HARDCOPY 2016

2016 has been a year of ups and down, both personally and globally. All over social media people are welcoming the death of 2016 and while I can see where they are coming from, on the whole 2016 has been a fantastic year for me, mostly because I participated in the ACT Writers Centre HARDCOPY professional development program.

Weekend One- Manuscript Development Masterclass:

HARDCOPY began with a manuscript development masterclass with editor Nadine Davidoff on an icy May weekend in Canberra.

I must admit once all the participants started talking about their manuscripts (ranging from YA to crime to historical to humour to fantasy and literary and some genres in between) my imposter syndrome set in. Everyone’s work seemed much more grown up and serious than my little story about cloned Neandertals fighting for freedom in a post-apocalyptic world (really that just sounds like a pulpy sci-fi novel or a bad action movie). But then Nadine got us to think about what had compelled us to write our story and the emotions behind the writing.

So let me explain what came out of that exploration-

In 2013 Harvard geneticist George Church claimed that he could clone a Neandertal. This intrigued me. My first thought was Hell yes. Somebody please clone a Neandertal. I wanna see that. So I decided to write about it. In order to write about Neandertal cloning I had to think about why we would clone Neandertals, how they would be treated, what they would be like and also how the science would work. The science part was fairly straight forward (for a biological scientist such as myself) and I learned that George Church was being extremely optimistic, but there is a chance in the future that we will be able to reverse engineer a Neandertal genome from a modern human genome. So to be plausible I set my story in the future. Extrapolating current social and technological trends into a future world brought up interesting themes and possible scenarios. Working out what Neandertals were like required research into the fossil evidence and as a result I became a staunch defender of the reputation of Neandertals. I get quite offended now when someone uses ‘Neandertal’ as an insult. Thinking about how cloned Neandertals would be treated and why we would clone them really took me into sticky ethical areas and brought up issues of prejudice, exploitation and identity. I also chose female main protagonists because I am inspired to improve the representation of women in science fiction. Through all this I came to realise the writing of this seemingly superficial sci-fi adventure was driven by frustration, anger and sadness at the shortcomings of the human race. (Phew- and I thought it was just an exercise in imagination!).

But enough about me and more about HARDCOPY. While the manuscript development class got me thinking about my manuscript in new ways and re-iterated important aspects of craft, one of the most valuable aspects of this weekend was the sense of community I got from meeting the other participants. I think we all felt somewhat validated to have made it into the program and were all excited and happy to be there. Everyone I met was kind and funny and interesting and genuinely easy to get along with. I got a sense, even from that first weekend, that the connections made would be permanent and we’d all be, at the very least, following each other’s careers closely into the future.

I left Canberra, that weekend in May, on a high and full of inspiration and motivation.

Weekend 2- Intro2Industry:

The into2industry weekend in September was a further opportunity to hang out with my cool group of new writer friends. It was also an opportunity to hear from writers, publishers, agents, booksellers and other industry professionals. For me the publishing industry was demystified. Throughout the weekend my emotions ranged from hope to a complete absence of hope and back again (regarding the chances of having a successful career as an Australian author). And I went home each night with a thumping headache from listening so hard. The most salient messages for me were that there is no one path to publication and that getting your first book deal is just the beginning.

After an interesting discussion of social media, I think most participants started a Facebook author page or opened a twitter account (it was twitter for me and I’m still not sure I’m using it correctly).

Then we all went home and applied for Round 2, where 30 would be whittled down to 10 (well actually 11 in this instance). More on that to come…

 

HARDCOPY is an initiative of the ACT Writers Centre and has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts