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Hi all, I just counted up my words for last week and the number fell between that of the previous two weeks. I need to up it. I am getting near the end of the novella I am writing, a science fiction fantasy story set in Broadmeadows in the not too distant future, so I will soon be back to editing the novel. On Kerry Schafer's blog I have been debating author Graham Storrs and others on whether ebooks will destroy the Australian and then the US publishing industries. No one has yet convinced me that the cheap ebook revolution will not cause a book price race to the bottom that will eventually turn authors into free content providers for Amazon, but I am open to the persuasion of facts or a good argument. I think ebooks might have a benefit for speculative fiction magazines. I find the few published in Australia impossible to locate in stores and I am loath to subscribe to them online due to not being a great fan of the predominance of fantasy in most of them. ...

Hi all, Despite a concerted effort over the weekend I failed to increase my word count from that of the week before, discontinuing a rise in words that had been occurring over the past few weeks. Alas, life continues to intervene. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out the effect the ipad and kindle might have on the Australian book market. UK Amazon doesn't have its own kindle bookstore, they are directed to Amazon USA, so we won't be getting our own store in Australia. With their titles sprinkled among tonnes of cheap US ebooks, Australian publishers will have little choice but to charge the same. With dirt cheap ebooks, the Australian paperback/hardcover market will be decimated. But at least we will have cheap ebooks. Instead of buying a $35 new release paperback written by a new Aussie author I will be able to buy the complete ebooks collections of Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyers. I have been trying to like the concept of ebooks and ebook readers, thinking...

Hi all, Critters.com have been running a survey on what a fair price for an ebook is. The average price respondents have suggested is US$7.78 for a new release and $4.60 for a back list book. Seeing as though most of the people who join critters would one day hope to be published authors, a lot of them obviously don't want to make any money out of it. Or perhaps they think the whole of the $7.78 will end up in their pockets. I put down US$20 for a new release and $15 for back list ebooks. So that's about $22 and $17 Australian, which sounds fair when there are no printing, transporting and storage costs. There should be less retail costs, but let's wait until Amazon and Apple have established their monopoly and see how much their retail costs rise too, while they squeeze the publishers and authors. If a reader purchases an ebook for $7.78, there would be less of a compulsion to read it, a bit like all the books I have collected from garage sales. If I spend $35 on a b...

Hi all, It has turned cold in Wangaratta , hopefully that keeps me inside writing. I won't have to water and weed the garden as much, YAAAAA . I was getting sick of mowing the lawns every week or so too. My word count increased for the third week running last week. Most words I have written for a year, but considering my eyesight wasn't great over the past twelve months and I spent most of my writing time editing a novel, the largest word count in a year is no big achievement. The word count better improve again this week. The short story/novella I am writing is soft science fiction/fantasy a bit of a change from the hard science fiction I have written previously, where nearly every speculative element of the story has to be a plausible reality in the future. I read a few interesting articles for writers in The Age . Patrick Carman has written a young adult novel called Ghost in the Machine , which requires the reader to view a video on the web after reading each...

Incandescence is a science-fiction novel set millions of years in the future. Humans have evolved into immortal data streams that can travel through the galaxy on cosmic rays and reconfigure themselves in any shape they desire. They are know as the Almalgam . At the core of the galaxy live the mysterious Aloof, who have rejected any attempts by the Amalgan to expand into their territory. The Aloof allow the Almalgam to travel through their territory, but not to stop. Rakesh is a bored member of the Amalgan who has spent decades looking for something exciting and challenging to do that has not already been done. He is approached by a traveller who was woken during a journey through Aloof territory and told about a meteor that contained traces of DNA. The Aloof want a child of DNA, an Amalgan , to examine it. Rakesh accepts the challenge and sets off with a friend to travel for thousands of years into Aloof territory. Roi and Zak are bug like creatures living inside a...

Hi all, I felt like a writer last week. I wrote more, concentrating on a short story that is turning into a novella, and I wrote my first critique of the year, which was also the first for a writing group I joined last year. I even wrote a few well thought out comments on other writer's blogs. I finished reading Greg Egan's Incandescence, which I found a very difficult read, but it had some interesting thoughts on society. I will post a review of it later this week. I have also been reading the huge Pen Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature and I discovered, not to my surprise, that most of Australia's early poets finished their lives as destitute drunks. I don't think there was much of a market for poetry among convicts and those escaping the poverty of England, and many of the poems were deriding authority figures, thus destroying the one potential paying market. Studio, the revamped Ovation on Foxtel has a few shows on writers tonight (Monday)...