It has been flat out around here! I have started my first week back at NMIT and already different sorts of things have fallen into place for me very nicely. You have missed out on much literary stuff, you have! So now that I am back at school, it’s time to let you into my literary world again, my unfinished book of my world inside the books, writing and ideas.Let’s rap!
Over the past semester I found that NMIT weren’t getting much luck with finding contracts with publishing houses for placement, which put me into a panic only I could fix by emailing EVERY publishing house I knew begging for a chance. I even emailed Scott Westerfeld asking his advice on where I should go and what I should do. Believe me, I was crazy!
Only Scott Westerfeld and one publishing house wrote back…and now I am currently doing an intern at Express Media at The Wheeler Centre. But wait, there’s more! The intern is for The John Marsden Prize. Terribly excited, so once a week I will be there. I might see you there, yes?
Once I organised that for myself I started to concentrate on getting my work out there and have polished off some pieces I am quite proud of and hold close to my heart. One special story I finished while on holiday in Narooma and learnt that the gender of a cow can stuff up your story massively. Mysterious, I know, but that is all I’m giving away! And thanks to Benny for pointing it out to me!
So, next on the list is my novel, which I have now decided to turn into a novella (longer short story, but not as large as a novel) the word count will hopefully reach around 12,000 words, but we shall see how we go. The challenge for the project is 1000 words a week, but we only have an hour in the class to write. Tricky, very tricky; but I love a challenge!
With the timeline set out I am still stuck with the big question I was trying to answer through research that wasn’t working out that well for me, until I learnt about Transhumanism.
Created by Julian Huxley in 1957 it’s the theory of “man remaining man but transcending into other” by looking at technology as ideas of superior intelligence that we otherwise could not achieve ourselves. Like Marshall Mcluhan’s Medium is the Massage (pictured, and no it's not a typo) with the quote I love “this book…is an extension of the eye” meaning the book is a technology for the eye to read and look at. Without the book, the eye wouldn’t read and otherwise wouldn’t use that technology. Beautiful, don’t you agree? I do like the theory; it interests me on many levels and helped me realize a key element to my new novella. Now I just have to tackle the smaller question under the big umbrella question I just figured out. Sigh!
But while I’ve been flying through my first week of Uni, we already had two guest speakers that I thoroughly enjoyed; Steven Amsterdam who wrote the book Things We Didn’t See Coming (also pictured) and his publisher from Sleepers Louise Swinn. Louise was so lovely and I talked to her about the course and what she is involved in so easily. She was quite impressed with us so that was a chest-puffer for sure! Already excited by her arrival I was even more so about Steven who bought in his new puppy, Wiley (cutest puppy I’ve ever seen) and told us about his experiences with critique workshops, his early writing days and being published by a small independent place. It was such a great experience and if they ever do read this, thanks again!
We even get the privilege of getting Steven back to teach our fiction class which I am pumped for. I hope he likes my stuff without me sounding like a desperate try hard!
And so ends a first week back into the literary world. It’s going to get busy, particularly in August because I’m also volunteering for the Melbourne Writers Festival which I will keep you posted about as well so they will almost certainly own my soul.
I feel flat out already, but in a kind of satisfying way!
Cursive Scripts submissions open again soon too, so watch this space for updates!
Happily Tired and Yours,
Jinx xx
