Everything comes around

I've been continuing my trawl through my new copy of the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook this week. And I've had a pleasant surprise, for once.  The number of agents who now say they represent SF authors seems to have grown a great deal.  

I can remember back a decade ago, when I could find only five or six agents to submit to who had any affinity for SF.  'No SF' was a common part of the listing of an otherwise promising agent.  The five or six who did profess an affinity for SF got sent every novel I had - and rejected them all.  I hit a brick wall, with nowhere else to go, and that's when I took a step back from the genre for a few years.

It pained me.  I fell in love with SF in my twenties, and started writing it soon after.  My first attempts were derivative, and definitely not publishable.  But by the time I'd finished novel number twelve I'd learned my craft, found my voice, and knew what I wanted to say.  The trouble was that nobody was interested in what I had to say.

I call that my fallow period, the time when I went on writing, because that's who I am and what I do, but I didn't submit anything for years.  It was a dark time when I found it hard to believe that I'd ever get the chance to be published.

But the wheel has turned again, and SF is back in fashion, but, more excitingly, it's moved on.  Social media has given women SF writers a strong voice.  VIDA has started measuring the under-representation of women in reviews and as reviewers.  That has spurred some editors to come out of the woodwork to say that they value women's voices, but don't get enough submissions from us.

Last year we had the Women in Science Fiction panel in London, which again highlighted the challenges women SF writers face.  I now feel that it's not me, that I'm not alone in this struggle. I have  sisters who are challenging the status quo and calling out the inequality. I have the feeling that we're on  the verge of a step change in the genre, despite, or maybe because of, this year's hiccup in the Hugo nominations.  For the first time for a decade I now have hope that there might be a place for me in the genre, an agent who will be willing to take me on, a publisher willing to print my words.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com