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I was listening to radio national yesterday and the memoir, A Fortunate Life, by AB Facey was mentioned. Those who watch First Tuesday Book Club would have seen A Fortunate Life come in at number three on their Ten Aussie Books to Read Before You Die list. If I remember correctly they said it was not very well written, but it really showed the horrors of war experienced by Facey. At the time, I thought it might be a book worth reading to get an accurate picture of what it was like at Gallipolli.  Evidentially, Facey claims in the memoir that he was one of the first soldiers ashore at Gallipoli, and came under heavy machine gun fire. But according to historian Chris Roberts, a retired Brigadier, Facey’s account only perpetuates one of the myths about the landing at Gallipoli.   In Chris Robert's book The Landing at Anzac 1915 he writes that the landing "was not a bloody landing under murderous fire", and that the beach was "not an inferno of bursting s...

As per usual, life has interfered in a major way with my writing so far this year. I went on holidays for ten days, I have had problems with my broadband, I have had problems with Divine, and a medicine I rely on went out of stock which made me even more tired than usual.   Tired From Illness A couple of weeks ago week I joined a Facebook page for people, like me, with ulcerative colitis or Crohns disease.   I found that those with either disease usually have other chronic health problems. I seem to be one of the “lucky” ones. Since “catching” ulcerative colitis about 15 years ago, all I have had to suffer was kidney stones and cataract surgery on my eyes, as well as low-level asthma, and being diagnosed with diabetes a couple of years ago. Others in the group have had much worse, including major bowel and colon surgery and nearly dying from their illness. But one thing is consistent, just about all of them, like me, report being constantly tired. I ex...

The genesis of this post comes from a typo and suspected typo. I will start with the suspected typo. Last week I read a press release announcing the BBC was remaking Blake’s Seven. The press release says: “Joe Pokaski and Martin Campbell have worked tirelessly with the Georgeville TV team to create an amazeballs reboot of this classic space opera...”  Amazeballs? WTF? I was debating whether this was a typo or some new term used in the media when Adrian Bedford, a man more up to date with language than I am, told me that it was a new term used on the internet to express excitement and enthusiasm. I had never heard it before, but that very night I heard it used in a television commercial. So I had to look it up. According to the Urban Dictionary, amazeballs “is some annoying term Perez Hilton keeps trying to make happen, by saying it repeatedly, even though it makes no sense, and getting twitter followers to try and make it a trending topic, to make himself more famou...

The New Yorker Rejects a Story it had Already Published. I recently read a very funny article where writer David Cameron “grabbed a New Yorker story off the web, copied it into a Word document, changed only the title, created a fictitious author identity, and submitted it to a slew of literary journals”. His letter simply stated that he was unpublished writer who was deeply appreciative of their consideration. Every single magazine, including the New Yorker itself, rejected the story. Just to be sure, Cameron choose another story from the New Yorker and did it again, with the same result. A writer’s immediate reaction might be ah-huh, those magazine editors don’t have a clue what good writing is. But there is no indication in the article that the editors actually read the story. As he says all he received back was boilerplate replies of “good luck placing your work elsewhere”. And why should they have read it? After all, these magazines probably receive a lot o...