My writing week 4 (3)

Hi all,

New Article on Divine

I have another article up on Divine, this one is about studying online for my master of creative writing at the University of Canberra. If you are considering studying writing at the University of Canberra I have a more substantial appraisal of the masters course and its lecturers on my website.

The Divine editor made a few changes to my article, even though I rewrote it and edited it many times. Oh well, changes to my writing always make me anxious. Some of them I can see why, the reason for others is not so obvious. I will examine them again when my ego has stopped raging.

More Torchwood

I was rapt to read that they are making another ten episode mini-series of Torchwood. Television is running out of quality science fiction.

Cheap Books at Booko

I had a look at an Aussie website called Booko a couple of days ago. It is a site that automatically searches for the online prices, including delivery, of books. Just type in the title or author. I checked my last few purchases. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood cost me $24.99 at my local Collins Bookstore, I could have purchased it online at Abe books for $11.37. But Solar, by Ian McEwan, cost me $32.99 at the local bookstore, the cheapest online was $28.44 at Abe books again. But I still will buy from the local bookstore even if it is $10 cheaper online.

Booko did not have ebooks, so I could not gleefully type in titles and see that I could get them all free from somewhere.

Lengthy Ebook Article in The Age

Speaking of ebooks, which I tend to do a bit, there was a huge article on whether they would destroy publishing in last weeks Good Weekend in The Age. I could not find a link for it, but I recommend reading it. It mentioned a journo Malcolm Knox who reckons ebooks could be a boon for authors, all they have to do is spend all their time social networking – forget the writing – to convince people to buy their ebook (This is my sarcastic bent on his comments).

But it did say that Vicki Tyley, who had been unable to get published in the US, put her mystery ebook Thin Blood up on Amazon for the guru recommended price of $2.99 and sold in excess of 25,000 copies. It did not say, however, how many were purchased by US citizens. She has published three novels in Australia. Still her US agent says he is negotiating a print publishing deal.

The article compared e-readers and publisher Richard Walsh reviewed the Kindle. He read Stied Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on it, and said that it destroyed the formatting of newspaper articles within the novel. Because of Kindle’s homogenised text, that formatting was lost and confusion reigned. Interestingly, later in the article, Larson was mentioned as becoming the first author to sell over a million Kindle ebooks. So there must have been a lot of confused Kindle users.

Walsh also said he had difficulty flicking forward to the end of a chapter and backwards on the Kindle. I have found no such difficulty as I usually read it a linear fashion, but there is a goto menu that allows you to bring up a table of contents and head to the end of the chapter. From the tone of the review, I think Mr Walsh wanted to hate the Kindle.

The one thing the article forgots to mention was free ebooks. So there was no discussion on how the over three million ebooks, and growing, might impact on the publishing industry.

What I Got up to Last Week

I spent a bit of time researching my next article for Divine last week. It is on authors with disabilities. So may famous authors had disabilities, including two of the big three science fiction writers. As about 20% of the population will have a disability at some time of another, a particular writer having a disability should not be a surprise. I have lined up interviews with two Aussie writers for the article too, which I hope to do in the next two days.

I spent a bit of time watching the floods. I used to live in Albion in Brisbane, one of the suburbs affected. My Aunty Anne also lives next door to the Safeway in Toowoomba, but luckily it was above the flood waters.

Down here in Wangaratta, the humid wet weather has been sending me troppo. The only thing it is good for is growing tomatoes. I picked 60 kilograms of them last week. We are running out of people to give them too.

I also did a bit of editing of the novella. After reading a blog post by John Scalzi, in which he aims to write 2,000 words by noon each day, I am determined to write more. I think 1,000 a day would be a more realistic goal, especially with all those tomatoes to pick.

Graham.

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