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Things we Didn’t See Coming is a collection of nine stories with the same unnamed central character. The stories are told in a linear order and follow the life of the main character from his childhood to his death. The first story is set on New Year’s Eve 1999 and subsequent stories extend fifty years into the future. The stories are all set in an Australia suffering wild climatic swings. The main character is neither hero nor anti-hero. He is an everyman survivor; a loner, not a leader. He is shown adapting to new roles and situations as the world around him falters and transforms.   Things We Didn’t See Coming is a perfect title for the book. When most people think of climate change they think of prolonged drought, but in this book the climate swings wildly, as scientists always predicted it would. Each of the nine stories is unpredictable, but not so much in having twists at the end, more that the stories head in unexpected directions and surprise the reader with ...

Ebook Prices. Another seven weeks have passed since I last checked the prices of Amazon’s 100 best-selling ebooks. The trend of ebooks becoming dearer, that I reported in August, seems to have stabilised. At the lower prices, six ebooks were 99c as compared to seven at that price in August and three in June. This is down from a massive 34 at 99c in February. $1.99 has resurfaced as a price in the best seller list, with eight ebooks at that price. The last two times the number priced at $1.99 was too insignificant to mention. The number at the ebook guru price of $2.99 remained steady at 16. In August there were 15, June 22, and in February 32 at that price. $3.99 (14) and $4.99 (9) have been confirmed as popular selling prices for ebooks. For $3.99 the numbers were 17 in August and 13 in June. There were 11 at $4.99 in August. Thirty ebooks were priced $7 or more this time, compared to 32 in August and 47 in June. The mid-range of prices, $3.99 to $6.99,...

  Writing Stats. Like many men, I am fascinated by statistics. One of the ways I display this fascination is by keeping a record of the number of words I write each day. This record includes both fiction writing and the writing of articles for the Divine website. Recently I checked my word count record and found I had written at least 10 words on each of the last 366 days. So I have fulfilled the Norman Mailer quote stuck to the bottom of my computer monitor that says “a real writer produces work even on bad days.” I totalled up the number of words for the past year and it came to 128,000 , which is 349 words a day. Now if only it was a 1000 words a day, then I might get somewhere. Oh, and I have just clicked over the 100,000 words on the novel I am writing. Adventures in Dentistry. This week I had my 23 rd article posted on the Divine website . The article is about my adventures using the public dental system. It contains a few numbers lik...

I finished reading Justin Cronin’s apocalyptic vampire novel The Passage a week ago. It is a brilliant novel in both the way it is written and the story. Cronin introduces dozens of characters, each with individual fears and problems that make them easy to empathise with. The Passage is one of the best adventure epics I have read. I had been thinking it was close to the best apocalyptic fiction I have read. To try and decide if it is the best, I went through my book shelves and found dozens of apocalyptic novels to compare it too. I define apocalyptic fiction as any story set during the collapse of a civilisation and/or the stories of the survivors in the years after that collapse. Some novels in my shelves had civilisation slowly in decline, not so much a collapse, so I did not include them. This meant my all-time favourite science fiction novel, The Sea and Summer, by George Turner, missed out. After a much consideration, here is a list of the top ten apocaly...

As part of the Melbourne Wheeler Centre’s “On the Road” program, author Tony Birch was in Wangaratta last Wednesday. Birch’s novel Blood was nominated for this year’s Miles Franklin award. I went and saw him talk primarily because he had some indigenous blood in him and I am curious about how his writing might portray indigenous Australians. He also teaches creative writing at Melbourne University so I was hoping for some writing tips. The talk was free, but only about a third of the 100 or so seats were occupied. The audience made me feel young. The Perfect Pedigree? Tony Birch seems to have lived a life full of hardship and triumph over adversity. He grew up on a housing commission estate, his father was an alcoholic, Birch was expelled from schools for fighting, he was a fireman for eight years, he then went on to get a PHD in history. Jealous of how his background made him attractive to publishers, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I could still reima...