Tag Archives: Laura E. Goodin

More Cabinet of Oddities News

Back in 2015, I was lucky enough to be part of an amazing collaborative event put together by the talented Dr. Laura E. Goodin. The Cabinet of Oddities, a show piece of original compositions for flute inspired by short stories from a group of Australian Spec Fic writers, was first performed at Conflux X. Since then, it has also appeared at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

My story, Guardians of Her Galaxy, was used as the inspiration for a composition by Gary Butler, and performed by flautist Angus McPherson. I can’t express how honoured I was to have played even a small part in the result.

So, I was thrilled to hear that Gary has recently become part of the Melbourne Composers League. You can find out more about his many achievements here. You’ll also find a number of videos of his work, including a performance of Guardians of Her Galaxy.

The Cabinet of Oddities is coming!

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One of my oldest friends in the spec fic community is the incredibly talented Laura Goodin. Laura has a unique gift when it comes to facilitating collaborations and creating mixed media projects, like the radio play we performed at Conflux.

A few months ago, Laura approached me and asked if I was interested in contributing a story to a new project of hers. She asked for a short piece, and told me that she would then assign a composer to set it to music. I thought this was a fascinating concept and I really can’t wait to hear what sort of musical piece my story might inspire.

More details will be announced soon, but Laura has posted an announcement about it, and I am sharing it here. This is the sort of artistic collaboration that excites me, and I am looking forward to seeing the end result!

Paying for Our Passion – Laura E. Goodin

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In this series of guest posts, I have asked a number of writers and editors to share the price they pay for pursuing their creative passion or what they sacrifice–whether that is money, time or lost opportunities. It might be how they pay the bills that writing doesn’t, or how they juggle working for a living or raising a family with the time it takes to write or edit. The people who have contributed have shared their personal stories in the hope it might help those new to the scene manage their expectations, or help others dealing with similar things realise they aren’t alone. You can read about the inspiration for this series here, and if you want to be part of it please let me know. Our next guest is one of my favourite people, Laura E. Goodin.

I’ve run the gamut: living alone and writing while working full time and going to grad school at night; living alone and writing while on the dole; living with my husband and being the one earning more money, less money, no money. I’ve had demanding professional jobs, and demanding menial jobs, and menial jobs that didn’t even begin to interest me. I’ve run my own business while doing my Ph.D. and trying to scavenge writing time. I’ve been at home with a baby; I’ve been a working mom with a working husband and a child with a demanding schedule; I’ve been an empty-nester.

Through all of that, I’ve found that my success (as measured by publications, performances, and participation at cons) correlates almost not at all with my life circumstances. The only time in my life where the writing nearly stalled completely was while I was working in a highly demanding more-than-full-time job where I had to jump to a pager at all hours of the day and night for years. And even then, I held onto my writing dream by my fingernails (one story I wrote during those years eventually got published on the BBC4 web site, which still makes me very happy).

That said, some situations have been easier than others. I had one blissful year where I wrote full-time, supported by my husband, and our kid was old enough not to need 24-hour care, before I had to go back to work. My productivity soared. In contrast, at times when I have a lot of editing work (that’s my small business), I find that it dries up the word juju quite alarmingly. When I was in the throes of my Ph.D., not much else got written. The supply of words may or may not be limited but the supply of my ability to process and produce them is.

At the moment, I’m still running the editing business, and I’m commuting between Melbourne and Sydney two days a week to teach at a tertiary institution. The teaching money helps when the editing isn’t coming in, and – oddly – teaching doesn’t deplete my word juju the way editing does. The editing hasn’t, in fact, been coming in recently, and I’m finding that writing consistently is far less of a problem. Moreover, my husband, who is more steadily employed at the moment, is paying the majority of the bills, which takes a lot of the pressure off.

Several factors have consistently forced their way into my writing equation:

Job: the number of hours and amount of word juju, focus, and energy it requires
Family: the number of hours and the intensity of interaction required and desired
Extracurricular activities (I’m prone to these, and it has probably slowed my writing career down quite a bit, but it’s given me a lot more to write about, and is good for my soul)
Degree to which I’m either enthusiastic or discouraged about my writing at any given time

Balancing these – minimizing, maximizing, mitigating – is a moment-to-moment thing. I’ve long since given up on grand announcements (“THIS is the year my writing career really takes off!”), and I’ve begun to recognize that the bouts of black certainty that I completely suck and always will are, in fact, temporary. After eight years of writing seriously, during which all those factors have oscillated wildly, I’m noticing the peaks and troughs are flattening, and my energy is going less into climbing and falling than into just going forward. Some of that is the onset of middle age (which for the most part I’m relishing, by the way), and some is the slow accretion of data that yes, I am a writer. If I haven’t given it over by now, I’m not going to.

American-born writer Laura E. Goodin has been writing professionally for over 30 years. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Adbusters, Wet Ink, The Lifted Brow, and Daily Science Fiction, among others, and in several anthologies. Her plays and libretti have been performed on three continents, and her poetry has been performed internationally, both as spoken word and as texts for new musical compositions. She attended the 2007 Clarion South workshop, and has a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Western Australia.

You can find out more by visiting her website.

Useless Questions Radio Play

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Earlier this year at Conflux, my good friend Laura E. Goodin asked me if I would be willing to help her out with a performance of her radio play, “Useless Questions”. I have done a bit of acting in the past, but this was something new and I was a little dubious!

But, I was so glad I agreed, as we had so much fun performing the play. It is very hard to write good humour (especially humorous science fiction), often times it falls flat or comes across as lame, but Laura got it spot on and the audience loved it. So much so that we did a repeat performance later in the con!

While we didn’t have any specialised equipment, Laura did make a recording, which you can find here. It’s not perfect, but hopefully it will give you a sense of how much fun we had. Enjoy!

From left to right: Cat Sparks, Nichole Murphy, Laura E. Goodin, David McDonald, Stephen Ormsby and Satima Flavell

Wednesday Writers: Laura E. Goodin

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Hot on the heels of last week, I get to introduce another of my favourite people, Laura Goodin! I had met Laura online just before Swancon 2011, when we both came up with the same answer in a competition to win one of Richard Harland’s books. Laura graciously allowed me to have the book, giving me an early introduction to her generous spirit. This was only reinforced when she made a point of welcoming me to my first con and showing me around, and introducing me to a number of people, a kindness I have never forgotten.

I soon discovered that Laura’s spiritual gifts were matched by her artistic ones. Not only has she written a number of wonderful stories, but she has also written poetry and plays and libretti and the list goes on…makes you sick, doesn’t it? Well it would, but for one thing – Laura is as humble as she is talented. Not humble in the sense that it so often used these days to mean someone of little importance, but humble in feeling no need to exalt herself or her achievements (as numerous as they are!), rather desiring to celebrate the achievements and milestones of those around her.

That’s why I was so happy to hear that she had won this year’s Kris Hembury Encouragement Award at the Aurealis Awards. Reading the description:

“The award was created in 2009 by Fantastic Queensland to honour one of their founders, Kris Hembury, who sadly died that year. Kris was an unceasingly positive and encouraging influence on emerging writers and artists of speculative fiction. Each year since, as part of Aurealis, an emerging writer and/or artist is chosen. The person chosen is seen to embody the spirit of creativity, leadership, self-motivation and fellowship that Kris had in spades.”

I can’t think of a more deserving winner, or anyone more qualified to write a guest post about community and building others up. Enjoy!

Community (Not the Epic TV Series, Although You Should Totally Check That Out*)

Writers work alone. In garrets. With caffeine as their only companion, and maybe a cat. We all know this.

Thing is, it’s completely untrue, and not just because we all waste time on Facebook (admit it). In fact, I don’t think it’s ever been true, even before the Internet. Fundamentally, writers need readers. Until very recently, writers have also needed publishers, and by extension, editors, printers, truck drivers, booksellers, advertising and marketing people, paper millers, lumberjacks, oil refiners — and on and on. But even as we reduce our dependence on paper books and traditional publishing, it becomes more crucial, not less, that we pay attention to the people around us. And the good news is that the more we focus on building communities that are joyful, courteous, cooperative, and dedicated to a common purpose, the more fun writing gets.

The most common form of writing community is the writer’s group, either in person or online. Many writers find these communities highly useful in helping them hone their own writing, but the benefits really come when writers learn to critique. (One of the basic principles of Clarion-style workshops is that you learn at least as much about how to write well by relentlessly critiquing story after story as by getting your own story relentlessly critiqued — and most find they learn much more.) When you focus on helping the other people in the community be the best they can be, that’s when you really start to grow.

Conventions and festivals are another type of community in and of themselves. They are a wonderful bubble of time and space when you’re at Hogwarts, you’re in Starfleet, you’re at Harper Hall, you’re focused solely and intensely on writing. Everyone there is a comrade, an actual or potential friend, an ally in the fight. Cons become a thousand times more fun when you move up from just going to panels and wishing you were famous to actually talking to the writers whose work you love, and then to volunteering. Even if you’re not yet ready to participate on a panel, there is always something that needs doing, some newbie who needs welcoming, some awesome genre-fiction icon who could really use a cup of coffee and a place to sit quietly. If you’re committed to making the con the best it can be for your writing buddies and heroes, it will alchemically become the best it can be for you.

Artistic collaboration is yet another type of community. It can be as small as you and one other person writing a piece of flash fiction together, or it can be you and a dozen other people producing a play, concert, podcast, anthology, art exhibition, graphic novel, or film. One of the very best things about being an artist (which writers are, of course) is that you get to hang out with people who have superpowers. Revel in that! Take time and take the opportunity to stare, open-mouthed and grinning, as your friends do amazing things. Help them to do them better. And above all, make sure the work, not your little piece of the work, is the most important thing, and that alchemy will happen here, too.

You see the trend, of course. The secret to good communities that feed your soul and improve your art is focusing on the other people. I’ve read a lot of blog posts that urge you to advocate for your own work, promote yourself, develop a platform, yadda yadda. I guess that’s important to a point, but frankly, the people who are the most focused on that are usually the least fun to work with. And this is kind of self-defeating if you’re looking for readers, publishers, collaborators — all those communities that are always so crucial to what we do. Instead, I’m urging you to consider a different model: trust.

Stop worrying about whether your contribution will get lost. Stop evaluating every acquaintance for how much they might be able to help your career. Stop whining about other people winning too many awards. Stop choosing which panels you’ll attend or participate on based on whose attention you want to catch. Just…stop.

Instead, start looking for ways to give, and accept that you may never see any payback, or even any thanks. Accept that when the work, when other people’s success, is more important than their gratitude to you, your career will move ahead as if by magic, because the work will simply be better that way. Trust that people will see and value your work without your having to smack them about the face with it. If you put your work out there with a clear intent to make something or someone who isn’t you the best they can be, trust that you will progress, you will improve, and you will accomplish.

Remember what it was like to admire and enjoy people’s talents for their own sake, not for what those people might do for you. Remember it and reclaim it. Just about everyone — and the stars of the con scene are definitely in this group — can spot a crawler or a climber a mile away. Ever wonder why they’d rather talk to some gobsmacked newbie who’s working on their first piece of fanfic than you? Might it be because the newbie wanted to tell them how much joy she got out of their last novel, whereas you were waiting, tense and eager, to say something clever that would reveal how special you were, in the hopes that they would rest their gaze upon you and say solemnly, “Yer a wizard, Harry — send my agent your latest manuscript and tell them I sent you”?

Take on new projects because you want them to happen, not because they’ll advance your career. Be content to let go of some of your pet ideas about how a project should be, especially if someone you respect artistically thinks another way will be great. Trust that there are many, many ways a given project can be good, and let some of these other ways happen, with cheerfulness and good grace and genuine faith in your collaborators.

Have adventures doing something you’ve never done before. Write a play. Perform your writing as performance (not just as a reading) in front of an audience who paid to be there. Take a dance class, and then write a story that can form the basis for some wicked-cool choreography. Illustrate your next piece with photos of the character figurines that you’ve crocheted out of old shopping bags. Trust that these adventures can lead to glorious things, new skills, new collaborators, new people who love your work and who love working with you.

Trust.

Enjoy.

Love.

That’s what communities are for: not to give you a platform, but to give you the honor and joy of boosting other people up. And that will have magical results for you. I promise.

* Here’s their official web site

Laura E. Goodin’s stories have appeared in numerous publications (both print and on-line), including Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, The Lifted Brow, Adbusters, Wet Ink, and Daily Science Fiction, and in several anthologies. Her plays and libretti have been performed in Australia and the UK, and her poetry has been performed on three continents. She attended the 2007 Clarion South workshop, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She lives on the South Coast of New South Wales with her composer husband and actor daughter, and she spends what little spare time she has trying to be as much like Xena, Warrior Princess, as possible.