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Hi all, My writing/editing/reading/critiquing output failed to increase much last week, even though I had overcome the flu and conjunctivitis, as I spent most of the week trying to catch up on other things. It was good to swim again and lift some weights, I really felt lethargic and semi-useless when not doing them. I finished editing chapter five of "Stalking Tigers". Probably a better description of what I am doing is writing a second draft as I am cutting out 2000 or more words a 5000 word chapter and then adding in somewhere around 2500 new words. I am making so many changes to each chapter that I then need to go over it again and edit it. Chapter five ended up 500 words longer then it was originally. One of the reasons for all the changes is that I had tended, in the early chapters at least, to have the main character despair too much over his situation. I have cut back on this, making the character more pro-active, and hopefully letting the reader despair for him. I am...

Hi all, The Revolution will be Downloaded was the fourth session I attended at the Emerging Writer’s Festival. The spiel for the session suggested I might find out about new writing markets and ways to promote my writing online. The Yarra Room was full with writers eager to learn about new opportunities. Rachel Hills, a writer, editor, project manager and social commentator who has been publishing online since 1998 spoke first. She suggested using Google Profiles to collate all the online information about yourself. It is a quick summary page of your blogs, websites, and social networking activities which you can direct people to. I have started creating my own simple profile page , which I just linked my Facebook profile to. One suggested way to use the profile page is to put it as a link at the bottom of emails instead of having multiple links to blogs and websites. Rachel has been blogging for a few years and stressed that you have to blog every day to capture a following....

Hi all, Conjunctivitis is not the greatest thing for a writer to catch. It’s a virus that irritates the eyes, and the ointments and drops used to remedy it tend to blur the vision. I had it all last week and had to live like a vampire as my eyes didn’t like bright light. Fortunately they have just about recovered, but I did little editing and writing, and no reading or critiquing last week. I had a mild dose of the flu at the same time. Satima Flavell, one of my Facebook pals, mentioned that literary agent Nathan Bransford had collated a few writing articles on his blog. I had been a regular reader of Nathan’s blog until lack of time intervened, so I went and had a look and found a blog post on first or third person . For a while now I have been trying to find out why writers choose to write in first of third person. After posting that question on forums, I reached the conclusion that most writers just choose what they read. If they read a lot of fantasy, which is usually wr...

Hi all, The Great State Divide, during The Emerging Writer’s Festival , had a number of interstate writers debating what they thought made their state’s writing unique and different from that of the other states. The debaters included Lisette Ogg who works for the Queensland Writer’s Centre; Rachel Hennessy, her first novel, The Quakers, won the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, receiving $10,000 and publication by Wakefield Press, she currently lives in SA; Simonne Michelle-Wells, a writer from Melbourne (originally from W.A.) with a background in theatre writing and directing; Sean Riley who is regarded as one of South Australia's leading playwrights; and novelist Jennifer Mills who lives in Alice Springs. Lisette Ogg started the debate by saying that WA writers were full of guilt about their treatment of Aborigines and migrants. Sean Reilly grew up in Tasmania and told a story of his mother denying his families Aboriginal herita...

Hi all, I have a progressively worsening cold or flu, so I didn't do much editing or reading last week. One thing I did do was mess around with the blog application on myspace . I can now cut and paste word documents into it without it destroying their formatting, so I hopefully won't have any more big posts go missing before I send them. I critiqued a potentially great story for critters. It had three unforeseen twists, I am not normally one for stories with twists as I find many of them predictable and full of contrived or boring setup. I did point out a few style and writing problems with it though, like telling instead of showing, the overuse of was, and lots of sentences that needed to be tightened up. I hope the writer rewrites it and converts it into that great story. Sad to hear that David Eddings died, I was one of the millions who read The Belgariad series. Time to cough, blow the nose and moan about my...

Hi all, This is my second post on the Emerging Writer’s Festival that I attended in Melbourne on the 30 th and 31 st of May. My first post covered the session, Seven Enviable Lines . After that session I followed the crowd upstairs where about 150 of us crammed into the smaller, but slightly better lit, Yarra Room for the panel discussion Just Write Dammit. The first speaker was crime novel writer PD Martin. She’s written four novels and been published in a number of countries. In between static clicks from the microphone she suggested that writers who finish a chapter should start the first page of the next chapter before stopping for the day, as this will the words flowing the next day. When I actually finish a chapter, I do tend to do this as I am keen to find out how I will set the scene for the following chapter. She recommended doing the 10k in a day challenge, which she does once a month. To achieve the 10,000 words she does not re-read dur...

Hi all, Remain calm Graham, it is not the end of the world. I just spent about an hour writing a beautiful post about the emerging writer’s festival only to have it disappear into the ether. I haven’t got a clue what I did or even if I did anything. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . Because myspace has previously totally stuffed up the formatting of word documents, I have been writing my posts directly onto it and then cutting and pasting them to my mirror blog on blogger . But, unfortunately, myspace does not allow you to save as you go. While threatening myspace with every evil known to man, a door to door salesman interrupted me. He made a quick retreat. I am not in the mood to write the post again today. Stupid myspace . I hope Microsoft assimilates you. Graham.

Hi all, It's amazing how a three day trip to Melbourne for the Emerging Writer's Festival lead to such a huge backlog of things I just had to do before I could spend time writing. A week later and I am still trying to catch up with my pedantic reading of newspapers. I should be thankful that it rained a bit last week so I didn't have to water much - I have no idea where I got the time to water over summer. I did very little editing of Stalking Tigers last week, just enough for me to say that I wrote on every day, which I still have continued to do since the start of 2008. I didn't critique anything last week. I started on a story for OWWW but then the author put a stop crit on it. I just had a look at the files for OWWW and found no science fiction so the prospects of me critiquing anything in the next week are not looking good. I am supposed to critique two stories a month, but last month did none, so I might be ejected from the group. My critiquing ratio of weeks t...

Hi all, Last weekend I went to the Emerging Writer's Festival held at the town hall in Melbourne. Over the weekend I attended nine panel discussions on various subjects. I found all except one of them of interest. At a cost of $37 it was a bargain for any writer living in Melbourne. I had to travel down from Wangaratta and stayed overnight, but still found it well worth the cost. I arrived early on Saturday and, taking their advice that some sessions could be booked out, took up a seat for the Seven Enviable Lines session. While I waited I looked through the showbag they had given me and find quite a few things that I will read, such as, a book called Perspectives containing non-fiction and fiction pieces on democracy, the future (perfect for a science fiction writer) and meeting the needs of vulnerable people, written by established writers and new writers. The first piece is written by Barry Jones who I have a lot of time for having read his book Sleeper...