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Hi all, Another week, another few thousand words. It's the start of spring and I have written every day this year so far, every day for two-thirds of a year, yaaa me. In the past three weeks I have picked up the word count as I started chapter fourteen, the chapter where everything changes. I read a few more chapters of the novel I am critiquing. I've been reading it on and off for three months now and frankly, I would not be pleased with me taking so long if I was the author. If I am going to do this again, I think I will have to forget about reading any other fiction while doing it and just concentrate on it. Incidentally, apart from a few quibbles, the novel is better than a number of published novels I have read. I have not read much of anything else, except a few articles on writing. In the AGE David Rakoff is quoted as saying, and I tend to agree, that writing is "like pulling teeth from my dick." I read in the local Border Mail about a competition where people ...

Hi all, If only writing a book was this easy. It got a smile out of me. Graham

Hi all, My eyes feel like they been nuked and have broken out in radiation sores. Now there's a pleasant image. Mentally and eyeballly I feel so tired, not so bad physically. Perhaps my eyes are suffering withdrawal symptoms after missing one of their thrice weekly dunkings in chlorine as I couldn't go swimming on the weekend due to the pool being closed for the Victorian short-course championships. My writing started out in a rush last week, but petered out towards the end. Things just got in the way, as usual. I ended up writing just a few less words than the week before. I finished chapter 13. At the moment, I am not going back and editing chapters, as I am in a rush to get to the end now that it is in sight. If I was writing a screenplay I would be just about at the end of the second act. I think I may have read a chapter of the novel I am critiquing, I am not sure, and I was too tired to read much of anything else. There's always this week. Graham.

Hi all, I had the most productive week of writing since I completed my masters this week. Still less than half of what I am aiming for though. I finished chapter twelve and I am now 63,000 words into the novel. Sometime this week I aim to go through the outline and cut out anything that doesn't move the story foward. I figure if the characters behave themselves in the next chapter so the relationship seems to have finally reached some semblence of normalcy, I then can jump foward to the calalyst that is going to change that normalcy. I think I have about 40,000 words to go as a lot does have to happen before the story reaches its climax. That 40,000 words will be written much quicker than the first half of the novel. I critiqued a story for critters, and I am finally making some headway into the novel I am critiquing. I am up to page 190 with 110 to go and so far the novel is as good or better than many of the published science-fiction novels I have read. About the only thing not i...

Hi all, There were a lot of articles on writing in last Saturday's Age and I enjoyed one that had comments from published authors aged in from the late teens to early seventies. The younger writers feel that a perception that they lack the wisdom of age is a problem, while the older writers feel like they are running out of time to write all the stories they want to. A couple of them like Robert Dessaux and Alex Miller didn't get their first novel published until they were into their fifties. David Carroll, this years Miles Franklin award winner, says "books require long periods of substained intensity, five days a week...three or fours hours a day...over two to three years. Most of the authors stress that writing is hard work. Chloe Hopper says "I hadn't realised that each morning I'd wake to face a fresh mutiny; each chapter trying to overthrow me as the boat fills with water". When I wasn't reading articles about writing, I did manage to write more...

Hi all, I've just read an article in The AGE (3rd of August) that had some encouraging things to say about the Australian book market. Firstly, sales increased by 7.5% in the past financial year to 1.25 billion. If the lastest installment of Harry Potter is removed then sales rose by 5.2%. Overall 63 million books were sold. According to Michael Heyward at Text 60% of books sold in Australia originate here. Much to my surprise there were five Australian books in the top ten, but two of them were non-fiction. The three novels were Bryce Courtenay's The Persimmon Tree, Monica McInerney's (I've never heard of her, probably because she writes chick-lit) Those Faraday Girls and Mathew Riley's The Six Sacred Stones (he hasn't done badly for someone who had to self-publish his first three novels - bet there are a few publishers regretting not signing him). The article goes on to say that 56% of Victorians in a Galaxy Research survey said they read for pleasure every da...

Hi all, Some day, hopefully soon, one of my posts will shock the hell out of its readers by telling them that in the past week I wrote over 7,000 words, read a novel and a speculative fiction magazine, and finally finished critiquing that critter's dedicated reader novel. Unfortunately, this is not that post. I struggled to give myself enough time to write anything substantial on six out of the past seven days, usually finding that I was getting into the process just as it was time to stop. I enjoyed drawing a floor plan of the house my characters now inhabit. Once drawn, I had to retrace my main character's movements around the house in the current chapter to ensure he hadn't walked through a wall or urinated in a pot plant. I am about to write up a critique of a story for critters. It seems that even though I am a dedicated novel reader my membership of critters will be suspended if I don't critique at least one story a month. The story I choose was wrongly listened a...