stuartforsyth

When my good friend and editor Lorna put the challenge of writing a novel to me last year, I jumped at the opportunity with a naive and joyous abandon.  The book was a submission for Terry Pratchett’s Anywhere but Here, Anywhen but Now competition for previously unpublished authors with a publishing contract and advance on royalties as the grand prize. I worked solidly through the latter half of 2010 and, surviving on surprisingly little sleep, reached my target in five months leaving the last month for revision and editing.

I don’t think I’ll attempt such sadistic timelines again but I was surprised (and continue to be surprised) at how easily the story came together. It’s April, 2011 and I’m a good 20% through my next book so writing, and creating, isn’t what I find hard - in fact, living in the reality of a story while my hands belt out the chapters is one of the most enjoyable activities I can imagine and I am gobsmacked that it’s taken me over thirty years to pursue it seriously.

It’s all the stuff that comes after that I find hard and need help with. The endless rounds of revisions, cutting back and rewriting and revising again.  And then at the end of the process, when you pretty much can’t stand the thought of having to re-read any of the chapters again it’s suddenly done and you have in your hand something tangible, something that has not existed before, something exquisite and entirely subjective in its beauty.  And then, with the manuscript done, comes the infernal ‘where to next?’ questions that seem so daunting and has been the bane for so many talented creators and artists.

I’ve made a decision to exhaust the traditional publishing avenues before tackling the self-published route because I want to be able to spend as much time on writing as I can. From what I’ve read on those few brave souls who have navigated successfully through a self-published model, there seems to be an inordinate amount of work required to actively market their material, to build a brand and to maintain that brand. It almost begs the question of how they continue to write?

I meandered into Dymocks this afternoon - as two magnets meander into one another - and came out a little poorer but considerable richer for the experience having purchased the books in the photo. I consider myself well armed now to take my first tentative steps toward finding the right literary agent to manage the business side of selling and promoting my books and short stories and hopefully free up more of my time to tell stories and create worlds.

Who knew the market for science fiction and fantasy writers was such a closed one? Walking the sci-fi aisles of Borders or Dymocks you could be excused for thinking the genre was burgeoning in popularity. You would also be wrong. According to Harry Bingham, author of the invaluable Getting Published:

Many agents have effectively closed the doors to fantasy / sci-fi because the administrative burden of sorting through all the bad manuscripts has overwhelmed the likely profit from the handful of good ones.

Harry, who is the MD of one of the UK’s leading editorial consultancies says the sci-fi slush pile is literally overflowing with poorly written submissions, many of them a grammatical train wrecks with plots blatantly plagiarised from computer games. Allow me a brief pause for the interjection of an expletive and the chance to vapourise my family-friendly blog rating. Shit! For science fiction, Harry’s advice is to either go after publishers in your local market, or snub the Queen and look to the livelier North American publishing market. Even then he advises:

with fantasy / sci-fi, you may need to go to more than the usual ten to twelve agents in order to get a reliable read as to the market for your work. Fifteen to Eighteen agents might be a more realistic number to target.

Above all, to stand even the remotest chance, you need to make sure your manuscript is orders of magnitude above the rest in terms of completeness. Writers often have one or two shots at getting picked up and noticed by agents and unless your manuscript screams competence and riveting you don’t stand a snowball’s hope in hell. So time to reign in my jubilation at having crafted a wonderful story and begin another serious round of critical self-evaluation and ruthless revising. Oh, and somehow finish my 2011 novel, hold down a challenging day job, make time for my family and kids, and work in a little R&R somewhere along the way.

Anybody know of a good cloning clinic Down-under?