Making It Official

I recently became a member of the NZSA, or New Zealand Society of Authors, and am currently enjoying such perks as a 10% discount on some books in some stores of some chains. I also attended my first meeting of the Auckland chapter, a monthly event. Let me tell you some stories...

First up, I am 20 years old. The median age for this meeting was, at a guess, 70. I didn't just feel young, I felt like a fetus. Still, they're all incredibly lovely people and frankly I'm glad they're all 'Christopher Lee' old, because that means they have more combined experience than I could ever hope to gain. That's an incredible thing to have access to as a young writer, and every single one of them was more than willing to share their expertise.

Second, I used to think I was salty. This room made me dehydrated with the amount of salt in it. Thing is, it was all incredibly justified salt. One of the things discussed in these saltmine chats was a recent award for mid-career authors being awarded to a poet-laureate who has been active for over 50 years. That struck me, and indeed everyone else in the room, as decidedly not 'mid-career'. In fact, it seemed that now this person has only 2 awards left to win; the Nobel Prize and a Junior Writer's award. Then a discussion came up about a major award finally allowing independently published authors to enter, but only mentioning this in the fine print. If anything, it seemed more like they were letting them in for the sake of inclusion without giving any indication that they would seriously consider these entrants for the award.

So what kind of country am I writing in? I'm young, and naive, so I always assume I don't know the half of what's really going on. But what I can see is a bunch of major publishers pulling out of the country, a disdain from retailers of indie publishing and a self-congratulatory circlejerk set of writing awards. What am I to make of all this? Should I unclick my pen and stop writing? It seems that none of the official bodies in this country want writers like me to succeed. It's like they've forgotten that in order to have a publishing industry, they need writers. And without wanting to sound mean, the truth is all these veteran authors getting the few publishing deals and awards are old as balls. Give it 20 years, they'll all be dead and I'll be 40. What then? Will they finally start handing these things to the rest of us when they have no other option?

Why aren't they encouraging writing in this country?

Anyway, last of all there was a small competition. We were given the prompt 'It was a very nervous voice in the male choir...' and had a limit of 150 words. We had weeks to prepare if we wanted to enter, so naturally I wrote my entry 10 minutes before leaving the house. I came runner-up and won a copy of 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies'. Here was my entry:

Pronouns

          It was a very nervous voice in the male choir that sang the pronouns wrong. In the audience was the man who would wink at him each Sunday, and in the pulpit was the man who frowned. The voice wavered on, unknowable save if you were listening for it. All the tiny rebellion went unnoticed, and if anyone had noticed, no-one would have cared. It was not their place to judge, and had the voice known their disinterest it would have sobbed. How alarming, don't you think, that the voice thought it was interesting only for its desire to be stopped by a stuffed-in cock. Such a shame, don't you think, that the voice couldn't think of itself as a person, as something more than its substituted pronouns.