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Hi all, I finally finished reading the best novella nominees for the Hugos . They were not small, with the average size being about 100 pages. I thought a couple of the nominees were more fantasy than science fiction. I had only heard of two of the authors before, Nancy Kress and John Scalzi . The novellas ranged from humour to steampunk to very hard science. A couple of them failed to engage my interest and one was too complex for reading just before bed. The nominees where: Act One by Nancy Kress . This was the shortest of the nominees and one of the best. The story revolved around genetic engineering, debating its pros and cons within the narrative. The main character is a dwarf and an agent for an actress who is researching genetic terrorists for a movie role, things go wrong and they become involved in the spreading of a genetic virus. The writing was simple and flowed as did the tension. I will be reading more of Nancy Kress . Palimpsest by Charles Stross . I ...

Hi all, I watched Moon two nights ago, the last of the five movies nominated for this year's Hugo. The other nominees are: Up, Avatar, District 9 and Star Trek. Up is an animated fantasy film with some science fiction elements. It is about an old grump who is about to be forced out of his home by developers. He attaches a whole lot of helium filled balloons to his house and it floats to South America. A not very bright or skilled scout hitches a ride with him. They befriend a supposedly extinct big bird and try and rescue it from a demented explorer and his huge pack of talking dogs. I laughed out loud on a few occasions, with the humour aimed at both adults and kids. District 9 Set in South Africa a decade or so after a huge spaceship arrived carrying a million alien refugees. The refugees now live in a ghetto in Johannesburg and are no longer welcome. The movie starts, in documentary style, with attempts to evict and move them 200 miles away. It follows the ignor...

H i all, Waiting, waiting, waiting. I am impatiently waiting for things to happen or not happen. The online magazine I submitted a couple of articles to got back to me last week, they wanted to use one of my articles. I asked if that meant I was getting a contract and that that the article would be considered the first one written under that contract. No, was the reply, they are still yet to make decisions on who will be contracted, so I didn't give them permission to put the article up. It would have been slightly hypocritical to allow them to run it for free as in that article I ask people not to download free ebooks , for which the author would receive nothing. They did change the article a lot, and initially I felt like I had lost ownership of it. But then I thought, shit I have written about six magazine/newspaper type articles in my life, and four of them were for writing courses, two of which appeared in local newspapers. Didn't get paid for them. But I wa...

Hi all, I have been busy moving forward with my writing. Last week I finished the second draft of the novella. I plan on moving forward further this week by editing the novella before moving forward to having it critiqued. The novella moved forward in size by about a 1000 words between drafts. I wish I could borrow some of Tony Abbott's great big bullshit dust while writing. You know the kind of dust that you sprinkle around so that greenhouse gases can be reduced without increasing electricity prices. I could have sprinkled that on my novella and it would have been rewritten without including any additional words. Perhaps if I manage to get some of his great big bullshit dust I could have written the whole story without using words. I am still yet to move forward on a decision on whether to lock myself into some great big writing sessions at the Melbourne Writer's Festival, which is on at the same time as Aussicon 4 in the first week of September. A lot of the ...

Hi all, I just found out that The AGE Melbourne Writer's Festival is on at the same time as Aussiecon 4. I had a look through its program in today's AGE and saw that they have borrowed a few of the incoming science fiction writers like China Melville, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson and Cory Doctorow for sessions. Television and film scriptwriter Josh Weldon (Buffy, Firefly, Dollhouse, Event Horizon) is also doing a session. Most of the writer's festival sessions are held at Federation Square, easy walking distance from Aussiecon 4. Graham.

Hi all, Ebook prices seem to be tumbling downwards on Amazon. For the past few months I have regularly checked the Kindle bestseller list just before I write my weekly blog post and noted about 30% of the top 100 bestselling Kindle ebooks where selling for $2 to $3.50, with three or four ebooks free. Three weeks ago 29 were free, today 39. There has also been a shift to books costing $2.95 - $3.50, from five or six to 16 this week. Today, like last time I looked, I saw no $2 ebooks , which used to be the medium price. About half the free ebooks were out of copyright classics. I had a look at some of the others and they all had over 20 reviews and most of them positive, so why are the authors giving them away for nothing? I will have to do some more digging. I have never heard the word masturbation used so many times in eight minutes as it was used on the latest episode of the Tuesday Book Club . They were talking about Tim Roth book Portnov's Complaint written ...

Hi all, We're halfway through the year and there is no way that I am going to check my 2010 writing goals because I know I ain't even close to achieving them. I think I planned to have finished editing the novel I was working on by now, but I been sidetracked by other writing activities and life experiences. Last week I spent a bit of time researching and writing an article on the benefits of ebooks for the disabled. Like the first article I wrote, it was too long. I added few anecdotes back into an article on dementia because I wanted it to sound more personal and it too is now about 600 words. I will probably spend hours this week deleted this word and rewriting that sentence to get them close to 500 words. I did a bit of redrafting of a novella. I am on the second last scene and I have rewritten it a few times now. I changed the occupation of the main character to something less cliched for a sci-fi thriller - he was originally a cop - and I haven't be able...