A treat for those who attended our Sunday Focus meeting at Greerton Library May 20 from our own local and steadily growing prolific author Lee Murray. Her journey of trials and tribulations is taking her to new contracts and recognition – but it didn’t happen overnight.
Lee has a background of science research, writes Speculative Fiction that covers genres of SciiFi, creative, paranormal, zombie, fantasy, supernatural, spiritual, paranormal romance and more.
Lee says having a foot in reality is a good skill to have when writing Speculative Fiction. Her first book was her training ground along with subsequent others. She spoke briefly about some of the books she had on display. After 10 years hard graft Lee is now getting offers of 10 cents a word and contracts to write for computer games. That’s on top of and because of her rising books sales
Short stories have honed her skills, which she highly recommends we do at any given opportunity. Although it might seem a drag to use social media, it is most important, without letting it run your life. Audience got a couple of good reference websites to investigate for their creative writing progression. Lee is programme director for the upcoming national conference http://www.sffanz.org.nz and contributes her skills to http://specfic.nz She says this genre is a hugely exciting field to be writing, reflected also by Netflix aiming toward its contents being 25 percent.
Her advice is to look for a publisher where your story will more likely fit but don’t presume it won’t fit either, because you never know.
Lee spoke about the voice, or not, for children and other tips on how to prepare a manuscript before sending it out to an editor or potential publisher.
Such is Lee’s giving nature, she even brought us chocolate cake for our break mid-way through her session. Wow! It received many favourable comments too!
In all, a very informative two hours held at Greerton Library. Thanks again, Lee.
