Tag's Mid Year Update

Its somehow July, so this week I am going to give you a mid-year update to give you some idea what is happening and how my year is progressing. Overall, it’s been a good year. My June Word Count tally was 350k+ with almost 500 pages edited.

I have brought a half acre of land in January and now I have also brought a house to go on my land. By the end of the year, I will have a completed house! Which real human beings can live in! Which is pretty exciting for me, as it has long been an important goal and milestone in my life.

However, this blog is mostly about writing, so without further ado:

Genrecon:

I am thrilled to announce I am speaking at Genrecon this year. On the Friday, I will be doing a one hour session on getting higher word counts and time management. If you are coming to genrecon, I highly recommend you come along and listen, since all I ever hear is how people want more time management/higher word count advice and apparently writing you all a book on the subject wasn’t enough. Plus, you get to ask me questions. Like exactly how many souls it took to buy my wordcounts. No one likes being ripped off by immortal tricksters.

Aurealis:

This is my third year as an Aurealis judge. This year I am judging horror short stories. I didn’t enjoy novels last year as much as I enjoy shorts. Since 90% of the fiction I read is horror shorts and I find it virtually impossible to look away from creepy pastas and over short/creepy stories, I think horror shorts is where I am happiest.

We were given official access to the judging documents today, so I am looking forward to the slow deluge of stories as the year progresses. Everyone should still be prepared for my inevitable sleep deprived break-down in January though. It’s part of my process, okay?!

RWA:

I’m attending RWA this year, not in any professional capacity, but I am still pretty excited about the event. The organising committee are doing a fantastic job and it looks like a really fantastic program. I’m super stoked and really looking forward to pitching to editors during the conference. If you haven’t got your tickets yet, what are you waiting for?

Online Classes:

As always, I am constantly seeking to learn more about the craft of writing. I’ve already attended a number of day-long classes, particularly those offered by the Morteon Bay Library, as they’re fantastic and free. If you aren’t already following their program, look it up and get involved.

I am also signed up for several QWC workshops and they are always fantastic value for money.

I stretched the budget this year and also signed up for an online fantasy writing workshop through the Victoria Writer’s Centre with CS Pacat. It runs for six months, but and I have already learned a lot. It was a pricy course, but well worth the cost. Pacat has a rather unique way of breaking down scenes and writing techniques and if you have a chance to attend one of her workshops, I highly recommend it.

Vision and retreat:

I am still the vice president of Vision Writers, which meant, of course, that it was my job to organise the Vision Writer’s Retreat again this year, with lots of help from my wonderful co-author Meghann Laverick. This year we are up on the sunshine coast hinterland again and looking forward to a very cold retreat, during which I intend to wear nothing but my Blastoise onsie.

Once again, it is a fantastic group of people attending and I am looking forward to lots of eating and lots of pretending to write.

The Vision Writer’s group as a whole is still an excellent community for feedback and support if you write speculative fiction (sci fi, fantasy, urban fantasy, horror, etc) in the Brisbane region. Meetings are the first Sunday of every month and you can get more info on the website.

Current projects:

Anyone who knows me well is aware my primary goal in life is biting off more than I can chew, then becoming paralyzed with horror when I can’t do the work of fifty people at once.

I have experienced little to no personal growth in this area.

Honestly first drafts of novels get completed and chucked into the ‘to be edited’ pile so fast it’s not worth mentioning them at this stage. Meg and I completed about fifteen first drafts last year and this year is on track to be able the same. 1-2 novels a month is our norm and that has not changed.

Editing, however, is a much slower process.

Currently Meg is editing Bite the Ice, our queer sports romance which will be sold under our romance pseudonyms. And I am editing White Skies, our queer fantasy forced marriage, which will also be sold under our romance pseudonyms.

I am also editing another project, which is still under wraps at this stage, but hopefully I will be able to give some news about soon.

It is also time for the two-yearly Arqum edit/re draft. Which is now a tradition going back sixteen years. Maybe this is the final round. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to finish this thing and call it done. OR MAYBE NOT.

If you want to connect with me, look for me on FACEBOOK and TWITTER.

Things I Learned As A 2015 Aurealis Judge

I was a judge for the 2015 Aurealis Awards and it was a fantastic experience.  Assuming there are no conflicts, I will be putting up my hand to be a judge again this year. I really enjoyed judging the horror category and would be happy to judge it again, however I’d also really love to try a different category as well. Fantasy novels, for example.

I learned A LOT as a judge. I highly recommend it to anyone who is serious about a career in publishing, in any capacity. Unfortunately I think most of these lessons are best learned by actually being a judge and will be hard for me to pass on to you through a blog post. However I am going to do my very best.

I’ll start with the smaller things and work my way up to the bigger, more complicated lessons.

Firstly, if you are publishing an anthology, having a table of contents at the start is VITAL. It is almost-but-not-quite as vital in a novel. Trying to skip through anthologies to find specific stories without a working index actually made me a cry a few times. Having a judge in tears before they even start reading your story because the e-book hasn’t been formatted properly is not a good start. If I didn’t have to read those stories (EG: if I was reading for pleasure) I wouldn’t have read them at all.

Secondly, when reading a novel or story, emotional connection is the biggest thing you're looking for. You want to feel. Something, anything. Ideally I want to connect with the characters, but just being surprised or pleased or uneasy... anything at all, as long as you are generating some kind of intended emotion in me. Please note I said ‘intended’. A few authors got very low scores because I was disgusted by misogynistic portrayals of women, indelicate, unsympathetic portrayals of incest and bestiality, or just general bigotry. Don’t be that writer.

(And don’t come bitching to me that I scored stories low just because of bestiality, etc. Some of the incest and bestiality stories got high scores, because they were well written and sympathetic. Also, that’s one of those sentences I never planned to write, but here we are.)

Thirdly, novels and shorts are judged on really different criteria. If a story is under 2k, I'm looking at ideas, but the moment it gets longer than that, I am really looking to connect with the characters.

And style is more important than both of those things.

A writer's priority over 2k should be:

1. Style

2. Character

3. Ideas

And under 2k:

1. Style

2. Ideas

3. Character

Some people write amazing short stories and SHIT novels for this reason. And visa versa.

Fourthly, you learn a lot more from reading shit writing than you do from reading the 5 start books. One of my friends was bemoaning his lack of short-listing this year and I suggested he sign up to judge this year. He said he ‘learned by reading the winners’ and I wanted to shake him a little bit (okay, a lot). You learn by reading the losers.

I read 115 short stories, 33 novellas and 13 novels and ranked all of them between 1 and 5 stars. Being able to articulate what made something a 1, 2 or 3 start story was much, much more valuable than being able to say what I loved about the 5 star books. And the difference between the 4 and 5 star books was so important too. Seeing what pushed a story from ‘good’ to ‘amazing’ was the kind of knowledge I should have had to pay for.

Also, I could also accurately judge a stories rating within the first page. Sometimes the score dropped, if it had a weak ending, but if a story started weakly, it never salvaged itself. I said this to an editor who has been in the business for years, and she said she can tell within a paragraph if a novel will be any good, which doesn’t surprise me at all.

Maybe you are screaming that is unfair right now, but I’m telling you it isn’t. 161 stories and not a single one with a crappy opening page managed to change my mind. NOT A SINGLE ONE. So when I say ‘style’ should be your priority, I really mean it. You want to be easy to read, evocative and have a skilled use of language.

Fourthly, there is a lot more competition in the Australian market than I realised. I only rated five stories five stars, but there were a hell of a lot of four star stories. There are plenty of brilliant writers in Australia, producing breathtaking stories. I was continually wowed. Thankfully people read a lot faster than they write, so there’s plenty of pie for everyone. However you should be reading contemporary works and you should be reading widely, if you want to stay on top of the market.

If you read the hammy best seller (*coughfiftyshadesofgreycough*) and think ‘I can do better than that’, you’re in for a rude shock. Being an Aurealis Judge made me realise just how much I have to step up my game if I want to play with the boy boys (and girls). I have to stop wallowing around in my giant ego and keep improving my craft.

Lastly, don’t go to lunch with an agent the same week as the finalist are announced if two of her clients were in the novel category and there was no shortlist announced. People are going to be butthurt where books are concerned. Writing is personal, for agents, editors AND authors.

I caught a hell of a lot of (good natured) shit about the lack of shortlist in the horror novel category. I still think it was the right call, however in saying that, I am saying the other novels in the horror category this year were not up to standard to be shortlisted. Australia is a small writing community and that means there are 12 authors out there who are not my biggest fans right now. (Actually Trent cast shade on the lack of short list in his acceptance speech, so it might still be 13.)

Tread carefully on other people’s egos. Saying no sucks sometimes. But saying no is another one of those lessons you have to learn.

I may be ambitious and try and write a post on writing style next week. Or I may go back to my Characters series. Both are on the table. Remember to comment here or email me if you have something in particular you would like me to do a blog series on.