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I finally got around to watching the Pens and Prejudice episode of First Tuesday Book Club last night. It was a discussion about the perceived prejudice against woman authors. All during the show I had a comment by Germaine Greer in mind. She said male authors tend to write about how the world is, whereas female authors tend to write about how they wished the world was. I often extrapolate Greer’s comment for science fiction into: male authors tend to write about how they think the future will be, whereas female authors tend to write about how they hope the future will be. I am yet to establish whether the original comment by Greer or my extrapolation is true, as I have not read that many books written by female authors. And I have to ask myself: why do I read very few books by female authors? Jennifer Byrne on the show displayed some pie charts showing how the overwhelming number of books reviewed in newspapers and other publications are written by male authors. This m...

At the recent Melbourne Writer’s Festival, six of the authors I saw mentioned how they got their book published. Jo Case was asked by a publisher to write her non-fiction book Boomer and Me after the publisher read an article Jo had written about her son’s Asperger’s. Graeme Simsion originally wrote The Rosie Project as a film script. It won an Australian Writers' Guild award for the best romantic comedy script. But he had no luck getting the film made, so to get the script noticed he decided to turn it into a novel. The novel won the 2012 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpub lished manuscript. A bidding war then broke out for the manuscript. Catherine Deveny said she submitted the manuscript of her novel The Happiness Show by mistake, she sent the publisher a file containing it rather than the memoir they had contracted her to write. The publisher read the novel manuscript and liked it so much they wanted to publish it (Note: Deveny already had had s...

  At the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, Max Barry asked why do audiences sit around and listen to authors reading from their books at writer’s festivals? Shouldn’t they instead be watching authors write? A few years ago, he attempted to put that thought into action. He set himself up in the concourse at the Melbourne Writers Festival so people could watch on a big screen as he wrote. He said it was the worst writing experience in his life, as every murmur or giggle from those watching had him thinking he had made an grievous error. So he now much prefers to do readings from his books. I heard him and a number of other authors reading from their books at the festival. Some of them had me wanting to buy their book, while others did a good job of convincing me not to buy their book. Graeme Simsion If you are an Australian writer and haven’t heard about Graeme Simsion and his book The Rose Project , then you haven’t been paying attention. Simsion has now sold hi...