The end of the year is
hurtling towards me and I’m not sure whether to duck, dodge, or weave. It feels
like the last few weeks have been a full on mix of completing a structural edit
of Book 2, teaching, talking and researching and preparing for the aforementioned
teaching and talking.
A few weekends ago I
was very lucky and very happy to be a special guest at the inaugural Genre Con.
It was very exciting to feel
part of an event, which is, I’m certain, going to be a permanent fixture on the
Australian writing calendar - an event that is only going to get bigger.
Congratulations to Australian Writers’ Marketplace and Queensland Writers’ Centre for having the
insight and initiative to recognise that genre writers and readers are a tribe,
a tribe who needed an event to meet, share experiences, talk about the craft
and learn about each other’s story telling.
It was a stroke of
genius to run the workshops and talks in mixed genres rather than as streams.
So I shared panels with Anna Campbell,
a romance writer, Joe Abercrombie,
a fantasy writer, Simon Higgins, a crime,
sci-fi and children’s writer and Charlotte
Nash Stewart, a romantic suspense writer. And it meant our audiences were
drawn from across the genre divides as well.
If you weren’t there
then check out the AWM’s blog
and the links to a whole range of wrap ups.
I also had the
pleasure a few weeks back, of teaching a day course for the Faber
Academy in Sydney – Troubleshooting Crime.
It was a small class and gave us
the absolute luxury of spending the day intensively working on the students’
projects.
Some classes consist of picking apart the pieces of writing crime –
the genre conventions and how to break the rules, the significance of writing
place, what makes a plot work, how to create a character that steps from the page and
into your life.
And then occasionally you have the opportunity to teach a class
that allows you to roll your sleeves up and work on the particular rather than
the abstract; to talk plot in respect of the students’ own plots, character as
it applies to the cast they have assembled, to wrestle with issues of structure and tone – it’s a rare treat.
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