Current mood:

bouncy

meeting with Rob Sawyer
So I met with Rob Sawyer today, and I'm at the Toronto Public Library scoping my mail and journal out now.

There was a small problem in that, well...Rob had nothing to really say about my story. Said it was well written, thought it was publishable, and used the word 'charming' (honest), and in fact referred to it as 'this fine piece of writing' (I swoon, I swoon). He was surprised when I said it was a first draft (I wanted an opinion of words as they came from me and not after I'd edited them). He'd marked a couple of punctuation mistakes and 2 places where I used variants of the same word a little closely. Told me he'd had some people in where their pages were marked up all over the damn place, but that I hadn't given him much to work with in that field.

It's actually a first chapter, and he suggested I modify it to be a short story, with more of a closure to the end of it, then work on selling that while I work on the novel, which, if I get the short story published, I could then send out with 'this is an expansion of the story which I published in Blah Magazine in June 2004...' etc.

We wound up talking about the middle east, anti/pro Americanism, some SF military fiction I'm writing and where I might be able to send my story (which is quirky, but light and witty, so while it is apparently good it is possibly going to be a hard sell while people are looking for darker stuff with a more acerbic edge right now), because, well...after 20 minutes we'd discussed everything we could about the story, and I had him booked for an hour.

But it was sort of odd, because as he said he really didn't have a lot of pointers for me. Which, in and of itself, was really encouraging. Rob Sawyer's stuff is really good and thought-provoking, so that felt good