Fantastic opportunities for editors
Robert Byrnes reports on the April speaker
My only experience with ‘speculative fiction' during my thirteen years as a freelance editor was a request from a female writer living somewhere north of Brisbane that I have a look at her current manuscript. This was one of those pro bono exercises that I sometimes engaged in. I found the story line extremely convoluted, as well as very difficult to follow because of the arbitrary use of verb tenses: the author kept switching—gratuitously, I thought—from the present to the past tense. There were also legions of spelling errors, to the point that I wondered whether this was the work not of a grown woman but of an untutored schoolgirl. I sent her my many comments—perhaps ‘reservations' might be a better word—wished her well, and heard no more.
Kate Eltham, the speaker at our April meeting, is secretary of Fantastic Queensland (which from now on I'll abbreviate to FQ), and she believes that a lot of work being done by Australian writers of speculative fiction could benefit from an edit. Apparently a great deal of such fiction is being written, and the main job of FQ, a non-profit incorporated industry association, is to encourage their efforts and help them find markets for their work.
What, you may be wondering, is speculative fiction? Well, for FQ it's an umbrella term that includes not only fantasy and science fiction but also horror fiction, ‘cyber punk', ‘slipstream', ‘steampunk' and even magic realism. Among many readers some of these genres are extremely popular (I recall being amazed, during a visit to the home of one of the Society's former committee members, to see dozens of speculative fiction titles lining the walls of his living room). Kate declared that FQ was happy to work with authors of ‘anything but contemporary realism'.
FQ emerged from a collectivity called the Vision Writers Group in Brisbane, and fortuitously got going at just about the time when Brisbane City Council was developing its ‘Creative City' policy. Simultaneously, both the federal and state governments were taking initiatives to encourage creativity in the community. FQ became one of the first of the Creative City ‘industry clusters'.
How do you market speculative fiction? Kate emphasised that conventional publishing is only one of many potential outlets, which include computer games, comic books, e-books, web sites, and of course the cinema (‘Star Wars', ‘Lara Croft Tomb Raider' …). The potential market for speculative fiction was therefore very big, and FQ was trying to exploit the many opportunities that exist for cross-pollination across several of these outlets. It was working at capacity building—‘making sure our writers are as good as possible'—using its Clarion South Writers Workshop for short-story writing and its Envision Manuscript Development Program for novel-length manuscripts; both those programs had produced encouraging results. In addition, FQ was collaborating with Arts Queensland in a pilot project to develop a game concept, and was about to start a joint project to develop screenwriting. Above all, it wanted to raise the profile of the genre (or should one say ‘genres'?), to encourage demand, and to give all its writers access to whatever markets were out there.
On the specific subject of editing and editors, Kate was upbeat. There were clear opportunities, she said, for editors to become involved with what FQ was doing, and FQ acknowledged that the editing process was ‘absolutely essential' to safeguard the quality of its writers' final product. Agents and publishers often complained that they received ‘a lot of crap' from writers, so it was important that work submitted first undergo some sort of editorial overview. FQ's writers needed to understand better how editors could improve the marketability of their work, and to appreciate that using an editor would not necessarily cost them an arm and a leg. (At this point our colleague Ben Jansen generously offered his services free of charge to review manuscripts submitted by FQ authors!)
Members interested in finding out more about Fantastic Queensland can look it up on the Web < www.fantasticqueensland.com > or contact Kate at kate.eltham@fantasticqueensland.com .