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Paradox Resolution is K.A Bedford's eagerly awaited sequel to his 2008 Aurealis winning novel Time Machines Repaired While U Wait . The novel continues the adventures of time machine repairer Spider Webb in a near future where time machines are the new luxury car. Spider is an ex-policeman, a man who quit the force after blowing the whistle on police corruption. He lives in a cheap motel while his wife Molly waits for him to sign divorce papers. He still hopes they will get back together, while she continues to use him as a cheap handyman.   Spider’s mundane existence changes one day when he opens the fridge at work and discovers a head. A head that asks to be saved. Spider is then reunited with a loyal police colleague, Iris, as they investigate the murder.   Life becomes more complicated for Spider when his new boss asks him to investigate the disappearance of his young son and friend in the employer’s supped-up time machine. And thus an adventure begins...

Last week I wrote a blog post which concluded that many self-publishers would probably burn out from the estimated twelve hour days needed to write and successfully promote their books. To illustrate the blog post I used a picture of a crazed Jack Nicholson from The Shining . For those who have not seen it, in that movie Jack plays a writer looking after a near empty haunted hotel. He is suffering a minor dose of writer’s block and ends up typing up a manuscript with “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” repeated over and over again. I used the image of Jack as a subtle illustration of an overworked writer going crazy. But when I placed a link to the post on Google+ I received a comment asking me if I knew that the image was probably copyrighted. I had not thought of that. I resisted telling the guy who mentioned it to get the stick out of his bum. But after a bit of research, I am glad he pointed it out.   Copyright Laws According to the Arts Law Centre of A...

My post this week relies on a year-old article in the Guardian about self-publishing authors. The article refers to a survey that was conducted by the Taleist website. One thousand self-published authors responded to an invitation to fill in the survey. So it is not a random survey of self-publishers, and therefore, its validity is open to question.    I suspect a lot of those who responded would have been enthusiastic about self-publishing because of some success, while people who were not so successful, and had given up, would not have bothered.  Still the survey has some interesting things to say what committed self-publishers earn.   Money Earned By Self-published Authors in 2011.   The average money earned by authors who responded to the survey in 2011 was, $10,000 dollars, a nice round number. Now before you say, that’s better than the dole and rush to start your mega-seller, that average figure is distorted by the sales of the to...

To my knowledge, I have not been abducted by aliens, although if I had, that might explain a few things. For example, maybe one of their alien probes caused my Ulcerative Colitis. I have seen many UFO’s, but I quickly realised those unidentified flying objects were hot air balloons or shooting stars, and not alien space ships. Not that I ever thought they were. Unlike one of my workmates at the time, I also never thought the first episode of the X-files was a documentary. I read and watch a lot of science fiction, so you would think that I would be more open to the possibility that aliens have visited Earth. To the contrary, I have always been totally sceptical. Aliens have not even entered my dreams. My primary reason for believing aliens have not visited is that any intelligent space faring race would live too far away to travel here. Tau Ceti e, the nearest possibly habitable planet that astronomers think they have discovered outside our solar system, is 11.9 light y...