STF June

Our June meeting will be on Thursday 30th at the Jolly Judge at 7pm.

Right Place, Write-Time – a post from one of our members

This month Stranger Than Fiction member Colin Salter tells us how he got his break in non-fiction writing.

Apparently there’s no such thing as a Job For Life anymore. A careers officer told me five years ago that we can all expect to have at least three different careers over the course of our working lives. Not counting diverse casual jobs (including my two-year stint as a picker-packer for a mail order hotel supplies company) I think I’m up to an even half-dozen now.

It took me 47 years to admit to myself that the best thing about any job I ever had was the parts of it that allowed me to write. I would volunteer to edit the in-house newsletter, insist on writing a report, even sex up the minutes of the union meetings. Any excuse for wordcraft. But despite that I stubbornly insisted that I was a hands-on maker and do-er, a rude mechanical – definitely not an intellectual, a writer or thinker.

Without “going there,” I can safely say that a forceful father who was an old-school English Literature lecturer may have had something to do with my resolute resistance to words. He certainly drove me to a lifelong passion for obscure alternative early 70s prog rock (ooh, twin guitars) through which, in a strange way, I came to my writing vocation.

No, it wasn’t liner notes for a 5CD Grateful Dead retrospective. I was in an internet chatroom for Manfans – hardy obsessives of the legendary Welsh band Man, or Manoraks as we actually chose to call ourselves – when the writer-editor of their fanzine came online. A hugely successful rock and sport journalist, he’d been commissioned to write a book that really wasn’t in any of his fields of expertise; did anyone in the room fancy themselves as a budding writer? Almost involuntarily my e-hand shot up; what was it about, I asked? Birdwatching. Not very rock and roll.

But I reckoned, what with the union meeting minutes and the fact that I had a bird table in the garden, I was as qualified as the next Manfan. Long story short, I wrote it and it went well – although the brief was to write a companion to a DVD in a Christmas Gift set, and they substituted another DVD without telling me, which made my book look a bit foolish in places! Since then I’ve had around a dozen further commissions from that journalist alone (including some CD liner notes), and I now have a CV which gets me work from other sources too (www.colinsalter.co.uk since you ask).

Beyond any inherent talent, it seems to me that it’s all down to luck, or at least the luck you make by networking, either accidental or deliberate: being in the right place at the right time. The most surprising consequence of that first break was a commission to ghost-write a University of Chicago text on marine gastropods – seashells to you and me – on the basis that, as a published bird author, I must have a natural history speciality.

No, just a bird table.

May Meeting!

Oh dear- looks like we forgot to update the website. I could have sworn I did!

The May STF meeting is tonight (Weds 11th) at the Jolly Judge, Lawnmarket, at 7pm.

April Meeting

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 12th April, 7pm at the Jolly Judge.

March meeting and Twitter

As the group grows we’re starting to think about all of the ways that we can really make the most of our collective knowledge and interests. Over the coming months we’re planning to encourage our members to write interesting posts for this blog and to take advantage of the benefits of using social media such as Twitter. Stranger Than Fiction now has a Twitter account and we hope you’ll follow us!

March meeting

Our next meeting will take place at the usual venue, The Jolly Judge, at 7pm on 23rd March. Hope to see all of our usual members and maybe a few new faces.

February

Our February meeting will be on the 16th at the Jolly Judge at 7pm as usual. We’re finding this venue is about right for the size of the group at the moment, so it looks like this is our meeting place of choice for the foreseeable future.

If you haven’t been along to one of our meetings before but think you might like to then please do let us know, we’ll be happy to give you some more information. Just leave a comment here for us and we’ll be in touch.

Literary Consultancy

Claire Wingfield, a literary consultant, offers various services for fiction and non-fiction authors.

On Saturday 22nd Jan 2011 she will be doing a workshop on Pitching Your Manuscript at Glasgow’s Trongate 103. This will look at both fiction and non-fiction pitching and submitting.