In July I’ll be teaching a workshop at Avid Reader called You Will Fail - The Business of Writing.
It will be mainly me talking about my career, the various successes and failures, but focussing on the things that have gone wrong, because things always go wrong.
It’ll be funny, gentle, hopefully helpful, and at the very least comforting. There is a sense in writing that you can’t talk about the failures and the disappointments, that this somehow sort of curses you, that it diminishes your career and the upbeat front we're all supposed to carry.
But a writing career is ups and downs, and sometimes those ups aren’t very up, and sometimes those downs are very, very down.
Every business is like that - though writing is often one of those businesses where you wear your heart on your sleeve, and the failures can be absolutely devastating.
But, you know what, we are all of us failures.
I honestly believe that’s actually something worth celebrating. We’re still here breathing. We can still seize the opportunity to make something of our time, to maybe leave the world a little better. Or we can sit down and relax and read something wonderful - and there's nothing wrong with that.
If you’re going to fail at something, that’s worth failing at.
The workshop isn’t going to teach you how to submit stories, or build more interesting characters or worlds or whatever. But it might help you when those things, or even worse that thing known as a Writing Career blows up in your face.
I sold my first short story 26 years ago to a wonderful Australian SF magazine called Eidolon. The story was illustrated by Shaun Tan - a picture that I still adore. It honestly never got any better than that: it just got different. And I’m still here, and I’m still writing.
You can book here
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On a sidenote, I've redesigned the website so that it suits me better. I always found it too noisy, and I like the simple bloggish nature of this one. I hope you all find it easier to navigate.
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