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Writing News. I have been catching up on my newspaper reading and I have read some interesting articles relevant to writing and books. Shades of Twilight. A few blog posts ago, I postulated that based on the success of Fifty Shades of Grey , publishers would now be bracing themselves for an influx of erotic manuscripts. I thought that this rush of erotica might make up for publishers having to wade through thousands of Twilight like manuscripts about vampires who couldn’t   bring themselves to have sex with their human girlfriends. Little did I know, Fifty Shades of Grey grew out of Twilight fan fiction. I only found out about this link between the two series of books when reading an article in the AGE by Helen Razer.   It seems the author of Fifty Shades of Grey really wanted the vampire to impose his manhood on Belle. As a result of expected Fifty Shades of Grey fan fiction wanted the female character to be more assertive, I predict the next big flo...

  Australian History in Schools There has been a bit of debate in the media lately about the teaching of Australian history in schools. I wish Australian History had been taught when I was in school in the 70’s. All I remember being forced to study was ancient Greek history in high-school. It not only bored me - I spent most of my time inking in text book illustration - but seemed totally irrelevant. But Australian history is another matter. My interest in Australia’s history grew out of a trip around Australia when I was fifteen. On the trip I found out that Alice Springs was named after a telegraph station built beside a spring. I learnt the history of the Flying Doctors. I saw the harsh conditions that convicts were jailed in at Port Arthur. I learnt that dinosaurs had once inhabited Australia when I saw dinosaur footprints at Broome. An Aboriginal ranger told us about their customs at Ayers Rock (as it was called then). I learnt that whales used to be caught off...

A Pursuit of Miracles is a fabulously entertaining and thought provoking collection of science fiction short stories. It maintains the exceptionally high standards of George Turner’s many novels. Turner is arguably Australia’s best ever science fiction writer and this collection shows why.  There are only eight stories in the collections 207 pages, so they are mostly long stories. All but one of Turner’s nine published short stories are in the collection. Turner preferred to write novels. Indeed, at least two of the stories in this collection were later turned into novels. Turner was obviously a proud Australian as most of the stories are set in a future Australia. He seemed to be fascinated with telepathy which is the main theme, or in the background, of a number of the stories. Turner also seemed very much concerned with humanity’s destruction of the environment. The collection was published in 1990 and the stories have not dated.      The collect...

New Article on DiVine When researching an article on the definition of what a disability is I came across the surprisingly large statistic that one in five Victorians have a disability. That’s a million Victorians with disabilities. I did find it hard to believe, but the more research I did   the more disabilities I uncovered. My article “What is a Disability?” went up on the DiVine website yesterday.   Critiquing. I have just finished critiquing a non-fiction book on a friend’s marathon running feats. It details his journey from an unfit and unwell person to someone who ran many marathons and then ran up a mountain. Along the way he raised a lot of money for charity. It is very inspirational and taught me a lot, especially why marathon runners never look that happy when running. The book was about 120,000 words and took me a few months to critique. This is the third full length book I have critiqued. One of them, Datura Highway , by Daniel King has been p...

Fifty Shades of Bad Writing. Seems everywhere I look someone has written an article about the mega-selling, publishing-game-changing, super- duper, must-read-before-you die (or at least dis) Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. As a result, I am sure publishers are looking forward to reading thousands of manuscripts full of badly written bondage scenes. Publisher’s assistants will all be rushing home to watch porn on the web to get sex back into some sort of normal perspective. But then again, the flood of bad erotica might make up for those manuscripts full of teenagers in love with vampires who refuse to give out.    Many of the articles I have read about Fifty Shades of Grey have been about how badly written it is.  An article I read in the Age today about its awfully written sex scenes made me laugh, especially its imagined ocker sex scene. There was even an article about the book in today’s Chronicle , the local newspaper. Fifty Shades has been...

Turning Short Stories into Novels. It seems I am not the only writer with an inability to keep a short-story short. I have just finished reading Aussie science fiction legend George Turner’s collection of longish short- stories A Pursuit of Miracles. The book’s 207 pages contain only eight stories, most of them novella length, three of which Turner later turned into novels. One of the stories went on to become Genetic Soldiers , which I mentioned in my last post. Another became his Arthur C. Clarke award winner The Sea and Summer .  One of the two novel manuscripts I have written started off as a novella. Recently I managed to keep a short story to 7,000 words, but my previous attempt blew out to 15,000 words. I think part of the difficulty with writing short science fiction stories is creating a compelling world within limited words. When I critiqued stories on critters.org I was always asking for more detail about the world a writer was attempting to create. The b...