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Hi all, I ended last week fearful about the shape the publishing industry will be in when I finally finish one of the novels I am writing. I have been reading a lot about ebooks and debating ebook authors like Graham Storrs about what effect ebooks might have on the publishing industry, and I have come to the conclusion that they will probably destroy the publishing industry leaving authors to battle it out online, selling their ebooks for $2 and having to rise above a biblical flood of free ebooks . On the weekend I attended an online convention, Survival of Writers in the 21st Century , at coyotecon .com , where, dark fantasy, author Scott Nicholson confirmed my fears. He said that he didn't expect the NY print market to be a viable proposition, especially for new authors, after the next five years. He thought that most ebooks will soon be selling for $2, as his already are. In the past months I have regularly checked the Amazon top 100 bestsellers and, on a...

Hi all, It's been a tough few weeks but I'm getting back into writing, reading about writing and reading fiction. I forgot to mention the Jennifer Bryne Presents' episode on Bestsellers and Blockbusters. The panel was made up of Mathew Reilly, Di Morrisey , Bryce Courtenay and Lee Child. It was an excellent show with the bestselling authors having a go at so called writers of literature who they said were jealous because they couldn't write bestsellers, even if they tried. Bryce mentioned that when he is writing he is aware of four protagonists : the two very important characters and the one they play off, and the reader. I was thinking about the two first draft novels I have written and both have two important characters and another they play off. I am not sure about the fourth protagonist , although I don't think as I write: this will make the reader work. I don't treat the reader as a moron either, but if something is important to the plot, I...

Hi all, My father died just over a week ago, on Mother's day. The previous few weeks he had been unable to communicate and just wanted to wander the corridors of the nursing home. Two Monday's ago he stopped eating and drinking and just slept. The last few days he spent unconscious. I was sadder then then I am now. It's not relief, definitely not shock, just an acknowledgement that we lost him bit by bit. I helped my mum organise the funeral and start to reorganise her life and finalise dad's. I had an argument with a moron at AATP who wanted to charge mum $60 to change the home phone over to her name, and wanted a death certificate that day, one day after his death, to do it. Mum received a letter from her health fund, Latrobe, addressed to dad and offering him condolences for her death. How could they get it so wrong? She had been the one talking to them on the phone. The funeral was on Friday. A brilliant sunny day. About 70 people turned up, which...

H i all, The transcript for the Well Rounded Worlds session (which I attended) at the coyotecon .com online speculative fiction convention is available here .

Hi all, I finished the first draft of the science fiction/fantasy novella I've been slowly writing over the past few weeks. It is now called The Watchers and is just under 9,000 words. Hopefully I can quickly revise it before sending it off to my writers group to be critiqued. Which means I should make an effort to critique some of their stories in the coming weeks, unfortunately there have been very few new pieces placed on it to critique in the past few months. I'll see what happens. I had a couple of moments of synchronicity last week. While trying to write some authentic period dialogue for my novella I read a story in the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australia Literature that had the same sort of characters in it, thus expediting the end of the novella. On Sunday's Ockham's Razor Dr Michael Lardelli from the University of Adelaide gave a talk stating that the world had reached peak oil in 2008 , that night I watched the second part of the mediocre...