Just Another Week in Suburbia and The Hachette Manuscript Development Program
The Hachette Manuscript Program is a joint initiative between Hachette Australia and the Queensland Writers Centre, which involves a week of workshops on writing, editing, publishing, marketing, agents, among other things. Entrants submit fifty pages. If they’re chosen, they submit the rest of the manuscript, then go to Queensland to participate in the Program. In 2013, I submitted Just Another Week in Suburbia and “Prudence” (the book I wrote immediately after) and, as had become my wont, didn’t expect anything. However, Just Another Week in Suburbia was shortlisted. It was gratifying given it was the novel I’d designated as THE ONE (as in the one where I was determined that…
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I’m starting immediately with the lie: last week I wrote, I can live with rejection. I can’t – not really. I get on with it, because that’s what you need to do. If I’ve sent a short story or article out and it’s been rejected, I might give it another read when it returns, then send it out elsewhere. A book obviously is too big to treat like that, but if it’s been rejected from a number of places, I might earmark it as something to revise when I have time. But, as much as it’s a reality of writing, rejection hurts. I write, I invest myself in this project,…