Cons

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

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.

Giving It All Away

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'

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?

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.

Tales of Long Ago

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.

A Plug For AWM Online

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!

Happy New Year!

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!

Manuscript Brokers Wanted

Agents are brokers. They are the middlepersons who sit between writers and publishers and make the connections between the needs of each group. Trouble is, agents are in short supply.

What we now need is a new kind of broker: one who will sit between agents and writers and make those connections.

I mention this for two reasons. Firstly, I'm looking for an agent. I've just finished my latest novel, TimeSplash! and I'd like to see it published.* Trawling through agents' websites, one by one, trying to understand what genres they like to work in, whether they're accepting new clients, how they like to be queried, and so on, is only part of the work involved. I'm also working my way through authors of similar material, trying to find out who their agents are. None of this is easy. All of it is time-consuming and tedious. The yearbooks for writers that list agents and their preferences are helpful and take a lot of the pain out of the initial stages of the work, but you need one per territory (so, for me, at least Australia, America and the UK) and the printed ones are at least a year out of date already.

Secondly, I just read a blog posting by Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management, telling the world that she wants people to send her queries right now so she can read them over Christmas. Wow! If only I wrote crime fiction! This is the kind of service agents should be providing - both to writers and to publishers. It got me thinking just how much easier and more efficient finding an agent could be if they were all willing to let the world know when they were open to new queries.

Of course, even if they were all as proactive as Janet, one would still have to subscribe to the blogs of every agent in your genre. But it would be a start.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if I could just tell someone what kind of agent I needed and they would then line them up for me? Or if there was a 'clearing house' online where I could tick a few checkboxes to describe my book and up would come a list of a dozen agents around the world, actively seeking for manuscripts of that type? Surely there would be money to be made by someone in starting up an electronic marketplace like this?

On the other hand, even Janet Reid isn't perfect. Consider this post about 'surrogate writers' which basically says she'll dump any query that doesn't come directly from the writer. Makes it kind of hard for the new middlepeople to get into the market if agents don't like hearing from them. But then Janet wasn't talking about my new breed of broker (meta-agents? super-agents?). She was talking about writers who get their mums to send in a query for them! I just hope that, when manuscript brokers start to appear, her email filters won't search for phrases like 'I'm writing on behalf of...' and file their correspondence under 'Junk'.

Meanwhile...

*For any agents reading this, TimeSplash! is a sci-fi thriller, set about forty years in the future and deals with the struggles of two young people trying to prevent a very singular terrorist attack on London. He's doing it because he's a nice guy who just got dragged into it. She's doing it because she has a personal vendetta agianst the terrorist.

Parallel Importation of Books is Bad for Australia

If you are interested in the culture of Australia, in particular, if you are interested in having a thriving, creative literary culture here, you should speak out against the proposed lifting of restrictions on the parallel importation of books. This pointless destruction of Australia's publishing industry and the subsequent silencing of Australia's writers, is currently being considered by the Productivity Commission.

Go and look at the Productivity Commission's web page and the submissions already made. Then check out one or two of the publishing industry insiders who have been commenting. I encourage you to add your own submission. But be quick, the Productivity Commission will accept them only until 20th January 2009. After that you'll be too late to stop our book market being given away to the US and UK, with all it entails in terms of the devastation of Australia's own literature.

Dead America - News of the Dead

Check this out! Writer Luke Keioskie has started up a new website based around the 'world' of his unpublished zombie novel Dead America. The site features news items from Dead America's alternate reality, along with fake adverts offering services, like cosmetic surgery, to zombies.

Apart from being way cool in and of itself, as a marketing vehicle to get a buzz going around his novel, this a fantastic idea. Everyone who has come across Dead America agrees this is a great premise for a novel, and I know for a fact that Luke is a skilled and original writer. Surely it can't be long before a publisher catches on too.

Limbering Up

There ought to be some kind of limbering-up exercise a writer can do. Joggers pose around in the streets trying to pull their feet off, musicians play scales and arpeggios, actors pull faces and make strange noises. What can a writer do? Compose haiku? Write out the alphabet?

I'm about to write the very last scene of my new novel TimeSplash! It's a tender scene that puts the final, delicate touch to a blossoming relationship, but it has also to tie off a number of lose ends from various plotlines, and I'd like it to end on a light, humorous note. I have the scene in my head but not the actual words. I now need to put it down on paper in all its subtlety - and I have performance anxiety.

Writing, for all that I do it in my quiet office on an isolated mountaintop, is in many ways a public performance. Just as a pianist on a stage must get every note right and give the performance the full emotional intensity the piece demands, so must the writer pull off a virtuoso performance with everything he writes. Some pieces are harder than others, some require more technical skill, some more emotional engagement, but every piece must be performed as well as it can be. The goal is always to be perfect, flawless, magnificent, to leave the audience enraptured.

So here I go with that daunting, final scene.

Wish me luck.


(The picture is 'Warming Up' by John Asaro.)

Where do you get your ideas?

As a budding writer, I feel I must prepare for this one. Imagine. An audience of three thousand in a gigantic auditorium. It is the plenary panel session at Schmoozecon, the world's premiere writing convention, and I am up there in an uncomfortable plastic seat along with all that week's great names. A weedy-looking guy in round spectacles near the back of the room stands up and a girl in a Schmoozecon T-shirt rushes over to hand him a microphone.

'Ahem,' he booms, his thin voice amplified almost beyond my pain threshold. 'Could the panel please tell us, where they get their ideas from?'

I cringe at the question. I cringe at the grammar. I cringe at the guy on my left who has already launched into a brief history of tropes in science fiction. I have just ten or fifteen minutes before the chairperson turns her smile my way with a raise of the eyebrows. What do I say?

The truth is, while it may seem odd to people who don't write, there's nothing special about 'ideas' in the sense of 'those things that writers have'. Mostly, they're the same kind of ideas that everybody has but, instead of dismissing them as crazy nonsense, the way a normal person would, the writer hoards them and makes things out of them. Where I might read a news item about how designers are looking at cities holistically, taking an ecological persective on energy use and sustainability, and think, wouldn't it be cool if a designed city led to unforeseen ecological niches within which entirely new life-forms evolved - the way anybody would - the man in the street would simply slap himself across the face and tell himself to grow up, but I would rush to my computer and write an eighty-five-thousand-word masterpiece called 'In All The Dark Places' (or somesuch) in which brick-eating metropoloids drag sleeping humans into their foetid lairs, strip the flesh from their bodies and use their bones to build altars to the concrete-and-glass towers they worship as gods.

It's like collecting bottle tops, or spent matches. The stuff sensible people would throw away. And then building ten-metre long killer millipedes out of them. That's all.

And, as the chairperson's gimlet eye swivels my way, I take a big swallow, force a smile between my frozen cheeks and say, 'Er, um, I dunno. They just... you know... like, come.' Panicking, I remember a joke. It involves a gorilla at an arms convention. I open my mouth to tell it but the woman on my right has begun a short discourse on the distinction between 'ideas' and 'ideation'.

There, you see, I need something like that for next time.

(This little idea was inspired by The Writer's Technology Companion.)

Jim Frenkel Saves My Self-Esteem

One of the things you struggle with as an unpublished writer - and I have this from many reliable sources - is that there is so much rubbish published each year while your own manuscripts lie mouldering on the hard disc. Who hasn't put down a book in disgust, crying to the unjust heavens, 'How the hell did that get published? I write a million times better than that and all I get are rejection slips!'?

We all know that the publishing game is a lottery - and not a particularly well-run one at that. Slush piles are so high and standards of writing so low that anything good in those piles is effectively a tiny signal buried in lots and lots of noise. I used to think that it was so hard for the publishers to spot the good stuff that, in despair, they simply picked something that wasn't actually written longhand in green ink, published that, and hoped for the best.

Yet something that was said at the Brisbane Writers Festival has given me a bit more insight into what is going on. It was Jim Frenkel who said it.

He's an odd sort of bloke, Jim. An editor with Tor Books in New York, he's about as world famous as an editor can be. I was in one of his workshops at the BWF so had the pleasure of listening to his insider insights for about three hours. I've never seen so many people get up and walk out of a workshop because the presenter had pissed them off before. (Maybe I need to get out more.) It's true he had a strangely confrontational manner, with not just a hint of pomposity about him. He even said that anyone who was anti-Semitic should leave the room because he was Jewish and they might not want to hear what a Jewish person had to say. (I found this quite shocking. I don't know what New York publishing is like but that's not the world I live in. Someone did actually get up and go at that point but not, I suspect, because they didn't like Jews.) Yet there was something strangely likeable about the man. For all the apparent aggression and arrogance that simmered just under the skin, there was a deeper layer of intelligence, delicacy and sensitivity that drew me to him. I could easily imagine being friends with him (not something I often imagine about anyone!) but only after he had lowered the all-but-impenetrable defences he seems to have deployed against the world. It will never happen, of course, unless the two of us are ever marooned together in a well-stocked bar for three days.

I digress.

What Jim Frenkel said, among several other interesting things, was that there are great writers in this world and there are great storytellers and they are not necessarily the same people. He took an impromptu poll of the workshop participants (all wannabe writers, I would suppose), asking who would rather read a good story than read good writing and, to my astonishment, almost everyone wanted the story. His contention, therefore, was that the reason so much execrable prose is published is because publishers are giving the people what they want: good stories.

It certainly explains the fact that not one in twenty sci-fi books I read these days is well-written. It also explains much of the advice and guidance editors, publishers and other writers put out, which almost exclusively focuses on structure and pace, character and plot. It explains why most sci-fi these days is space opera - and pretty awful space opera at that. It also explains why my favourite sci-fi writers are mostly dead, or getting there; they come from a time when good writing was valued more highly than it is now.

So now when I toss aside the unreadable work of some modern 'master' of the genre with cries of anguish and wails of self-pity, I can at least console myself that it was the half-witted, clichéd, trope-ridden story that the publisher liked, even though it seemed to have been written by a hyper-active ten-year-old with literacy issues.

Technical Skills Needed By Writers

Over on About.com there's a writing blog that deserves a bit more patronage. Alena's Freelance Writing Blog is usually talking about something interesting. Currently, she's asking the question, 'What Tech Do We NEED To Know As Writers?' And it's a tricky sort of question.

My first reaction is, 'Not much!' People have been writing for thousands of years without needing anything more than a flat surface and something to make marks with. Then along came pens and paper and you had to know how to sharpen a quill and mix ink. Much later came the typewriter, but still little demand on technical skills - a bit of maintenance now and then, learning how to insert carbon paper, how to poke at the hammers with the end of a pencil to unjam them, etc.. Even the electric typewriter wasn't exactly challenging.

But then came the word-processor and the Internet.

I first used a word-processor in about 1980 - about the same time I first used email. It was called WordStar and ran on MSDos. I immediately fell in love with the whole technology. By simply inserting 'control coldes' in the text I could change fonts, embolden text, italicise text, and so on. It was wonderful. I didn't use a typewriter ever again. When the first Apple Macintoshes appeared a couple of years later, word processing was taken to new and dizzying heights with WYSIWIG formatting and new software that allowed the definition of styles. Does anyone remember an astonishingly ahead-of-its-time product called MacAuthor which came out in about 1985? It didn't survive long unfortunately but it didn't matter too much because Microsoft Word, which appeared on the Mac in 1984, soon became a first-class product and the deserved front-runner in the field.

From the mid-Eighties and beyond, being a competent user of a word processor became something that required a bit of skill. The programs were so complicated, so 'feature rich', that learning to use one well required enthusiasm and patience, or an actual training course. They have only grown more complicated since.

But could a writer work without a word processor these days? Could we go back to using typewriters, say, or pen and paper? Emphatically, no. Handwritten manuscripts have not been accepted by publishers for decades now and, while most will still accept a typewritten MS, there is a strong movement towards electronic submission (i.e. sending word-processor files by email). In fact, some magazines will now only accept electronic submissions.

So a writer needs to know how to work their wordprocessor, how to save files in appropriate formats (.RTF and .PDF being two of the more popular ones), and how to use an email program at least to the standard of being able to send a message with a file attached (but probably to the level of being able to maintain several email accounts and integrate them in your email client.) And all this implies being able to use a computer and one of the leading operating systems (Windows, say), to install programs, update programs, manage a filing system, back up files, install and maintain anti-virus and ant-malware software, wire a computer and its peripherals together, upgrade the bits of a computer system every few years, and on, and on.

And that's without the Web. As I've been discovering lately, public libraries (especially out here in the country) are a poor substitute for the Web as a research tool. If I need a biography of Lenin, a street map of Ommen in the Netherlands, pictures of the Berlaymont Building in Brussels, tech specs of experimental fusion reactors, and a 1982 calendar - all of which I've needed in the past few weeks as I've done research for my new novel (TimeSplash!) - the local library is no help at all. Only the Web can provide these kind of riches. (Actually, even the Web let me down on the Lenin biography - not enough depth in the online sources. This one was only solved when my daughter found an excellent biography in a second-hand book shop in Brisbane and posted it to me.) Doing research online is a bit of a skill in itself and getting quick answers to questions means knowing where to look and who to ask - much of this being knowledge that has to be acquired, stored and indexed.

And the technical infrastructure that makes this possible is not always trivial. I can't count the hours I've spent researching ISPs and broadband packages, setting up and maintaining my wireless broadband service, finding, learning, acquiring and maintaining browsers and feed readers.

And then we come to blogs and websites - which I won't get into except to say that, unless you're really keen to establish yourself as a 'brand', or unless you really do have a fan-base to keep in touch with, blogs and websites are something a writer really can do without. Having just spent about 20 hours changing from one web-hosting service to another (and I'm still not finished) I'm tempted to say that writers should stay away from websites altogether unless you can afford to pay someone to do it all for you.

All in all, then, you need a considerable amount of technical savvy to use the two basic services that writers really do need - word processing and email. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, you need this level of tech savvy to function as just about anything these days, so the incremental knowledge needed by writers is actually quite small.

What I'm Listening to as I Write My New Novel

One of the strangest things I've heard of late is that fans of writers like to know what the author was listening to as he or she wrote particular books. Some authors, I hear, even produce lists of musical pieces that should accompany their novels - the sound track of the book, no less!

Anyhoo, I think I have the whole thing automated now and would like to pass on this info to any author planning their own sound track.

As a secret songwriter (secret as in nobody knows I exist) I belong to a number of 'band sites' where I can post my music and listen to other people's postings. These sites have many interesting features - they manage track sales, they provide social networking facilities, they run charts by genre, etc., etc.. One of them, Last.fm, provides a piece of software that will monitor what a subscriber is playing at home on their computer and compile their own personal chart by day, week, or overall. I have this software installed (it's called Scrobbler for some reason) and you can all go to my Last.fm member page to see what I typically listen to.

Since this data can be put into a widget and embedded in my blog page, I could easily let you know what I'm listening to right now (it's Blondie's '11:59' -- I love Parallel Lines.) Of course, I won't because this whole blogging thing is narcissistic enough already. Believing anyone wants to know what music you listen to in the privacy of your own office takes vanity to whole new heights. But, for those whose fans are clamouring for it, I suggest you do it the easy way and get Scrobbler.

Science Looks At Fiction

I love science. I love writing fiction. I even enjoy programming. So an article in last week's New Scientist was especially interesting to me. Keith Oatley, a cognitive scientist from the University of Toronto, has been studying the effects of fiction on personality and emotion. His conclusion is that there is a strong effect. He and his collaborators found that people who read fiction (as opposed to non-fiction) actually become more like the characters in the stories. He likens fiction to a simulation of a social world, created by the author, which then runs in the minds of the readers. Reading involves exercising empathy to identify with the characters and, through a kind of social learning, the absorption of some of their traits.

Oatley's finding is that reading fiction improves social skills and gives fiction readers 'substantially greater empathy.' He therefore believes it is generally beneficial to a society. Of course, he might be slightly biased. Oakley, as well as being a scientist, is also a writer of fiction.

But I like the idea that when I write fiction I am also writing a simulation of a world that will run in people's minds. It is an idea that squares pretty well with how I have always thought of writing fiction – although for me, the greatest pleasure in doing it is to create a simulation that will run in my own mind.

Yet I can't help feeling a little anxious about all this. If people are learning social skills, learning to understand people and their interactions, from fiction, doesn't this mean fiction writers have a strong moral obligation to represent the world truthfully and accurately? Doesn't it at least mean they should be intelligent and wise enough that what they write isn't stupid or plain wrong?

Many years ago, I used to study 'argumentation' – the modern incarnation of rhetoric. Ancient rhetoricians such as Aristotle (pictured), Plato and Cicero, understood that effective argument could be a force for good as well as ill. Aristotle in particular believed that only moral men should be taught these potentially dangerous skills. It is pretty obvious that persuasive arguers who might use the craft of rhetoric for their own ends and without regard for morality or truth, can do immense damage to society. Look at the way the USA and the UK were persuaded to invade and conquer Iraq.

If fiction – apparently harmless entertainments like novels and short stories – can have such a strong influence on the reader's mental construction of social reality, maybe we should be more careful about what we read – and what we write. Should only moral people be allowed to write fiction? Should publishers and editors take their share of the blame for what damage an inaccurate or untruthful depiction might do?

Oatley has not directly investigated the other kinds of fiction in our world – films and games, for example – but he suspects they will be found to have a similarly powerful effect on personality and social understanding as literature does. Now that really does make me worried.

Three Observations On Successful Writers

Marianne de Pierres (She Who Must Be Obeyed) suggested I write and chat to Peter Cawdron about getting published. She seems to have forgotten that I know almost nothing about it and have certainly not had any success until recently when I got one story into print.

However, in wondering just what I could tell somebody about being a successful writer, I realised that I have formed some opinions based on what I've seen of the species. So, rather than bore only Peter with my neophyte observations, I thought I'd share them with everyone and give everyone the opportunity to comment. Here then are the three things I have noticed about being a successful writer.

Observation 1. You have to be a good writer. Not a great writer. Just a good one. Pick up a book or two at random from a bookshop shelf, or browse the e-zines in your genre and you'll see what I mean. Most writers in print are competent and capable - very, very few of them are brilliant. Not by a long way. I suppose if publishers had to wait for an L.P. Hartley or a William Golding to come along, there just wouldn't be enough books printed to make a living from it.

This is good news for the likes of me, since I ain't no Michael Frayn!

Observation 2. Successful writers seem to be very much into the writing 'scene'. They go to the conferences, they belong to the discussion groups, they track the industry news. They all know one another and they all know who's publishing what, who's on the judging panels for the various competitions, and what other writers are doing. As an example of how important this is, let me tell you a little story.

I've been a writer since I first learned to hold a crayon. From time to time over many years, I have tried to get a piece published. The way I did it was to package up a manuscript, write a covering letter and send it to a publisher - or agent. This has always been a waste of time. In the end, I decided I would simply write for my own amusement and sod the publishers - and agents. I did this for about ten years - and got a lot of very pleasurable writing done.

Out of curiosity, a couple of years ago, I joined a writers' group (Crime Writers Queensland). I eventually left them - mainly because it was a very long drive to the meetings. However, at one meeting, someone had passed on the news that a new literary agent had opened up shop in Brisbane. I filed the address away and forgot about it. Then, a few months ago, I finished yet another novel - one that I thought really ought to be publishable - and remembered the new agent. My book is set in Brisbane and I thought a Brisbane-based agent might just be interested. So I dropped him an email.

He told me he'd given up agenting (already!) to focus on writing his own books but he did mention the Orbit/QWC manuscript development program that had recently been announced and suggested I try for it. I, of course, hadn't heard of it and I've always hated the idea of entering competitions - but, since he went to some pains to stress what a rare opportunity this was to ensure that a publisher would actually look at your work, I thought I'd have a go. And I did. And I won one of the places, got my book read by Orbit, had a one-on-one session with the publisher about my book, and got the opportunity to revise and resubmit the manuscript.

Now this is as close to being published as I have come in all those years of trying and it only came about through 'networking'. If I hadn't been at that writers' group meeting, if I hadn't written to that (erstwhile) agent, I would never have known there was an opportunity, let alone profited from it.

This, however, is bad news for the likes of me as I am an antisocial troglodyte who lives up a mountain in the middle of nowhere.

Observation 3. Successful writers tend to be prolific, dedicated and, above all, persistent. Even if you're a good writer and totally plugged-in to the world of writing, there is still a very big element of luck involved in becoming successful. Publishers only do so many books a year, magazines only do so many stories. They are looking for good writers, of course, but they're also looking for other things; things that excite them personally, things that will excite their colleagues in marketing and production (who also need to be convinced) things that will sell well in particular markets, things that will sit right with the other material in their list, and so on. All of these factors change all the time, even for the same publisher, so your piece better be exactly what is needed at precisely that moment in time or it doesn't stand a chance, however good it is.

This means that, if you aren't writing, if you aren't sending your stuff out all the time, all over the place, your story will not be there in the slush pile for the editor to find it when they're looking for exactly that kind of thing. You simply have to be in the game. The odds are not in your favour but if you're not in the game, you will never get the prize.

This is one of the areas where I have been letting myself down. I do the writing alright but I haven't taken seriously enough the process of getting it out there and keeping it out there. As it happens, as soon as I did start making a concerted effort, it payed off.

Not the deepest of insights, I'm afraid but they're all I have. If it seems a bit gloomy, I have only one small word of consolation for Peter and all the rest like me waiting to leap into print. When you do start networking with writers, editors, agents and publishers, you will probably discover, as I did, that they are a pretty good bunch and incredibly helpful and supportive. Talking to these guys makes being a writer a much more pleasant experience than one in which you merely swap mauscripts with publishers for rejection slips.