My writing week 3 (37)

Hi all,

Lots of news this week. First, Divine online magazine sent me a contract for a article a month for the next 12 months. The pay rate is quite good, so I had no hesitation in signing and returning the contract. They then contacted me about the training day on 8th of October, offering me accommodation for the night before and night after, which I gratefully accepted.

A couple of weeks ago they sent me an email suggesting I write an article that introduced myself. I wrote that last week, concentrating on my interest in science fiction. I included a mention of Aussiecon 4, and in particular the panels on global warming. Hopefully this article will be accepted as my first paying assignment for the magazine. I already have two sample articles up on their website.

I sent an email to Gregory Benford requesting more information about his talk of geo-engineering the Arctic as a stop-gap measure to give us more time to reduce greenhouse gases. He gracious sent me back an email with his ideas, another article and his powerpoint presentation attached. I will write more about his talk in my next post about Aussiecon that concentrates on four climate change panels.

I spent a bit of time last week networking on Goodreads and LinkedIn joining some writing groups. I also now have a flickr account with a few recent photos of floods and aussiecon on it.

I even spent a bit of time on my novella this week. Mostly adding in a bit of description after my trip down to Aussiecon took me through the area that the story is set in.

So I had a reasonably productive week. It helped that I got over my Aussiecon cold in record time - less than a week.

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