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Hi all, I had a busy week last week with a few things happening on the writing front. New article on Divine. My article on writer’s with disabilities was posted on Divine. The article features multi-award winning Australian science fiction author KA Bedford. I also interviewed Karen Tyrrell for the article, a writer who I think is very close to joining the ranks of those with a published book. The article is the largest I have written for Divine and its responses indicate it is one of my best. Acknowledged in Daniel King’s new novel Datura Highway . Last year I critiqued a terrific manuscript, Datura Highway , for Daniel King. The novel has just been published by Vexil Publishing and is available on Amazon . I did not expect the very nice acknowledge of myself he placed in the novel. Datura Highway is a fantasy/science fiction/mystery novel. It begins with the main character in a very strange building full of statues. He doesn’t know how he got there, ...

Hi all, If you haven’t heard yet, Angus and Robertson and Borders were placed into voluntary administration last Thursday . There stores are expected to continue trading as normal. There are 103 stores Angus and Robertson stores. Sixty-one franchises should not be affected. Borders has 26 stores. We don’t have an Angus and Robertson or Borders in Wangaratta so it won’t effect my book buying. I have never been into a Borders, but had thought of them as a big American company who probably would not promote Australian authors as much as an Australian owned bookstore would. A Reading ’s customer, in one of the Age articles, described Borders as a two dollar shop, making it even less likely that I would venture into them. But it is a shame to hear that Angus and Robertson is in trouble. Online sales were not the cause. Online sales might have had a slight influence on Borders and Angus and Roberston’s problems, but economic analysts are saying the major cause was t...

Hi all, I hand no excuses last week for not writing. Well maybe. The humidity and constant temperature changes set my asthma off so I was feeling a bit run down most of the week. Still, after submitting my latest article to Divine on Monday, I had plenty of time to spend editing my novella. But I can’t seem to edit; I just end up rewriting, changing nearly every word I wrote. I spent a fair bit of time on the novella last week, compared to previous weeks anyway, and ended at nearly the same place. I find myself checking what I rewrote the previous day and revising that and going back to the start to see how it flows since I made all those changes, and then rewriting that. So I am not getting anywhere. But I don’t spend anywhere near enough time writing. When I do, I usually start getting involved right at the time I know I have to stop and do something more important. The task is always greener. Goal Setting: Who Needs It? I keep on reading blog posts about art...

Hi all, This is the best of the three volumes I have read in the Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy . I had thought volume one (2005) was good, but that was mostly based on the stunning first story, Singing My Sister Down by Margo Lanagan. I felt a bit let down by volume three (2007), with its depressing concentration on death as a theme. Volume two (2006) is easily the best. I liked most of the stories in volume two. I didn't find myself thinking: what was that all about? Or more depressingly, not another good versus evil sword and sorcery story. What's more important, I actually remembered what some of the stories were about days after reading them. The two standout stories were the two novellas. The shorter the story the less likely it will have an impact on me. Speculative fiction stories need to be long so the author has time for world building. So novellas generally appeal more to me than stories under 5,000 words. Greg Egan's Riding the Cr...

Hi all, Authors with disability article submitted to Divine . I’ve just submitted another article to Divine online magazine. This one is about authors with disabilities and features great responses from interviews I did with KA Bedford and Karen Tyrrell. I had a bit of trouble verifying some of the information I had originally included in the article, especially in regards to whether some famous writers had epilepsy. Epilepsy sites were claiming Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe as epileptics, but I could not find any original biographical source to back that up. It appears they claimed Charles Dickens because of his great descriptions of epileptic characters, but perhaps someone close to him had epilepsy. Lewis Carroll seems to have been included for similar reasons, especially some of the scenes in Alice ’s Adventures in Wonderland. There’s argument that Edgar Allen Poe could have just been suffering from the effects of too much ...

Hi all, I am a bit late this week with my post. When it hasn't been too hot to write, I have been working on an article for Divine. Where Have All The Free Ebook Gone? I had my first look at the Amazon Kindle ebook bestseller list on Tuesday and found no free ebooks in the top 100. Had consumers finally decided there is no such thing as a free lunch and, rather than contribute to the destruction of the publishing industry and author incomes, decided to pay for all their ebooks? I don’t think so. There are still thousands of free ebooks on Amazon. What has happened, it seems, is that Amazon no longer lists free ebooks in the bestselling lists. Why have they done this? Is it because a free ebook is not “sold”, just downloaded, and therefore it can’t be a bestseller? Or is it because Amazon wants to hide the dominance of free ebooks? Or is their some other reason. I have been checking the top 100 bestselling ebooks about once a month for the past year and o...