Kia ora!

Welcome to my first ever newsletter. (And maybe archive it so you have the evidence that you were there in the beginning. You're a certified Hiria Dunning hipster :P )

Let's get straight into it!

What did I get up to this month?

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The actual writing:

• This month I revised Peregrine Pax // My Best Friend is an Interdimensional Shape-shifting Time Traveller, my middle-grade sci-fi adventure which I will be submitting to Huia Publishers in June this year (at the end of my time in the Te Papa Tupu programme [https://mlt.org.nz/te-papa-tupu/]). I'm pretty happy with the changes I made!
• I also started drafting The Villa Delacroix for the Royal Road magazine contest [https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/102948/the-villa-delacroix]. It's a gothic horror novella inspired by The Haunting of Hill House, Yellowface and Birnam Wood, and the famous writing event at the Villa Diodati in 1816. The hook: Four writers enter a villa on the shore of a Swiss lake. Only one will walk away alive. It's borderline experimental in how internalised it all is, and very much not in the Royal Road wheelhouse, but I don't care :D I like the challenge of serialized fiction forcing me to move fast and fix the things I break on the fly.
• I revised a short story and submitted it (it's in what I call the 'Floraverse', and is loosely related to this novella [https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/97339/inheritance-whakarerenga]).
• Oh, and speaking of Te Papa Tupu, I wrote and submitted my final blog entry for the programme [https://mlt.org.nz/claire-dunning-blog4/].

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Over in Social land:

I started a new tag prompt group over on Bluesky, called #pretendpanel. It was so much bigger than I anticipated, but everyone was also a million times more lovely and supportive than I ever imagined. I never expected to get such a kick out of forging a new community space... though to be honest I never expected I'd be forging one so large. Or at all. I thought it would be a one-off, more like a little addendum to communities I was already a part of. But it's become so much its own thing that I'm loathe to discontinue it, so I plan to keep it going on a weekendly, rather than a daily basis from now on. (Come join us if you haven't already, fellow writers! [https://bsky.app/hashtag/pretendpanel])

Another new thing I tried on social media this month was three pitch events. (What's a pitch event, you ask? It's where agents and publishers are invited to review social media posts giving short pitches of people's manuscripts. If they are interested, they can let the writer know with a like.)

Since I have to hang onto my more general-audience fiction for the time being and see where my relationship with Huia Publishers goes, I decided to pitch something they (probably?) won't be interested in (I mean, I'll run it by them, but like... I doubt it?); namely my spicy adult romantic fantasy which I intend to publish someday under a pseudonym. Yes indeed: I have a sapphic pirate romantasy. I finished draft two in December last year. It's something I'm tentatively rather proud of, even if I feel a bit naughty for having written it! I entered it into three different events: #BluePit, #P2PPit, and #YouDeservepIt.

I got... no agent likes. But to be fair, I did say that it was a work in progress rather than query-ready. And more importantly, I got so much enthusiasm and support from other people, and learnt so much from looking at other people's pitches. It will be interesting to come back to pitches in the future with a better idea of what I'm doing, and how to have fun with the wider community.

(I'm particularly looking forward to #WSPit on 26th February, as #WIPSnips is where I first made a lot of my writer friends on Bluesky. From the reactions I've gotten from other wipsnippers to my work-in-progress snippets, I think my writing shines as itself, rather than in the standard pitch format... but we shall soon see whether that's enough bait on the hook for an agent-fish ;) )

The other thing I did this month in social land was I tried to make Instagram happen for me. It's... kinda working? Ok I'll be honest, I have no idea what my metrics for success are here. But Instagram was one of the platforms recommended by the Te Papa Tupu programme for author branding, so I kinda have to go along with it. In January I tried the #writerfriendschallenge, and engaged with some fellow writers who were all very encouraging. When things got a little too busy for me, I made the call to only post there a few times a week, rather than every day, and that felt more sustainable. I still feel nowhere as comfortable with image-based posting as I am with text-based posting. Then again, I've been active on Bluesky since October 2023 or thereabouts, whereas I opened my author Instagram in December. Good things take time!

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The Unexpected:

I've had three unexpected emails arrive this month, each of them quite pleasant in their own little way.

• The first was an email from my video game publisher in Spain, saying they want to port my first computer game over to consoles! Exciting news for old and new potential fans of The Nine Lives of Nim: Fortune's Fool [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1063110/The_Nine_Lives_of_Nim_Fortunes_Fool/]. That could take a while though. Working with them porting Wonderland Nights: White Rabbit's Diary was interesting, but slooooow. So don't expect to hear too much about it anytime soon.

• The second was a young NZ author reaching out to me for helping selecting pieces for an anthology. This is an honour I've never received before! I'm waiting to hear more about this, and I won't say too much more until it's all confirmed and underway.
• The third email was asking me to accept a nomination for a Sir Julius Vogel Award. More on that closer to the awards season, but the piece which has been nominated is Crass [https://www.unchartedmag.com/stories/crass/]

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The Final Te Papa Tupu Workshop:

Quick rundown of Te Papa Tupu for those of you not in the know: it's an incubator programme for emerging Māori writers which runs every two years, and is a joint venture by the Māori Literature Trust and Huia Publishers. It wraps around the people lucky enough to be chosen for it, giving us workshops, mentorships, access to writers' festivals, all in aid of helping us to craft a manuscript ready for publication. As I said up the top of the email, I've got that deadline to meet halfway through the year.

I intend to write up a bit more about it on my blog soon, as my head's still kinda ringing from it all. This happens every workshop: I'm so keyed-up by all the huge transmission of knowledge that it takes a while to actually sort through my thoughts. This time there was a heavy focus on the future e.g. what to do regarding the submission deadline on 30th June, how to write loglines and synopses, how to apply to sources like CreativeNZ for funding. I got to spend a good hour of time with my mentor Lauren Keenan, and we had a great chat about all the wide open possibilities ahead. She's had a really interesting and diverse writing career already: a book with Allen and Unwin, two with Huia, one with Penguin Random House NZ so far (The Space Between, which is doing really well) and another coming up soon with them. I've always felt like they chose really well, pairing me up with her, as we are both multi-genre, and motherhood kinda kicked our butts into taking this writing thing more seriously.

But as I said - more on this whole final workshop thing when I have digested it properly. In the meantime, here is a picture of me at Dinosaur House Raetihi on the road trip down (what a hidden gem that was!).

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What's coming next month:

• In first-draft-land: I will continue working on The Villa Delacroix.
• Revision: Going to keep forging on with the 2nd draft of Peregrine Pax after a break of a week or so to let the current round of changes settle.
• I'm part of two events for (antipodean) Pride Month: a panel on Queer Storytelling at Onehunga Library, Saturday 22nd February, 11am-12.30pm [https://www.facebook.com/events/783970340608272]; and a workshop at New Lynn Community Centre, on Pathways to Publishing for queer writers, Saturday 1st March, 10am-1pm [https://www.facebook.com/events/860729346064608]. I got these bookmarks printed to give out at the events, since unlike all the other writers who will be attending, I have nothing to sell. But as I do want to have something for people to walk away with, I can give out these bookmarks to point them to some of my free fictions online. (One day, I will have something physical to sell with me at such events! I'm sure it's not too far off now!)
• #pretendpanel continues in its new form. #WSPit 26th February. As for everything else on social land, I'm just going to see what happens, and continue to connect with people as authentically as I can. (Especially if I can be helping other indigenous or queer writers in any way in these difficult times!)

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Thanks for taking the time to sign up to my newsletter, and if you made it through reading it... thank you very very very much! I know we have busy lives and sometimes newsletters do just end up ignored in my inbox, so I understand. But if you did read it, that means a lot to me.

Arohanui,

Claire Hiria

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