2014 - the science fictional year

2014 was the year when I finally came home.  After dabbling with the idea of being a crime writer for a year, I finally realised that I could be nothing other than an SF writer.

January found me doing a lot of soul-searching about this issue.  I couldn't deny my true calling any longer.  Despite the best efforts of my crime writer friends to get me to join them, I just didn't feel like I belonged in crime.  Yes. There is often a crime at the heart of my stories, but my heart sings when I'm exploring something in an SF setting.  So armed with my new resolve i bought a membership to the World Science Fiction Convention Loncon 3.

Next I completed the manuscript of my second indie-pubbed book Panthera : Death Song.  The books went live on the Amazon site the week before Loncon 3.  Then I left for Loncon 3, five days of brilliance in London in August.  I attended an SF writers' workshop, heard some of the major editors in the genre speak, and spoke on a panel myself. There was also the satisfaction of sitting in the Hugo awards ceremony and seeing Best Novel go to a woman, Anne Leckie.  And Aidan Moher, one of the bloggers I appeared on my panel with, also won a Hugo.

I went home and wrote two 20,000 word novellas in two months, a phenomenal output of words.  Then I decided to re-write Jade, my 15 year old novel about the discovery of a sentient planet.  Half way through that re-write the Conville and Walsh Word of  Mouth Prize was announced, and I found myself scrambling to do the edit of the first 30,000 words to submit to the competition.

As the year closes I've finished the final edit of Jade, and have just completed reading the book aloud. I've moved on to the final edit of Panthera : Death Plain, which will be my third indie-pubbed book, which I want out before Easter.

Looking back on this year, I see how hard I have worked, and how hard I played at Loncon 3.  I have a sense of having come home, and have recovered my passion for writing in the genre.  But writing is only the first step in the journey.  My goal for this year is to be able to come back at the end of next year having persuaded somebody to pay for my writing.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of science fiction Eco-crime novels Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song,

Hanging with my SF tribe

Last week I was blogging Fromm the ExCel centre, in the midst of Loncon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention.  A week later, and I'm back home, thinking about what a great time I had in London, and about how much I learned.

I spent a lot of time with other writers who 'get, the SFF genre. I also had my work critiqued by a group of fellow SFF writers.  My usual critiquers aren't SFF writers, and it was great to get feedback from my own tribe.  I didn't always agree with what they had to say, and some comments had me scratching my head wondering why they'd been made, but listening to the discussions made me feel like I belonged to this tribe,

Do AIs have gender?  Should they have?  Should we be using pronouns other than 'he' and 'she' to denote a multi-gendered future?  The whole idea of  "gender" gets challenged when the intelligence is manufactured and not a product of Darwinian evolution.  

I listened to a group of genre writers talk about how they got their agents.  For the first Angry Robot Ooen Door reading period hundreds of manuscripts were submitted.  Of those, the publisher sent out 65 requests for the full manuscript.  From those requests, 5 authors were signed up.  These writers shared tips on quizzing an agent who is interested in taking you on, and warned against grabbing the first agent interested in you.  And I got a sobering reminder that the query letter is more important than the manuscript.

One of the best mind-expanding lectures was "The Post-Human Future", delivered by the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees.  "Too many people think that humans are the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree", he said.  "No astronomer can believe that."  He offered the sobering thought that this century might be "the final century" for humans.  He talked of global warming, the dark side of tech development, space and space tourism, and life elsewhere.  And speculated that space could contain a quantum computer the size of a galaxy.

Fact - or at least, hard science speculation - segued into fiction as I went from the lecture to the fan village and stood by the Tardis.  And this was the wonder of Loncon 3.  You could have spent all five days going to serious science lectures and dealt with nothing but hard reality.  But if you're a dreamer and an SF writer like me, absorbing a heady mix of fact and fiction will keep me going for months.  Loncon 3 was one of those magical experiences that will never be repeated, but will live for ever in my memory.