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Hi all, Literary Agent Nathan Bransford wrote a good post on "show not tell" last week. I am reasonably sure I am aware when I am telling and not showing in my own writing. When critiquing I frequently point out instances of telling, eg , when the POV character is described as sad or unhappy. I also often point out instances of the author writing "he felt like" or "she looked at", where writing what he felt or describing what she looked at would do away with the need to tell of that action. I still tell in my writing. In the novel I am working on, where the characters take a logical sequence of steps to set up their lives on a newly terraformed planet, every now and then, to speed the story along, I tell the reader a summary of what has happened between shown scenes. I might tell them how they did put in the building's foundations before a scene where I have them putting up the walls. I...

Hi all, Last week was one of the most stressful in my life. My father, who has the early stages of dementia, had a hernia operation on Monday. His health is not that great so the operation was not without risk. The operation went well, but at 11.30 that night I was awoken by knocking at the back door. I opened the door and it was my father in his PJs and dressing gown with an intravenous needle in his arm. We found out later that he had also removed a catheter, before shuffling out of the hospital about one and a half kilometres away. I asked him why and he kept on saying, "there was nobody there". The pain killers were obviously making his dementia worse. A call to the hospital found them frantically looking for him. They had called the police, who arrived a few minutes later and took him back to hospital. My father's deteriorating mental state is a huge and saddening worry. On Tuesday I went to the dentist to have a crown put on a tooth. Unfortunately, as the dentist w...

Hi all, I wasn't as tired last week so I spent a bit more time editing Stalking Tigers than in previous weeks. Perhaps my goal at the moment should be to increase the amount of writing/editing/reading I do from week to week. I actually did some fiction reading too. I went "inactive" on critters.com and I am surprised that I haven't been booted from OWWW because of my lack of critiquing. I have decided to devote my critiquing energy to KSP , but I won't be doing much until after my eyes are fixed. I continue to worry about my appointment with the eye doctor this Wednesday. Stephenie Meyer's run of having the top four selling books in Australia has finally ended, with Kathy Retchs now holding the number one spot, followed by Meyer and then Richelle Mead (with another bloody vampire story). Meyer then has four to six. This could be only temporary as her sales will probably increase after some Victorian school libraries banned her novels for being to...

Hi all, Ridiculously tired last week. Went to bed at 6.30 on a couple of nights. If I had not figured out that I am a bit stressed at the moment, then I would be worried about it. Stressed about my cataracts; stressed about work, where ongoing renovations see the place in an orgy of disorganisation every morning; and stressed about my father's up coming hernia operation (my dad's health isn't great). My father's operation is in just under eight days, so hopefully my stress levels will reduce after that. I see the eye doctor two days later and who knows what that will do to my state of mind. But the renovations just go on and on. So it would appear that I am not going to get much writing and editing done over the next couple of months. I am about half way through editing chapter eight of Stalking Tigers. No critiquing or fiction reading last week. At least the Lions won. Graham.

Hi all, I’ve finished editing chapter seven of Stalking Tigers – that’s if I can resist the temptation to go back to the start of that chapter and go through it again. I can always find something to change. The chapter ended up 1500 words longer, so much for cutting it back. I am thinking about dropping out of critters.com and devoting my critiquing efforts to just KSP, where I am waiting for someone to put up the first few chapters of a science-fiction novel, rather than start critiquing mid-novel. I had a look at the Conflux virtual mini con , an online speculative fiction forum, held over last weekend. James Minz, a senior editor with Baen Books who also worked at Del Rey and Tor Books, had some interesting comments. He was asked: what makes a gem stand out from the slushpile? He said “it's all about the storytelling. If there's strong story, the rest is negotiable. Don't get me wrong, you don't know how to use the English language properly, you're...

Hi all, Over the past few months my vision has been losing focus, especially after a bout of conjunctivitis about two months ago. I began to interrogate my eyes by reading with one or the other closed and discovered the left eye, the one most badly affected by conjunctivitis, had an opaque patch, right in its centre. It was like trying to read through badly scratched spectacles. I noticed too, that the world become a lot clearer when I just peered at it from the right eye. I made an appointment to see an optometrist, but got a bad dose of bronchitis, missing both it and work. As I waited for my bronchitis to disappear, I thought the opaque spot was probably the reason my eyes felt tired a lot of the time, as the left eye strained to see through the fog and the right wondered what was up with its partner. I also noticed my eyesight seemed hazier on cloudy days. I remembered being told a few years ago that I had cataracts slowly forming on my eyes. The optometrist assured me that...

Hi all, I spent most of last week catching up on things I had put off while sick, so there wasn't much time for writing. I'm still a few days behind in my newspaper reading. I don't chuck them until read, so they can pile up. I once got eleven weeks behind, but after some months I eventually caught up. I find reading newspapers very necessary for my writing, not just the stuff on writing and books, but anything that might give me an idea of future trends. For example, I reckon if you are writing a science fiction book set on Earth in the near future you will need to include the effects of global warming in it or give an explanation of how science fixed it (because it looks very unlikely that any useful global agreement to stop it will eventuate). If you write a book set 50 or so years from now, you will need to extrapolate the possible effects of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, cloning, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, medical advances, population changes, ot...