Marvellous Journeys

Today I went to a sci-fi/fantasy writing workshop hosted by this man. It was good fun, and wierd in a strange way (that told you a lot). Terry's a pretty energetic and flamboyant speaker, he started of a with a fairly intense, motivational introductory talk about pursuing our ambition, going to the next level, taking writing seriously, advancing our projects and getting published. All of which pretty much intimidated the shit out of me - this workshop was a birthday present, I didn't have any projects of any kind. I didn't even have a sample.

I'm not sure about previous workshops but I suspect they might have been a bit more advanced in their projects; but as a he asked each of us in turn what our projects were and what readers we liked, I suspect he realised that some of us weren't on that trajectory- at least not at the moment. In either case after that run-through the workshop shifted to a more relaxed, less intense format as we learnt about the byzantine intrigues and protocols of UK/US publishing and Australia's position in this vast system for the shifting of marketable, paper-based narrative product.

I wish I'd been taking notes properly throughout, as we covered a really great range of topics; our current media culture, the singularity, how (and how not) to get your work published, consistency and believability in fantasy worlds, all of it really interesting and useful. I was startled by all the stuff there was to learn - up until then it hadn't really struck me how much writing was a craft as well as an art - but also at the resources available online (we got scads of useful links).

During lunch break we all got to read the group's anonymous writing samples (including my not-so-anonymous handwritten, paragraph-length writing sample), and critique them out loud afterwards. Some of the samples I read weren't that impressive, being pretty conventional shopworn genre-fantasy, but others in our group have got really good stuff going; a lot of the samples I didn't get to look at sounded great. My paragraph got pretty good reviews.

I was expecting a lot of nerdy male SF-heads my own age, but on the contrary, the group was a very mixed sample, ranging from late teens/early twenties to two septugenarians, who were total dudes and there was a slight gender imbalance, favouring the females (which isn't actually that surprising when you consider the makeup of Australian fantasy authors). We all put our email addresses and someone's setting up a yahoo group to stay in contact, of which I hope something good will come of it.

PS

As a postscript, here's the paragraph. It's part of an idea I've been kicking around in my head for months, loosley themed as a space-comic-opera romp with liberal pilfering from Iain M. Banks, Steven Baxter and one of Alex Clatworthy's MSN names (true!).

... Eoc woke him with buzzing synths and faint echoes of something harsher. He was drowsy, verging on puking. They were decelerating. About time. After a struggle he levered his eyes open. The music jumped in tempo. Eoc was getting impatient. Showtime. Sila dived out of his crib and swam down the corridor.

Mysterious huh? I'm glad I ended it there, otherwise I'd actually have to explain what was going on to the reader. Artistic license rocks.