My writing week 3 (2)

Hi all,

I'm feeling tired, but that ain't unusual. I went for a slow swim this morning, thought I was making an effort to swim fast, but my time was lousy. Maybe I miscounted the number of laps as I abused God for not looking after one of his devotees, my father. So much for being an atheist.

My father's rapid dementia decline continues to dominate my thoughts. We had a little stab of hope last Friday when he communicated a bit, but the two trips since then have been very painful. I don't think he even recognised my mother or me yesterday. (big sigh) I now think his quality of life is so diminished that he might as well be dead. Sad way to think of a man who I used to take great pride in being his son.

I subsequently did very little writing last week again. (another sigh) I did a bit of reading, often falling asleep at night with the book on my chest. There were a few interesting book related articles in the newspapers (which I am still two weeks behind in reading). Stephanie Meyer had seven of the top ten selling books in Australia last year, selling over two million copies of her vampire series. Dan Brown had the number four book, Mathew Reilly the number nine and Stieg Larson the number ten.

A well know left leaning journalist said that intellectual property rights are dead, let's wait and see about that comrade. I will be interested to see how long many websites will survive if they no longer have the ability to steal off sources like newspapers who fail due to lack of respect by others for their intellectual property rights. If novelists no longer write because it doesn't pay, what will they put on Kindle that is relevant in a few decades.

In the same article it mentioned Amazon's Kindle book downloads out did their paper books sales for the first time during Christmas. So a lot of people brought kindles and had to put something on them. Most of which, would have been free downloads from ancient authors. Are these techno geeks really gonna sit there and read more then the first paragraph, if that, written by some bore who died years ago.

Oh yeah, and I deliberately did not mention the author of the articles name, because that is what it will be like when their are no intellectual property rights.

Perhaps I should have said I was tired and narky at the start of this post.

Graham.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Read more

New Blog Look.

I have just updated the look of my blog. I am trying to create a consistent web presence online by ensuring that my blog, website and social media look the same and are connected.  This desire for a consistent web presence is a result of what I have learnt in my studies for a Bachelor or Arts (Internet Communications). I have just completed the first two subjects. One of the subjects, Web Communications, had us creating a new web presence, so I created a new blog on Wix, a new Facebook page, a new Twitter account, and joined Wattpad for the first time. As part of the assignment we were supposed to consistently style all the sites. The central node is here . The other subject was an Introduction to Internet Design. In that subject we had to create, from html and CSS code, a website. I choose to do one for author Graham Clements. For that website, I pretended that I had published four novels that are in reality only unpublished, and in need of redrafting, manuscripts. I am quite ...
Read more