memoir in an Apple Store. Then she got an agent. Then she fired her agent because things weren't going fast enough. Then she self-published the book. Then she promoted herself so effectively that she ended up signing a deal with Harper Collins.

Jade is definitely very good at self-promotion - and I mean that in a good way. Take a look at her tips for self-promotion on a small budget and see what I mean. She is dedicated, professional, and savvy, and she clearly puts in a lot of time and effort. Talking in a recent interview on the Morning Media Menu podcast, she said,

"I'm extremely self-absorbed, but in a productive way. I'm always thinking ... how is what I'm doing interesting to somebody else? How could this appeal to an audience? Why would somebody care what I have to say?"

There is something very good about this. We all admire people who believe so strongly in themselves that they manage to push through to success against all odds. Yet there is also something very disturbing about it.

As the publishing industry creaks under the strain the recession is putting on it, as it struggles to maintain its relevance in the digital age, as other options for publication and (especially) distribution become available to authors, people like Jade and the many other self-publishing success stories like her, are becoming minor folk-heroes to the vast numbers of authors aching to break into the exclusive club of published authors and looking for a way around the roadblocks that agents and publishers appear to place in their way.

Publishers too see the drive and ingenuity that Jade and her kin possess and, with their own publicity and marketing resources stretched way past the point of usefulness to any but the biggest-name authors, they want some of that. They want their authors to be their own publicity machines. They want their authors to be celebrities. They want their authors to find markets and build brands and grow loyal followings.

Which is great if you're Cory Doctorow but not so good if you're not.

This is a slippery slope for publishers. We all know that the author is the brand. But if the publisher isn't the one building that brand, if you have to do it yourself, then the publisher's value has slipped yet another notch. Right now, they have a strangle-hold on distribution because the bookshops only want to deal with publishers. So their value is high. But what if more lightweight intermediaries stepped up? What if there were companies that would manage an author's brand for them? Companies that would project-manage book production, warehousing/POD and distribution. Companies that would review, rate, even marlet-test self-published works as a service to booksellers? Where is the publisher now? Or the agent?

Picking up deals for successful, dynamic self-published authors may look like easy money for publishers, but it looks to me like another step down the slippery slope to extinction.

(If you have comments, please post them at my writing blog.)

Agents Need (Software) Agents

2009-02-26T11:56:00.001+10:00

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog.)

I recently finished writing (yet another) novel and I'm looking for an agent to represent it.

To get an agent (it seems) you have to 'query' them. That is, you have to write them a letter asking them if they would be interested in reading your manuscript. Easy enough, you'd think, but writing a query to an agent is actually a form of High Art. The novice must master this exacting artform before the agent will even consider responding to the letter, never mind them actually asking for your manuscript.

Don't laugh. I'm serious. I never knew until recently how delicately-wrought an agent's query is. When I look back at queries I've sent out in years gone by, I realise now that I never had a cat in Hell's chance of being asked for my MS. I was doing it all wrong! There was one time - many years ago - I sent out 56 agent queries and got back just six, pro forma rejection letters. That experience was instrumental in me deciding not to bother even trying to get published again: a resolution I kept for nearly fifteen years.

There are whole websites dedicated to critiquing query letters. And many others that deal with the subject among many others on publishing etiquette. I'm told there are even services where people will write query letters for you for money!

Why is it so hard? Because agents get hundreds of queries each week. Far more than they can read sympathetically and consider with a generous spirit. The query has to be organised so that it is in a structure they expect, is concise enough to scan through in a few seconds, and gives them specific pieces of information.

As someone who has spent a long career designing user interfaces to computer systems, I understand this problem very well. In fact, it would make the agent's life soooo much easier if they created an online form that could be first checked by computer to weed out the grosser errors. For example, they like to see their names spelled correctly. A computer could easily check that. They like to know that a manuscript (fiction, anyway) is complete. That just needs a checkbox. They need to know it is a genre they represent (selection from a drop-down list), that the word-count is reasonable (peasy), and that the author can spell and construct gramatical sentences (so easily checked these days). This kind of checking would probably mean form rejections are sent out to a huge number of queriers without ever having to bother the agent.

Of course, the agent would still need to read the synopsis and they'd still need to see whether the author had personalised the query appropriately, but the software filter would be saving them so much time that they could spend lots more effort on this than they currently have available.

Sadly, most agents still insist on paper queries and havent even reached the stage where they can deal with email. It looks like there may be an opportunity here for a new agent to leap ahead of the competition. Don't forget, less time spent reading duff queries is more time spent networking and selling the good ones.

More Hope than you can shake a stick at

2009-02-23T08:40:00.001+10:00

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog)

Remember that four-part magazine I told you about - put together by speculative fiction fans and full of stories and artwork donated by Australian writers and artists? Well, the first edition has now been published.

All the money raised by the sale of this magazine will go towards the disaster relief fund for the survivors of the recent catastrophic bush fires in South-Eastern Australia. So get out your credit cards and visit this page to make your donation and get your copy. I've seen the first edition and it is astonishingly good - packed to the rafters with the work of top-notch writers and illustrators. The quality is so high, you'd want to buy it anyway.

To get out a magazine like this in just a couple of weeks is an astonishing achievement. My hat is off to Grant Watson, Ju Landéesse and Maia Bobrowicz, who made it happen - and to all the many Australian spec fic writers and artists who contributed. For the likes of me, giving away a story doesn't cost a great deal - since I don't get paid so much for them - but for some of the big-name contributors, this represents a significant donation. Make sure this generosity isn't in vain, order your copy of Hope #1 now. In fact, why not order all four of them?

'Tis a far, far better place I go...

2009-02-22T20:12:00.005+10:00

Don't you hate moving house? I do. Each and every time I do it, I swear that I will never do it again. Ever.

Yet I always end up breaking my vow. There are aways excellent reasons why it must be done, reasons that hold more sway than the vague memory of how awful the ordeal was last time.

So you'd think I'd avoid moving my blog to a new platform at all costs, wouldn't you? Especially one like this where 75% of my traffic is referrred from other people's sites? (I love you all, you wonderful people!)

But I made the mistake of downloading Wordpress and installing it on my website - just to have a look, you understand, I didn't mean to cause trouble. But I fell in love with it. It is so feature-rich, so flexible, configurable. There are so many widgets and plug-ins, so many options!

So I started working on a Wordpress blog, to see what my writing blog could look like with all this extra wonderfulness. And, in no time at all, I was hooked.

Now, I'd like you to click on this link and go across to the new site. Don't worry, you can still keep reading this post. (If you're already there, the link will be disabled, so please stop clicking it and read on.)

If you'd clicked the link like I asked you to , you'd be there now, enjoying all that techno-goodness.

As time goes by, I will move over completely to the new bog, so be warned. If you have a link to my blog on your own blog, or on a web-page, you should update it now. My links to your blogs - if I have any - have all been taken over there and that is the only place I will keep up-to-date from now on. So, if you have my blog bookmarked, you should update your bookmarks to point there too. Don't waste a moment, do it now!

I'm really, really sorry for the inconvenience. Honestly, I hate to do this to you.

Just in case you're a forgetful procrastinator, I will continue to put up duplicate posts at this old blog for a while, until I'm sure everybody's links have been redirected. I'll be sure to let you know before I stop double-posting.

Meanwhile, get over to the new blog, take a look around, and enjoy a better browsing experience.

Definitions for the Perplexed

2009-02-22T08:58:00.003+10:00

Anyone new to the writing business will probably be as vague as I am on the meanings of certain publishing terms. If you're not in the industry, and you haven't had a book published, you might be unsure about terms such as; 'ARC', 'galley', 'proof', 'mech', and so on. Even if you're hip to the jive, you might still not quite grasp the difference between a 1st galley and a 2nd galley.

Well, thanks to one of my favourite bloggers, Editorial Anonymous, you can now bandy TLAs and obscure jargon with the most hardened industry professionals. For a few days now, EA has been doing a series of posts called 'Definitions for the Perplexed', wherein she defines a whole slew of such terms in her usual, clear and concise style.

As soon as I saw the series title I thought, 'Hey, that's me!' If you have the same reaction, I suggest you start adding these invaluable posts to your bookmarks collection.

The Novel Viewed As Moldy Bread

2009-02-17T20:56:00.004+10:00

Way back at the dawn of time, I used to do research on hypertext. This was the early Eighties and the Web hadn't been invented yet. It was a time of wonderful freedom - like the days before the IBM PC and its Microsoft operating system were invented, when there were dozens of different personal computer architectures and dozens of different operating systems. Once the IBM PC appeared, all that diversity was quashed. Well, the Web did the same for the many budding hypertext systems - all those brilliant ideas were trampled in the rush to the lowest common denominator.

Which is all very dreary, but what's it got to do with writing? Not much, really. It's just that I've started writing a novel as a hypertext and I've been pondering the many ways such an object could be structured. I have a strong urge to write it as a linear structure - beginning-middle-end and everything lined up neatly in between. Something in me says this is how a book should be. But I'm fighting it. I'm trying to force myself out of this groove and to play around with some ideas.

The first, obvious, thing to do would be to have the main plot be linear with a few loops out along the way into sub-plots. The main line and the sub-plot loops could then have little spikes off them for discursion, or minor character backgrounds. This isn't so bad, it may even be something like the real 2-D structure of a book if it didn't have to be 'flattened' into a 1-D line. But there is more that could be done.

The main plot could be a number of threads - different character perspectives, different emphases on the themes of the book, or different interpretations of the action. These threads could be bundled into particular outcomes, based on decisions made one way or another throughout the book. With this approach, the book is now, effectively, many books, depending on the paths you take.

But a book isn't necessarily a sealed entity. As a hypertext, it can grow tendrils out into the wider world of knowledge and opinion. Obscure references can be linked to their exegesis in Wikipedia, the social and political context of the story can be expanded indefinitely, technical terms can be explained, maps can be referenced, animated models and video can reveal what even the best writing might leave unclear. Like a mold growing on the loaf of the Web, the book can thread its ever-branching hyphae throughout its host's body.

It's all fascinating, and the possibilities reminded me of those far-away days, scribbling diagrams on whiteboards, struggling with graph theory, and trying to hammer SGML into something computable.

But what about the reader? How much complexity can a reader take? How many divergent plotlines will a reader tolerate? How many different points of view does a reader actually want to take on a story? Where does a hypertex stop being a novel and start being intellectual masturbation? I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.

In the end, to be kind to my readers, I will probably go with a simple structure - the one I called 2-D a couple of paragraphs ago. But, oh, the possibilities!

Cons

2009-02-16T16:42:00.003+10:00

If you want to be a writer, you need to network. There's no two ways about it. You need to see and be seen. You've gotta press the flesh and schmooze. And that means going to cons and other writerly events.

Cons, as the name suggests, are a great way of spending lots and lots of money. They are gatherings of the great and good where, forthree or four days at a stretch, you get the chance to pester publishers and editors, agents and fellow writers, with the small but tantalising possibility that you will meet someone who can do your 'career' some good. Yeah, you get to listen to people standing at podiums and going on about stuff - how they got their big break, how they organise their time, how to market in the digital age, and so on - but the real reason everyone is there is to get their face known.

Or so I'm told.

Other people tell me its all about meeting fellow writers and discussing one's art with people who will understand, or who will at least be clever, interesting people who like to drink and have a laugh.

Whatever it's all about, it's expensive. I've just done the sums for the two cons I'd like to go to this year. Travelling by coach and the very cheapest flights, staying in the cheapest possible hotels, and not eating much, each con comes to a little over a twelve hundred dollars. Even the book launch I want to go to, travelling by pack mule and eating only tree bark, will set me back about six hundred dollars. So, a total of three thousand dollars for three marketing events.

If I got an agent out of it, and she got me a book deal, it would cover the cost (although I'd have to wait maybe two years to get it all back.) If I didn't, I'd have to sell a barrow-load of short stories this year to pay for it - my quick calculation puts it at about a tenth of all those printed in the paying mags this year.

As a marketing proposition then, going to a couple of cons and a book launch is probably a non-starter. In fact, if I self-published my book and spent the money on online advertising, I'd stand a much better chance of breaking even (I'd only need to sell about 600 copies).

Of course, if I did that, I'd miss all the fun of sitting in bars with half-drunken writers for seven evenings - which is not to be sniffed at - but I'd also miss the six days of travelling by JetStar and Crisps Coaches, and the ten nights of staying in cheap hotels miles from the convention centre.

What I can't understand is why I still want to go.

HOPE

2009-02-12T11:19:00.004+10:00

If you'd like a really great way to help the victims of the Victorian bushfires, you should order your copies of Hope. This is a four-issue spec. fic. fanzine created by enthusiasts in Western Australia, with all proceeds going to support fire victims. Issue One should be out this weekend (Valentine's Day). The other three should follow at weekly intervals.

It's being put together at incredible speed. All the material is donated by the Australian spec. fic. community. The latest update shows the state of play. Keep an eye on angriest for news of how to order your copies.

Apart from a story by me :-) there will be a previously unpublished piece by Sean Williams, another 135,000 words of fiction, loads of Dr Who fan-fiction, and enough cartoons and images to fill a whole edition of their own!

This is a fantastic effort by Australian writers to help people who have lost almost everything it is possible to imagine losing. Please buy your copies of Hope, and spread the word.

'Skyball' now online in Bewildering Stories Issue 324

2009-02-09T16:20:00.006+10:00

Why waste your time reading blogs when you could rush over to Bewildering Stories Issue 324 and read my newly-published short story 'Skyball'?

Yes, I'm in print again! And this particular achievement is always going to hold a special place in my heart. It was the first of my sci-fi stories ever to be accepted for publication. It will also be fondly remembered for the process I went through with the editor Don Webb.

Don is a very exacting editor and I had a tough time working the story into a state where he would accept it. He's also an intelligent editor and easy to get along with. I had never been through such an exercise before (although I've been through similar with other editors since) so it was a hugely important and valuable lesson for me which, I hope, will have lasting benefits for my writing.

But the experience didn't stop there. Bewildering Stories includes a set of 'challenge' questions that Don asks as a way of exploring the stories he publishes. These reflect deep and thoughtful insights, and show how intently Don considers the work he publishes. In the case of 'Skyball' the questions reference one of Don's own essays “Space Aliens as Metaphor” which sparked me to draw an analogy between alien invasions in fiction and the Iraq war, which in turn prompted Don to write a commentary on my analogy.

It really doesn't get any better than that.

Writers wishing to have their own 'Don Web experience' are urged to submit their work to Bewildering Stories. This is not a paying market but the value I got from it went way beyond getting a few extra bucks in my PayPal account. Readers looking for good fiction should just go along and read the magazine. Here is an editor working hard to make a serious contribution to the genre.

P.S. Don't mention this to any of my Australian compatriots, but I was telling someone about Don's challenge questions and his other comments and I could see they were impressed. "Is this an Australian magazine?" they asked, sounding confused. "No," I replied. "It's Canadian." "Oh well," they said. "That explains it!"

Is sci-fi the new black?

2009-02-06T13:11:00.004+10:00

I've spent many hours now trawling through listings of literary agents, trying to find ones that are sci-fi friendly, and there are very, very few of them. In fact, agents who say they handle sci-fi are outnumbered at least ten-to-one (maybe twenty-to-one) by the ones who go out of their way to say 'No science fiction.'

Now, I know that sci-fi isn't the most popular genre on the block - fantasy out-sells it by ten-to-one, and crime and 'general' fiction are 30 and 40 times more popular, respectively, than sci-fi, and, let's face it, fiction as a whole is less than a third of the total book market - but must sci-fi writers really be treated like pariahs? Must we be singled out and shunned by agents as if we were poets for heaven's sake?

I can only think of a single reason. My guess would be that, although sci-fi books in print represent less than a third of one percent of the books published each year, sci-fi writers represent a large proportion of all writers submitting manuscripts to agents. If only a third of one percent of the MSS they received were sci-fi, agents wouldn't need to mention it. So agents are trying to maximise their chance of finding a publishable book per thousand metres of slush by excluding all the 'noise' sci-fi (and poetry) introduces.

The worst offenders in the 'No peddlers, hawkers and sci-fi writers' stakes are the agencies who say they handle 'literary fiction' or 'quality fiction'. I suppose they're willing to miss out on the chance of a Bradbury, a Vonnegut, or a Ballard, in order not to have to wade through all the space operas and steampunk epics.

Well, there's no harm in asking, I suppose, so, would all the other sci-fi writers out there just stop writing for a few years, please? Then the agents won't need to hold back the floodwaters with such paranoiac fervour and I might actually get one of them to take on my books.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy: Why I like one and not the other

2009-02-01T16:09:00.003+10:00

I write science fiction. I read science fiction. I love science fiction.

But why?

Today I read two highly-aclaimed short stories by fantasy writers. Both recently won awards. Both were well-written. Both were well-constructed stories. Both were really, really boring.

Which is a puzzle. Why shouldn't I like fantasy when I like sci-fi so much? Both genres take the reader on journeys into worlds invented and strange, fabulous and wonderful. Just because some worlds contain soul-stealing demons, why should they be less interesting than ones containing mind-stealing aliens? Both genres utilise inventiveness and novelty, and both explore the consequences for their characters of the new ideas they introduce. So why does fantasy leave me cold?

Well, I think I know the answer. The ennui that crept over me as I read these two stories today (rushed over me in one case) showed me just where the fault lay with each piece.

Firstly, they were not real. The novelty, the ideas, the situations, were all just completely made up. Souls, demons, dragons, magic, witches, gods, and all the other paraphernalia of fantasy worlds, are completely and utterly fictional. They bear no relation to the real world whatsoever - except as issues in the psychology of people who actually believe in such things. If you put characters - however realistic - in worlds of magic swords and dreaming gods, my reaction is 'So what?' because such worlds do not and never could exist. It's irrelevant what people would do when confronted by a binding spell because such a situation will never, ever arise.

Secondly, the characters weren't real either. Yes, alright, some of the characters were real enough - ordinary people with ordinary personalities, but there were also purely evil creatures - or creatures inhabited by pure evil, evil spirits, etc.. Sometimes (sadly, not infrequently) you find purely good ones as well. Even if such characters have only minor roles, it spoils the whole story. Like gods and goblins, such creatures do not happen in the world, or in any conceivable real world.

OK. I can hear you clamouring to come back at me on that. Lots of people believe in fairies and angels and such. What's so awful about having them in a story? Nothing, I say, as long as you don't mind me not reading it.

Alright, you ask, why are aliens and cosmic minds and transhumans so much better than elves and magicians? What makes faster-than-light travel and phasers and teleports better than bracelets of power and ley lines and magic pyramids? Well, on the one hand you have things which could exist, are extrapolations of what we already know, or are justifiable leaps of imagination based on actual reality, on the other hand you have things for which there is no plausible way for them ever to exist and which often, quite explicitly, exclude themselves from possibility by being ostentatiously supernatural (as in 'not natural').

Of course, some science fiction (some of the most famous and most popular) also relies on magic. Dune, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 (to name the tiniest few) use ideas like telepathy and telekinesis, Star Wars has The Force - ideas that are clearly in the realms of the supernatural rather than the scientific. For me, such lapses into fantasy spoil a good sci-fi story. By all means confront your characters with superhuman robots and hand-held beam weapons, uploaded brains and wars in space - these are things we might all have to deal with one day soon. But don't make them have to worry about telepathic aliens because (uless they're using wireless networks to connect their brain implants) that just aint gonna happen.

That's why I consider science fiction a completely different genre to fantasy: it is reality-based, fantasy is not. That's why I only like sci-fi and not fantasy: I like to imagine and play with what really could happen, not with absurd impossibilities. That's why I had to force myself to get to the end of these two award-winning stories rather than dump them after the first mention of dark forces: because it seems childish to read stories about things that cannot ever possibly exist.

Giving It All Away

2009-01-25T11:38:00.002+10:00

I just had an email from Jeff Vandermeer - which is kinda cool. I don't know the guy but I know his books and I read his blog and he is one hell of a writer. So it's nice to be tenuously associated with him. It makes me feel more writerly just being in the same cyberspace.

It also reminded me of how I came to read him for the first time: I foud City of Saints and Madmen remaindered in a big bin of books in a mall in Brisbane. The book had a quirky cover, so I picked it up and scanned the blurb. It all seemed a bit weird but, hell, it was only a few dollars, so I bought it anyway. And, boy, am I glad I did! It blew me away. It was a fantastic read, the writing was excellent, and the 'world' of Ambegris was the richest, most sumptuous and compeling that I had come across in many years.

And this, in turn, reminded me of other authors I've discovered through their remaindered books. (Like the amazing The Limits of Vision by Robert Irwin - a book I re-read often and which I found in a remaindered book shop in Toronto, Canada.) Maybe I'm just tight-fisted (well, alright, I admit it, I am tight-fisted) but I hate paying out $25 to $35 for a paperback and then finding I don't like it. It gives rise to what novelist Dave Freer recently called 'the resentment factor' (and he's in the same writers group as me - another cool thing) - that feeling of antagonism one feels towards an author for making you shell out so much for something you didn't like. Dave actually gives his books away (as well as selling them) and says it helps him win new readers - and paying customers - something I've heard from several different writers.

For me, being able to buy remaindered books for a couple of dollars is an even better way of getting a sample of an author's work than downloading the text for free. It comes as a real book. I hate reading long works on screen and it's well worth a few dollars to avoid having to do that. (Libraries are pretty good too - that's where I first found Dave Freer's work.)

I would encourage every bookshop, everywhere, to carry a large stock of remaindered books - and then be sure to have the same authors represented on the full-price shelves.

Praising 'Praise Song for the Day'

2009-01-22T14:13:00.003+10:00

Did anyone enjoy Elizabeth Alexander's poem "Praise Song for the Day" at Obama's inauguration? Well, I did. What I enjoyed even more was the fact that a whole poem was read out from beginning to end on prime-time television (I watched it on the news, not in the middle of the night). Has that ever happened in Australia before?

In many ways I wish Kay Ryan (the "American Poet Laureate") had been asked - I just love that woman's work! - but Alexander did such a great job it's hard to imagine anyone doing better. She didn't write a great poem, but she wrote the right poem for that moment and for the tens - maybe hundreds - of millions who were listening.

For a Yale Professor (Dept. of African American Studies) she did a great job of writing plainly and without condescension. Best of all, she did it without any nationalist or religious triumphalism. "Poetry is not meant to cheer," she says on her website, "rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation." Well, maybe 'transformation' is going a bit too far, but there is no doubt that "Praise Song for the Day" caught the mood and spoke soberly of a new beginning ('A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."') and of 'repairing the things in need of repair.'

Alexander definitely earned the right to have the last word here, so let me leave you with the final couplet:

'In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.'

What Is The Future Of Publishing?

2009-01-17T20:13:00.006+10:00

As a one-time Authonomy user (see why I left) I have been following the recent controversy about what happens to their top-ranked authors. Rumour is that not one has yet had a book contract and, instead, some have been quietly offered the chance to take part in a print on demand (POD) self-publishing experiment. Well, Harper Collins, which runs the site, has published an apology for the concern they've caused and assurances that POD is merely another service that HC is offering Authonomy users. It's all very odd, I must say.

But that's not why I'm posting. What struck me about the HC post was that they assured authors who felt like self-publishing that this would not bar them from future publication with HC. To quote:

"And as a publisher we certainly don’t have a problem with authors who have self-published: we’ve acquired a number of authors who took this route initially."

Which is nice to know, since I've read several self-published books which are better than most of the stuff currently on the shelves at my local bookshop. (I'll pass over the hideous grammar of this sentence and the horrible notion that HC 'acquires' authors - as if we were commodities to be bought and sold.)

Agents, publishers and bookshops act as filters on what is available to us to read. Agents and publishers in particular use their professional skills to prevent the great bulk of manuscripts which are poorly written from being published. This, I believe, is a valuable service. It means that, what you see in the bookshops, in the high street and online, meets a minimum standard of coherence and literacy. It is a fairly low standard, but it is there.

But what the agents, publishers and bookshops also do, is try to guess what we the readers will want to buy. So they exclude manuscripts - however well written, however thoughtful, intelligent and insightful - which they do not expect will sell in large enough numbers. The reason for this is obvious: publishers and booksellers need to make money from selling books, and agents need to make money from supplying publishers with books. If the books that are printed don't sell, the whole supply chain collapses.

For the writers of books, this can be a frustrating, infuriating situation. Some writers are not writing commercial works - but they would still like to see them in print. Some writers are producing highly commercial works but their themes or presentation, genres or style, or whatever, are not judged to be saleable that year, or that month. Some writers who produce good, saleable work still don't get a look in because the industry knows it will make more money from a da Vinci Code lookalike, or a celebrity memoir, and each publisher can only do so many books in any one year.

So there are a lot of writers out there who will take the risk and publish their book themselves - because they believe in it, or because they can make enough money from it (even though a publisher couldn't), or because they just don't care about the money. There is a world of talent and excellence in self-published books that the ordinary buying public never sees simply because the agent-publisher-bookshop chain excludes them.

I can understand why each of these groups is loathe to accept that there can be high quality self-published books. The agents simply have no role in the self-publishing supply chain. The publishers are also excluded middle-men. The booksellers can't easily take on self-published books because, without a book going through the agent-publisher filter, there is no guarantee that it will meet even the minimal standards of quality I mentioned earlier - the booksellers would have to become their own filter, judging the books they allowed on their shelves. (For booksellers, there are also issues of quantity, reliability of supply, economies from single-sourcing, and the sale-or-return deals they have with publishers, that would make them wary of self-published works.)

Which all means that the self-published author, no matter how good he or she is, or how saleable his or her book is, is almost inevitably doomed to economic failure because they simply cannot get their product under the noses of the book-buying public. Yet, in this digital age, it has become cost-effective to lay out all our wares - good, bad and ugly - and let the market decide which are the quality products. After all, we find the best blogs to read, the best news aggregators to visit, and the best online shops. The Web has made finding what we need and what we like easier than it has ever been, and a lot quicker and better-focused than marching around town, browsing through bookshops.

There is so much talk these days about the future of publishing - which is mostly about ebooks and other delivery mechanisms. Maybe some of that talk should get down to the basics of how the whole industry could be restructured to let more voices be heard and to give the public more choice in who they listen to.

The Earth Ship - published today

2009-01-16T16:10:00.004+10:00

There is no feeling like it!

My short story 'The Earth Ship' is out today in The Absent Willow Review. I am so glad to see this story in print as it is one I'm particularly proud of. At 8500 words, it's longer than most magazines are comfortable with these days, so I'm particularly grateful that AWR came into existence just in time to pick it up and give it an airing. I wish Rick DeCost every success with this new venture and look forward to seeing even more SF appearing there (are you listening, Rick?).

So please go along and read 'The Earth Ship'. I would be more than happy to hear your views on it - just leave a comment below.

Tales of Long Ago

2009-01-14T11:50:00.006+10:00

A post today at Emma Newman's blog got me remembering stuff. (Since she says her post was inspired by a post of my own, this is becoming strange and incestuous. Either that or it's what people used to call a 'conversation'.)

Emma recounts the amazing tale of the two times she nearly stopped writing. My own tale is rather different. I have never nearly stopped writing. (I've completely given up all hope of publication a couple of times.) I can't imagine a life where I don't write. It would be torture.

Since I was as young as I can remember, I have written stories. By the time I was ten, I'd focused down on sci-fi. Apart from reading, writing stories was all I did with my spare time as a child - and all I do with it now.

So when, at the age of 11 or 12, climbing my way up the slippery pole in my local scout troop... (All right, for those who know me, this might seem an unlikely thing for me to have done. In fact, I was in the scouts for a couple of years and became a troop leader. It was great and I really enjoyed it.) Where was I? Ah yes. Getting on in the scouts meant earning badges. Badges were great and I had an armful of them. For one such badge, I had to provide evidence of a hobby I had pursued diligently for at least a year. The only thing I did that fit the bill was writing. So I brought in a (very) thick sheaf of sci-fi stories I had written and handed them to 'Skip'. He looked at them in dismay and said he'd have to think about it.

Next time I saw him, he was very concerned. He wanted to know if I had really written the stories and not some grown up I knew. I was hurt and flattered at the same time. I discussed the stories with him at length until he was completely convinced they were my own work. It didn't seem to cheer him up though. Writing stories, I eventually concluded from his tactful reticence to accept them, wasn't really a scout-like thing to do. It wasn't really in the spirit of it. In the end, when I had promised I had no other hobby and it was this or nothing, he decided he must send the stories up the chain of command to get a ruling from his superiors.

It took weeks but, finally, the word came back down the line that I could have my badge. As far as Skip knew, I was the only scout ever to get the badge on the basis of this particular hobby (although it seems unlikely to me). If so, I may be the only sci-fi writer who has won a scouting badge for his work. (Who needs a Nebula or a Hugo with an achievement like that?)

At the time, I was merely relieved I'd got through ordeal and earned the badge. Now I tend to think how well this reflects on the scouting movement. Yes, they tend to emphasise a lot of healthy, outdoorsy, quasi-military activities but, when it came to it, they were flexible enough to allow the definition of a scout also to include more intellectual pursuits.

Maybe someone else will be inspired by this recollection to add their own childhood writing story. We could get a chain going.

The Devil Made Me Do It

2009-01-11T20:51:00.007+10:00

OK, so I'm skiving off work. Ever since I finished my latest novel, TimeSplash!, my productivity has been way down (although I just finished a new short story I'm very pleased with - Jim'sWorld.)

So here's a drawing of a character from TimeSplash! by way of whiling away the time. I know, I'm no Jeremy Gordon, but it's fun trying new things. This guy really does appear - looking just like this - in the story. Only my readers (Terry, Rod, Christine and Becky) know why.

Anyone else care to hazzard a guess?

A Plug For AWM Online

2009-01-09T11:23:00.006+10:00

Every Australian writer will be aware of The Australian Writer's Marketplace - one of those 'listings' books like the UK's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook. It's the must-have reference for anyone trying to find places to sell their writing in Australia. What they may not be aware of is the website, AWMOnline. This has all the content of the book (and more) but is searchable. It costs the same to subscribe to AWMOnline as it does to buy the book but, if you ask me, the value you get is much greater.

In a recent attempt to add yet more value for the Australian writer, AWMOnline has established a forum where subscribers can get together and exchange information. It is still very much in its infancy but I have to applaud the effort. Australian writers in particular need electronic fora. Being part of a writing community when you live 250 kms from the nearest city (150 kms from the nearest bookshop!) is not easy. So my hat is off to the Queensland Writers Centre (which publishes The Australian Writer's Marketplace and runs AWMOnline) for this effort to build an online community of writers.

Which means, if you're an Australian writer, or want to sell into the Australian market, subscribe to AWMOnline, and then join in the discussions on the forum. The more the merrier!

Sci-Fi and What?

2009-01-08T17:07:00.004+10:00

How did 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' ever get lumped together in the popular mind? In particular, why did they ever get lumped together on bookshop shelves?

I ask because I've just had a couple of days in Brisbane and was able to visit a few bookshops. The nearest town with a bookshop to where I live is 150 km away, so this should have been a real treat. Instead, it was a frustrating and annoying waste of time. I wanted just two things. One was to buy a decent poetry anthology. The other was to have some fun browsing the sci-fi shelves.

The anthology was a dead loss. Bookshops in Brisbane have 'self-help' sections as long as a Buddhist mantra, 'cookery' sections that would take a lifetime to eat your way through, 'business' sections the size of a CEO's 'productivity' bonus, but the 'poetry' section, if it even exists, is a couple of Banjo Patterson collections tossed in with a few Shakespeare plays and school crib sheets. Ah well, back to Amazon, I suppose, land of the long tail and minority interest.

I knew I'd do better with the sci-fi because even a Brisbane bookshop always has a 'Science Fiction and Fantasy' section. Sadly, however, these are invariably 'Fantasy' sections with a few sci-fi books hidden among the hundreds of other books. I must confess, I have now and then read a fantasy novel. I've read The Lord of the Rings. I've read one or two Anne McCaffreys. I even ploughed through six books of Steven Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, each one the size of a brick. But it was a long time ago and I'm over it. People with talking swords fighting with or against dragons just doesn't do it for me. If I want black-and-white morality and mystical mumbo-jumbo in a pre-industrial setting, I can read the Bible.

Of course, I'm being rather harsh. Most sci-fi - especially space opera - is just as bad. My excuse is that I'm narked that to find anything good - some actual, honest-to-goodness sci-fi - among all these fat trilogies with Celtic fonts on their spines, is like fossicking for gems in the bush.

To avoid wasting shoppers' precious time like this, I implore bookshops (and publishers, and magazines, and conferences) to do the right thing and separate out the sci-fi from the fantasy. They are like chalk and cheese. What is the point of mixing them up?

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T21:05:00.003+10:00

Well, it was nice that the year went out on a high (see below).

As I sit here eating assorted rice crackers and drinking sump oil port, it's hard to credit that at the beginning of 2008 I was finishing off my previous novel (Time and Tyde) and wondering if I could be bothered to waste my time sending it out to publishers. Then I heard about the Orbit/QWC manuscript development retreat and thought, What the hell? I'll give it a go.

Since then I've had four stories accepted for publication, been shortlisted in one short story competition and was the winner in another. I've also finished and polished up a whole new novel (TimeSplash! - many thanks to Terry Hornby, Rod Rivers and Wifie for help with the polishing) and have it out with three agents already.

It may not sound like much, but after a lifetime of failing to get anywhere with my fiction, I'm suddenly having some real success. I blame it to a large extent on Orbit and the Queensland Writers Centre. That retreat last May really opened my eyes and got me focused on what I needed to do. Specifically, Marianne de Pierres, Kate Eltham and Bernadette Foley, put together a package of concentrated enlightenment that changed my whole approach to getting published - with incredibly good results.

I should also mention the other writers who were at the retreat with me. We refer to ourselves collectively as the Orbiteers. These guys have been a constant source of support and encouragement. It is so good to be teamed with such a group of talented writers - who just happen to be terrific human beings too. The whole experience of that retreat and the subsequent months (which also included joining the Vision Writers Group - another amazing collection of talent and wit) has changed the equation for me. I am no longer the lonely, isolated outsider I used to be. I have made inroads, I'm networking, I actually have friends who are also writers. The publishing world doesn't seem so cold and hostile as it did at the beginning of the year. I have found islands of warmth and fuzziness in that great ocean. I even have hope again that I might succeed as a writer!

Of course that might just be the sump oil port talking (or the rice crackers - hard to tell). Being an anal, scientific type, I did my accounts for the year, to see just what my success amounted to. On the one hand, I got paid for a couple of things. On the other I forked out money for retreats, conferences, memberships, books, etc.. The balance was a loss of nearly $600 for the year. Not as bad as it could be but definitely a reminder (as if one were needed!) that I still have a very long way to go.

Well, come on 2009! I've got a lot to do and I'm counting on you for support.

Happy New Year everybody!