Come Friday (probably Saturday, your time), you should consider joining the Novel Support Group (NSG, for short). It can be found under Hatrack Groups.

cool name

we need some gully cats too

it is good to 'up' the aussie-quotient around hear.

You will find some interesting variations is humour levels/styles around here so remember to use smilies if you are employing good ol' aussie irony.

I noticed that the 2nd Quarter Winner in Writers of the Future is a South Australian... cool.

In an alternative Donald Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel offers heady and invigorating advices on novel writing to compare a manuscript's creative qualities to.

Donald Maass Literary Agency has an overseas representative closer to Australia than their headquarters in New York City.

See Maass submission guidelines at;

http://www.maassagency.com/submissions.html

Maass accepts e-mail queries, not sure about the Grayhawk Agency or the validity of their e-mail address below.

Gray Tan
The Grayhawk Agency
7F-3, 106, Sec. 3, Hsin-Yi Rd,
Taipei 106, Taiwan, R.O.C.

e-mail: grayhawk@url.com.tw

Valuable and useful advice. I did a bit of research and, at any given time, there's about 3 agencies open for submissions in this country -- it varies from month to month depending on how long their backlog is. There's about that many publishers as well that are willing to look at newbies. So I've already pretty much determined that I'll need to go overseas if I have any hope of getting published.

I tested the waters with one local agency and got a reply something like: "I'm not the right agent to represent this work, but I encourage you to try others, and publishers directly, who may have a totally different reaction." About what I expected.

My issue at the moment is that I don't believe in my own manuscript, so I can't really expect anyone else to believe in it. It's had a total of 3 rewrites, and quite a number more revisions. Somewhere through the second rewrite I questioned whether this is just good money after bad, but I decided to stick with it, so I need to see it through to some sort of conclusion. If it turns out as unpublishable, then that would be unfortuante, but I'll put it off to a learning experience and hopefully have more success with my second manuscript.

I'd like to think that my writing and story is with potential, but I'm not getting the sense that its the sort of professional work someone might actually want to publish. By the same token, aside from a vague gut-feeling, I can't actually tell you where I need to improve it.

I understand and empathize with the faith a writer must place in their work, the aesthetic hunches we fellow travelers must operate under. Part of the reason why I don't participate in workshop critiques much anymore is because aesthetic hunches only took me so far, not as far as I want to go. My goal is developing a dynamic and effective developmental editing method for my own work and from and for examining others' writing for the benefits I can derive therefrom.

I dug back into the realm of writing advices by accomplished authors, writing professors, and literary agents. I found a few tedious but insightful texts, a few derivative and digressive texts with little new insight, and a wealth of insights from a few pointed, standout tomes. Maass, Freytag, Card to name a few.

I'm a graphic designer although I mostly worked in TV news and then marketing. Your post kind of struck a chord with me because I'm also looking at the shift from visual to literary output.

As far as confidence in your writing, try to keep in perspective that creativity is transferable. You wouldn't have achieved all that you have without being a creative guy. You've been having great ideas all along. Now you just get to apply them to a different area.

It's just like learning a new 3D program - you might thrash around a bit at first but just work it and you'll start improving in no time. Hope this all isn't too heavy as I suspect it's partly my subconscious talking to me at the same time.

seems like a few Aussies have found voice here. I'm down under too! I seem to get the same impression that AU is not the ideal country to find a scifi / fantasy agent and publisher...

At least it appears that a few agencies from the other side are open to intl clients however...