To begin: I am not a great fiction writer. I am not a good fiction writer. I may occasionally verge on competence. Mostly I hope someday to hit competence regularly and then someday maybe even be half decent. I don't have all the answers when it comes to writing, but I've learned a little bit in the past few years.

I met a woman Saturday night who is one year older than I, though I would have suspected she was younger. She, and another woman, and my husband had spent most of the night discussing religion, particularly Jewish myth. Some people get their mythological training through Joseph Campbell via Star Wars; my husband gets his world myth via Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. I can think of worse places. (It's a pattern for him, you see. Most of his literary exposure came from reading Classic Comics.) Towards the end of the evening, at about eleven p.m., Rice calls to me and says, "She writes speculative fiction."

I jumped up, very excited, and he left me to discuss speculative fiction with her.

Over the course of about three hours, this is what I discovered:

She has written three novels in twelve years. She started writing at age ten, quit for a while during college, and then got back on the horse after finding herself enchanted with a certain SF TV series and started writing fanfic. Eventually she started writing her own stuff again.

She has evidently read a good portion of media tie-in novels. She spent a good portion of the night discussing a particular author well-known, and perhaps primarily known, for his media tie-in work. (I know this because I read a couple of his books in high school and use Wikipedia.) She is very frustrated with his current SF novel; he spends too much time talking about the SF aspects -- gadgetry and the spaceships and stuff.

What she really loves is action adventure. She described her novel to me and has sent me the first four chapters. The only SF aspect to her novel is that it takes place on a spaceship. It could take place anywhere else and still be the same story, the same book, the same characters.

We started out by having a nice conversation about how a particular popular SF series of movies, books, and other media could actually be fantasy, just in space. She talked about this series a lot. This series seems to be very important to her, as does another very popular SF series which is very specifically SF. This series also has movies, and many series in the same universe, etc. (It was the second series in this universe, whilst in reruns, that got her writing again.)

See this? This is narrative. It's not linear -- it goes around and around and around, with squiggles and other such lovely shapes.

She has sent her second book that she's trying to get published to lots of agents. She tells them it's a SF novel. But I'm not sure it is. It seems to be action adventure on a spaceship. Is that SF? Depends on your definition, I suspect. In any event, she has gotten about twenty-something to thirty form rejections. She's very frustrated and annoyed. She hasn't really done any agent research -- she's mostly just going down the Writer's Market list, hitting the ones who accept snail mail first, and then she'll hit the ones who accept e-mail, and then she'll look to Canada and the UK.

We had a discussion about reading Miss Snark. I think Miss Snark has addressed this sort of situation quite well, (e.g. research agents -- don't just send indiscriminately) and this young lady will probably take Miss Snark's advice better than if it came from me. She was worried that once she'd sent this book to all the agents who accept SF that eventually she'd run out and never have any agents to send any manuscripts to ever again. I pointed out that the agents had rejected her submission, not her. And they get so many submissions that they probably wouldn't remember her initial submission upon receiving another. She was worried that they would remember her and laugh at her and think she was an idiot if she resubbed.

She had received a lot of information and insight from a writer who has a couple decades on us. She's a Ph.D. in English, and a professor. She writes YA. Currently she's writing a YA dark fantasy purely because dark fantasy sells and is hawt right now. She has an agent, and has had for three years. The agent hasn't been able to sell any of her work yet. The young lady I was visiting with spent a lot of time talking about how her friend was a really bad writer who wrote about stuff more suited to the 50's or '60's or '70's than to now, but she was her primary source of publishing information. (Note as an anthropologist: The friend of this lady is writing a lot about race. Race is still an issue. If you live in Idaho you may think it's not if you don't get out and observe race relations, which we are a tad light on, but it is still absolutely an issue. /end rant)

She had spent time checking out some local crit groups I'd heard of and have considered looking into. She's done the footwork for me. They are what I feared they would be. We discussed local profs interested in speculative fiction. She reaffirmed what I already suspected and knew about them. Thank heavens I have stayed away. (Can we say unprofessional and insecure?)

She is going to be going to grad school in the fall because what else does one do with a triple major in the liberal arts? But she feels she needs to get some validation for her writing now so she knows she's not wasting her time. She can't justify writing while in grad school unless an editor or someone tells her she's not wasting her time. She kept coming back to this.

Also, unless she can get her novel(s) published, and a deal with a big movie studio, and the right to pick the director and write the screenplay she's not sure if this whole writing thing is worth it.

She has not been online. She was talking about being lonely and the writing situation in the area, which I am completely aware of. She also talked about not knowing what her writing needed and if it was any good. (She's only done IRL crit groups and they all evidently sucked. I understand what she was saying.) At the same time, she's been writing since she was ten, except for her sabbatical, and so she absolutely knows what she's doing, better than all these other people running around who may indicate she doesn't.

I asked if she'd considered cons for the socialization. She told me about some literary writing conferences she'd considered. I explained the concept of a speculative fiction con. I then told her about things like Clarion and Bootcamp and Odyssey and Viable Paradise, and so on. She had never heard of them. She also hadn't heard of most of the speculative fiction writers I mentioned. It's true that I read some weird stuff that's not exactly mainstream; however, I did mention some classic SF writers and modern fine writers. She knew Gaiman's Neverwhere, Card (who you can't escape in Idaho and Utah), L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and the media tie-in writer. I'm sure she knows other writers (one of her degrees is in English), but those are the spec fic ones she's familiar with.

I think that about covers it, in general.

Oh, also Stephen King and Earnest Hemingway are hacks (another friend was involved with these comments -- not the King one, however -- he's a big King fan). There was also discussion of writing vampire novels and another series of books which would rake in the cash.

First of all, I'm still not sure she's placed herself in the right genre. Also, after looking over her chapters there's either a lot to learn or she needs to quit reading all the media tie-in books, unless she wants to write them. At this point she's shooting herself in the foot with agents, I suspect. (Her synopsis is also questionable -- she's not sure if it's good or not. She's rewritten it six times and it keeps getting longer and longer and more convoluted.)

She was asking for my insight, so I've been considering these things.

But she also caused me to consider my own motivations and desires. I'm afraid New Line and Spielberg have nothing to do with it. Though writing a screenplay might be fun, just for the experience.