Graham Clements

My Writing Week: Issue 4, Year 5.

2012-01-22T21:21:00.000-08:00

Hiall,

Communicationproblems was my theme last week.

BylineMissing From Divine Article

Ihad a newarticle posted on Divine last week. The article was about hiding myulcerative colitis from the world. I failed to notice the article lacked a by-line.Some readers might have thought that I wanted to remain anonymous and still hidmy disease. I was notified of the problem the next day and the article is nowattributed to me.

Ihave received a number of comments on the article on the Divine site and onfacebook. As a result, if I wrote the article again I would include anotherreason for not telling the world I had ulcerative colitis: people offeringdietary and medical advice. Over the years I have come across lots of naturaltherapies and dietary changes that supposedly cure ulcerative colitis, none ofthem have worked.

Abig problem with ulcerative colitis is that it comes and goes. So say it isactive and I decide to try one of the various “cures”. I choose a cure ofstanding on one leg while singing I’m too Sexy for my Shirt. After a couple ofmonths of no sign of the disease, I might become convinced my cure has worked.But the disease returns a couple of months later leaving me feeling slightlygullible.

Typosin The Dervish House

Inmy last blog post I pointed out three typos I had seen in Ian McDonald’s novel TheDervish House. I then added a comment about a further two typos. I didnot point these typos out as a complaint, just an observation. The typos havenot influenced my enjoyment of the novel. I finished reading it last night and hopeto post a review sometime this week.

Problemswith Technology

KarlMarx was convinced chemicals were added to bread to make it go stale faster.Maybe they are. I am convinced that electronic manufacturers start sending bugsover the web to computers and printers two years after the machines are firstused. These bugs eventually cause so many problems that a consumer gives up andbuys a new machine.

Thefirst two IBM second-hand computers I bought lasted five and seven yearsrespectively. The current Compaq began acting up about a month after its twoyear warranty ended. I doubled its Ram memory and the computer behaved forabout seven months. But now it keeps having start-up problems.

Thefirst printer I bought lasted over seven years. The last two, including the oneI destroyed in a fit of rage last week, lasted about two years each before theystarted acting up.

SoHewlett Packard and Cannon, I am aware of what you are doing.

MyNovel Writing

Myprinter and discussions about my article and blog post, took up a lot ofwriting time last week. As a result, I added the least weekly amount of wordsto my novel since I started writing it at the beginning of November: a paltry1300 words.

Thisweek has not started any better. My computer decided to have start-up problemsthis morning. A blue screen said something about a corrupt file. As requested, Idid yet another restore, the third in two weeks.

Andthe cricket starts tomorrow. And it’s My Birthday on Wednesday. And then Australia Day onThursday. And I have to spray the fruit with malathion on Saturday…

My Writing Week: Issue 3, Year 5

2012-01-15T23:04:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

Best Place to Self-Publish a Book

For the past year or so Ihave followed a thread on LinkedIn that asked the question: Whatis the best place to self-publish a book? Here are a few things Ihave learnt:

Createspace (Amazon) comes up as the best self-publishing platform. It is relatively easy to use compared to other platforms and not many authors seem to have problems with it.
Smashwords rarely has a bad comment posted about it.
Until recently, I had not noted any references to Apple’s ibooks. This is probably due to writers having to use Smashwords or Lulu to prepare their ebook before it can be sold in the ibookstore.
Never use Publish America. It is a total rip off. The fact that it still exists means many writers do very little publishing research. Authors accuse Publish America of doing things like charging $350 for the placement of 15 copies of their book in Barnes and Noble. Many authors say they know they have sold books, but Publish America says they have not. Publish America then seems to make it virtually impossible for an author to get the rights back to their non-selling book.

Typos

I am reading Hugo nominatedauthor Ian McDonalds’ The Dervish House, published byGollancz. Recently my reading was interrupted three times in thirty or so pagesby typos. Twice a word was repeated and a word that should have been singular waspluralised. But in the hundred pages I have read since I have not noticed any moretypos. Perhaps the proof-reader read those thirty pages on Friday, after a big nightout.

My Divine Writing

I wrote and submitted anarticle to DiVine magazine last week. It is about how I hid my UlcerativeColitis from everyone. I will let the universe know when the article ispublished, which seems a bit odd when the article is about hiding my disease.

My Novel Writing.

Much of my writing time lastweek was taken up with the Divine article. I had computer problems which alwaysseem to happen at this time of year. I also spent a lot of time in the garden pickingtomatoes and beans, watering and waging war on fruit flies. And then there wasthe cricket.

So I didn’t achieve my goalof 1000 words of the novel on any weekday. My best effort was 750 words onFriday. But, but, but…chapter thirty-four was so hard to write as the POVcharacter kept on thinking up new evacuation supplies and activities for thecrew to perform.

All up I added 1970 words tothe now 70,900 word novel. This week I hope to do better.

My Writing Week: Issue 2, Year 5

2012-01-08T21:37:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

As a personal stand againstthe ebook price race to the bottom, I made a resolution at the start of lastyear to only purchase ebooks priced over $5. Here is what I ended up downloading:

WTF, an anthology by Pink Narcissus Press, $8.99

Marketing for Authors by Anita Revel, $4.97

The Last Albatross by Ian Irvine, $6.99

Oxygen by John Olson and Randy Ingermanson, 0.99

Turing Evolved by Dave Kitson, free

My Name in Lights by Patty Jansen, $1.99

Creating an ebook by Paul Hurst, free

Ah-huh, Graham was not verygood at keeping his resolution you think, but wait until you read myrationalisations.

I sent Dave Kitson an $8 donationwhen I finished reading Turing Evolved.

Patty Jansen’s ebook was a33 page novella. I think $1.99 is a fair price for a novella.

I read Randy Ingermanson’snewsletter, sometimes hurriedly, and mistakenly thought Oxygen was a novella with some writing tips atits end.

Creating an ebook, by Paul Hurst is only a small non-fiction book.

And I was not going toquibble about three cents in the price of Marketing for Authors.

So I reckon I kept my newyear’s resolution.

Australian Book Sales in 2011.

According to anarticle in the Age by Jason Steger, the number of books sold in Australia last year dropped by 7.1% to 60.4 million, withtheir value dropping 12.6% to $1.1 billion. Most of the drop in sales is putdown to the collapse of Angus and Robertson and Borders. I wonder how much wasspent at overseas online bookshops by Australians.

In the US sales dropped from 717 million to 651 million. In Britain the value of book sales dropped $150 million.

The same article said MathewReilly’s Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves was the top selling Adultnovel in Australia in 2011, selling 124,000 copies. It was the thirdbestselling book in Australia last year. Di Morrissey’s The Opal Desert was theeighth bestselling book, with 92,000 copies sold.

My Novel Writing.

I finished chapterthirty-three on Tuesday and then got bogged down in chapter thirty-four. That chapteris told from the point of view of the XO of the starship as he organises itsevacuation. I kept on changing the chapter as I thought about how he would managethe evacuation and what supplies he would take when there was virtually nochance of rescue and only eight tonnes capacity available. So a lot of wordswere deleted and I did not get to my 1000 words on any day. I ended the weekwith 69,000 words of the novel written.

My writing week: Issue one, year five.

2012-01-01T19:02:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

This is my annual best ofthe previous years science fiction and new year’s resolutions post.

2011’s Science Fiction Books.

The best science fictionbook I read last year was The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, a prequel to herequally as good Oryx and Crake. It’snot about global warming, the flood is a genetically engineered plague. I alsoenjoyed Stephen King’s Under the Dome – which did sag a bitin the middle - and Dave Kitson’s self-published ebook Turing Evolved, which hada great story, it just needed a good edit.

Overall, I made very goodchoices for reading in 2011, except for the very much overrated PerdidoStreet Station, by China Mieville. Its story took way too long todevelop into anything interesting. It should have been cut to half its 600pages.

2011’s Science Fiction Movies.

Apart from the excellent Riseof the Apes, was any other science fiction movie released in 2011? Atleast that’s the question I asked myself. When I checked what else wasreleased, I did remember other movies I had seen last year.

Source Code was good, but not the sort of film that got myimagination going. Paul was a goodlaugh. I expected more of a Philip K. Dick story with The Adjustment Bureau. X-men Origins was a good butinstantly forgettable movie. The same goes for Super 8 and Cowboysand Aliens. There currently seems little appetite to make sciencefiction movies that get a viewer thinking. I want more movies with grand themesand ideas like Inception, Moon and District9.

Two absolute stinkers releasedlast year were Battle Los Angles and I am Number Four.

2011’s Science Fiction Television.

Easily the best sciencefiction on television last year was series four of Torchwood: Miracle Day. It was a ten part miniseries that slowly built up the tension beforereaching a satisfying conclusion. A series that made you think about the prolongingof life for those with little quality of life.

Doctor Who improved as the year went on. There were some goodepisodes, but none as good as those with the previous two doctors. Suspense hasbeen thrown out the window with the current doctor. As we all knew the doctorwouldn’t die, although I was hopeful he would regenerate, the continuing storyof his death generated zero suspense. I did enjoy the non-alien invasion Christmasepisode.

Terra Nova is too predictable and like Falling Skies has beenmade as a family drama (soap), rather than a science fiction series. The leadcharacters and families in both series act exactly like other current televisionfamilies. They even have the same clichéd dialogue. The writers seem to haveput no effort into exploring how families might behave in the future or in aworld destroyed by aliens. Instead, the writers have said, let’s writecharacters who today’s teenagers can identify with.

I enjoyed Fringe,and look forward to its return this year. I also enjoyed the low-brow Warehouse13, Eureka and Chuck. I think the last two will struggle for originality in future episodes.

Two movies I saw on cablestood out, both British. Monsters was an excellent character based movie, set in Mexico, where twopeople get to know each other as they try to cross a no-go zone full of aliensto get back to the US. I also found Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travelvery funny, and clever for a story about a group of drunken yobs who step intothe lavatory and find themselves in the future.

Last Year’s Resolutions/Goals

I didn’t make any writingresolutions last year. The previous year I had a goal of writing every day,which I did achieve.

The only new year’sresolution I made last year was to download no ebooks that were less than $5.My next post will tell you how I went with that resolution.

Last year I signed up for the Goodreads reading challenge. My goal wasto read 26 novels/anthologies. I only read half that due to tiredness andchoosing long books – they averaged 400 pages. This year I will again challengemyself to read 26 novels/anthologies, hopefully the tireds won’t interveneagain.

2012 Writing Goals.

My writing goals for thisyear are many. I want to finish the first draft of Jack Logan, Astronaut. I amabout half way through it at 67,000 words. I then want to rewrite it, get itcritiqued, rewrite it, and then edit it.

I also hope to edit a 25,000word novella, get it critiqued, and rewrite and edit it. The same goes for a6,000 word short story.

I want to do all thatwriting before NaNoWriMo in November which I plan to do again.

If I have time, I want to returnto rewriting another novel, which I was halfway through rewriting lastyear.

When I am writing new words my aim is 1000-2000 words a weekday. When I amrewriting and editing, obviously the word count will drop.

I also aim to again get 12 paid articles published in DiVine magazine and tolook for other freelance writing jobs.

I want to critique a lot more this year and be more of a contributor to acouple of writing communities I am involved in. In the last two years I haveonly critiqued a couple of novels and a few stories. I need to do more.

I want to do all this beforethe world ends on December 21, according to the Mayans anyway.

My Writing Week: Issue 48, Year 4

2011-12-27T21:50:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

I had an enjoyable andstress free Christmas: good food, good company, and appreciated gifts. Itwasn’t too hot and the neighbours kept the noise down. They were probably toobusy watching the huge LCD TV they got for Christmas, the box of which is stillon the front porch so the world, including local thieves, can know about theirincreasing carbon footprint.

We had prawns, lobster,oysters, and mussels as well as the traditional turkey and roast spuds, and pavlovawith blue berries on top. But just about the most delicious food was some home-growntomatoes that had finally ripened a few days before.

I hope everyone whocelebrates Christmas had an enjoyable time.

Plenty of Aussie Science Fiction to Read

The gifts I received includedfour books, three of which were science fiction, two of those were written byAussie authors. Along with books I bought for myself when looking for gifts forothers, I now have six new science fiction books by Aussie authors to read. Ihope there are some memorable and innovative stories among them.

I find our authors are asgood, if not better, than those in the rest of the world. Aussie novels like The Sea and Summer by George Turner, Quarantine by Greg Egan, Genetic Soldier by George Turner, The True History of the Kelly Gang byPeter Carey, Capricornia by XavierHerbert and Red Queen by HM Brown areamong my favourite novels. The DarkBetween the Stars by Damien Broderick is easily my favourite one authorshort story collection.

My Novel Writing Efforts

The pace of my novel has changedfrom a slow build up of tension to lots of action. I found the change of stylefor action scenes hard, but my writing began to flow as I wrote more of them.

I achieved my goal of1000-2000 words on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. I even did some writing onChristmas Day. I wrote around 4500 words for the week. I am beginning to thinkthe novel might greatly exceed 120,000 words because at 65,500 words, I think Iam yet to reach the halfway mark.

Now its time to try andremember if there were any decent science fiction movies apart from Rise of the Apes, and television apartfrom Miracle Day and Fringe for my year’s best lists in my nextpost.

My Writing Week: Issue 47, Year 4

2011-12-20T20:27:00.001-08:00

Hiall,

MyNovelWriting.

I’vefinally made time to write this week’s post. I’ve been too busy writing. Lastweek I wrote just over 1,000 words on each weekday and a few hundred on theweekend. I ended up writing 5410 words for the week and starting chapter 30 ofmy novel.

Idid a lot of research for the novel on things like gravity, g-forces,acceleration and velocity. I even tried to get a flight simulator going, but Ihave little patience for anything that does not work straight away. Playingwith a flight simulator might have given me descriptive ideas for the novel,and been a bit of fun.

Ifinally put my VCE physics to use, using it for calculations for the novel, andfor adapting information from distance/acceleration/g force calculators I foundon the web.

Mostof the novel has been a slow build up of tension. Only in recent chapters do actionscenes begin. I found it a struggle to adjust my writing, but after a fewaction scenes I am enjoying writing prolonged action sequences.

At60,900 words, I reckon the novel is about half written.

MyDiVine Writing.

Anew editor of DiVine magazine liked a couple of ideas for articles I have. Onewill take a bit of research, the other I can write virtually off the top of myhead as it is about my illness, ulcerative colitis.

ChristmasStuff.

TheBook Depository kept their promise to deliver Christmas presents I ordered within10 working days. Next year I think I will only give gifts I ordered from them,and avoid shops full of junk that no one who is not completely feed-up with searchingfor something reasonable, would buy. The retailers in Wangaratta are appalling.

Onthat festive note: Merry Christmas to everyone. May Santa bring you heaps ofbooks, preferably science fiction written by Aussie authors. Don’t drink toomuch and may you tolerate your relatives. If you are a climate change denier mayChristmas bring you a subscription to a non-Murdoch newspaper and the time toread it.

Graham.

My writing week: Issue 46, Year 4.

2011-12-11T22:24:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

I’ve nearly finished myChristmas shopping. I just hope the Book Depository keeps their promise of deliveringwithin seven to ten working days. I used the Book Depository because my localbooks shop did not have the audio books I was after and I loath crowded shops.

I cringe at the thought of shopsfull of old people who have parked their electric vehicles, trolleys and fatbums across aisles. My head hurts at the thought of listening to Paul McCartneysing over and over how wonderful Christmas is. I sympathise with Harry’s in The Slap every time I am stuck in a queuewith a parent who seems to have no intention of stopping their kid fromscreaming.

It seems that I have become areal Christmas grouch. Apart from being an atheist, except when I visit myfather’s grave, I think the Christmas spirit could do with a good Marxist reboot.I think Christmas would be much happier time for all if we all it we justforgot about the gift giving (even retailers. Consumers will then spend moreevenly during the year and wouldn’t return piles of unwanted gifts). Therewould also be fewer no-longer-cute-and-cuddly-puppies discarded in the monthsafter Christmas.

Christmas shopping alsointerferes with writing and thinking about writing. My goal last week, thefirst full week after NaNoWriMo, was to write 7,000 words. I completely blameChristmas shopping for not achieving that goal.

I started the week okay with1040 words on Monday. But then on Tuesday, I spent too much time in Big W lookingfor some DVD’s that they didn’t have. When I finally got home I only had timeto write 440 words.

On Wednesday, I wrote 1127words, even after being side tracked into writing a reviewof Ian Irvine’s, The Last Albatross.On Thursday, I was back proving that except for food and grog, the retailers inWang sell absolutely nothing I want to buy. They should spruik Wang as a greatplace to save. When I finally got home, I ended up writing 750 words. Friday,was my best writing day of the week, just, with 1130 words.

I had decided to only writeif I really had to on the weekends. On Saturday, it was back to skulking aroundthe shops. At last I found a present for my sister, yay. Relieved of Christmasgift agonies, my thoughts instantly returned to my novel and changes thatneeded to be made. I just had to do some deleting and then writing when I gothome. I wrote 550 words for the day. On Sunday, exhausted from Christmas shopping,I took it easy and only wrote 220 words.

All up I wrote 5037 words forthe week. I had written 55,600 words of the novel and was in the middle ofchapter 27. Now if it wasn’t for Christmas…

Scribe abandons trade paperbacks.

I am a bit behind in mynewspaper reading, so my outrage at Scribe is about six weeks late. Accordingto the Bookmarks column in The Age on the 29^th ofOctober, Scribe has abandoned the trade paperback. Fools. Most of the new booksI buy and am given for Christmas are trade paperbacks. I buy them because theyhave bigger print than paperbacks and are cheaper than hard-backs and lookbetter on my bookshelves than paperbacks. It looks like I will be buying less booksand getting less Christmas gifts published by Scribe.

Review of The Last Albatross by Ian Irvine

2011-12-06T21:57:00.001-08:00

The Last Albatross by Ian Irvine
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Last Albatross is set in a near future Australia where the technology, environment and economy is failing. It is a story of extreme environmentalists versus, in the beginning at least, an apathetic materialistic woman and her partner.

The heroine of the story is Jemma. She is an overweight, unconfident school-teacher who wants to have a child. Her older partner, Ryn, is a computer scientist who forecasts the damage from major weather events. At the start of the book he is working on a program that forecasts the effects of the collapse of one of the Antarctic ice shelves.

In his youth, Ryn and a mentally unstable friend Hercus found a bar of plutonium at Maralinga and buried it in a relative’s back yard. There it remains for years until Hercus returns into Jemmas and Ryn’s life. He is distressed about materialists destroying the environment is going to get rid of them all. And so the adventure begins.

I did not really like the characters. Not my type of people. Jemma had sold her soul to un-fulfilling nothingness long before the novel started. Ryn was too rapped up in his work to care about anything. Hercus wanted to blame the world for everything bad in his life. In the end, only really Jemma came close to redeeming herself.

I did have a problem with technology constantly refusing to function throughout the story. Although the Australia in the novel is a virtual corporate dictatorship, I still kept on thinking, only fools will buy the corporation’s goods if they don’t work. Others will buy, make, illegally import, invent some other product that actually works or just go without. Basically I thought Jemma and Ryn fell into the fools category, the type of people who keep on going back to the Reject Shop to buy a replacement for something that just broke.

I think the novel was too long. It should have ended with Jemma and Ryn’s attempts to stop Hercus using the plutonium. Instead, it continued with Jemma improbably taking over a speech in front of world leaders from her ailing husband. I thought Jemma’s and Ryn’s reputation was so soiled at the time that it would be a bit like Lindy Chamberlain addressing a child care conference. We know a dingo did it, but still there is baby’s blood thrown by the media all over Lindy.

The novel ends up portraying all environmentalists as extremist nutters. This aspect of the novel really rubbed against me. I was surprised to see the author himself has/does work in the environmental field.

Overall, I thought the novel okay, it did keep me reading. I was just frustrated by its character’s motivations and some of its ideas.

View all my reviews

My Writing Week: Issue 45, Year 4

2011-12-04T22:01:00.001-08:00

Hiall,

Halfof last week was taken up with successfully completing National Novel WritingMonth. Apart from a great sense of achievement, that I could actually average1667 words per day over a month, I also finished with a sore lower back from mydesk chair. The back seems to be on the improve today, after a swim, adjustingthe chair and spending less time sitting in it over the past five days.

NewArticle on DiVine

Onthe last day of NaNoWriMo I got an email from the editor of DiVine magazinewanting me to write a short article about a researchproject into the experiences of students with disabilities at school. I gotup early the next morning and wrote the article and it was up on the site anhour later. We were both happy with the quick turn around; a nice quick earner.

NovelGoing Well

Myfirst draft of the novel is probably not halfway written yet. It should end up atleast 100,000 words. At the moment I am 6,000 words into part two of its projectedthree parts.

Myplan for the novel seems to working well. Sometimes the characters take thestoryline away from the plan, but they then seem to naturally return thenarrative to my outline.

Ihope to continue writing the novel at about 7,000 words a week. At that rate,it will be a couple of months before the first draft is finished.

NaNoWriMo - the finish

2011-12-01T16:34:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

I started the final ninedays of National Novel Writing Month needing only to write 10508 words to reachmy 50,000 target. That should have been easy as I was averaging over 1800 wordsa day. Did I make it?

Day twenty-two: I had the house to myself for the next four days. You would think thatwould mean an ideal environment to write, but I like to take a break and slobaround when alone. I was nearly four days ahead of schedule for NaNoWriMo, mybrain was beginning to tire and I was developing a sore lower back from sitingat my desk, so I decided to only write a bit on each of those four days. On daytwenty-two I wrote only 464 words,for a total of 39956.

Day twenty-three: 287 words for a total of 40243.

Day twenty-four: 110 words for a total of 40353.

Day twenty-five: releasing I was leaving myself a lot of words to write in only fivedays I wrote 1006 words for a totalof 41359.

Day twenty-six: I now needed to average close to the original daily total of 1667 tofinish on time, so I upped the word count to 1965 for a total of 43324 words.

Day twenty-seven: 1685 words for a total of 45009. But then I accidentally deleteda chapter from my computer. I had given the chapter I spent the day writing thesame file name as a previous chapter and then saved it. Ahhhh. Fortunately Ihad been backing up every night and was able to recover the deleted chapterfrom a memory stick.

I then spent a lot of timeupdating my plan for the next few chapters to ensure that indecision would notlimit my word output on the final few days.

Day twenty-eight: 1731 words for a total of 46740 words.

Day twenty-nine: 1692 words for a total of 48422.

Day thirty:I only needed to write 1578 words. My back ached and sudden temperature changeshad caused my asthma to suck my energy away. My sister visited. It was herbirthday, so I had to at least say happy birthday. It was just as well I didn’tcheck my email early because the editor of Divine wanted me to write an articlewhich needed to be submitted the next day.

I was checking my word countevery 100 words or so and adding them to my excel spreadsheet so it would tellme exactly how many words I had to go. Finally the excel world count said 50014.

Yay me. I had done what Ithought impossible. I had written more words in the past 30 days than I hadwritten in the past six months.

What I learnt from NaNoWriMo

I can write 1500 – 2000words a day. It takes about four hours of writing. Another ½ hour of planning,and many hours of thinking. Before I did NaNoWriMo, I would usually turn mycomputer on and have a look at what I had written the previous day and spendmost of my time fixing it and not moving forward. With NaNoWriMo I mostly ignoredwhat I had written previously.

I did go back and ensurethat a character’s hair had not changed colour and I changed the dialogue ofone character and made a few changes for the sake of consistency. I also scrapeda couple of paragraph starts of a two chapters because I thought of a betterway to start them.

But I did very littleediting. Which left me with the thought, why bother editing at this stage?Especially as I tend to totally rewrite a story/novel on the second and thirddrafts. Why try to fix what will be rewritten? I think formerly my attitude wasa bit like if I died, then someone might turn on my computer and read my stuff and think Ican’t write.

So from now on, my firstdrafts of anything are going to be an unedited sprawl of missed commas andsplit infinitives.

NaNoWriMo Week 3

2011-11-20T22:06:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

It’s the end of week three of National Novel Writing Monthand I am feeling tired and of need of a break from writing. In the last twodays in particular I have felt like just lying on the bed and dozing. Anyway, Iforced myself to write past distractions until the writing eventually becameeasier. Here is how I went:

Day fifteen: Musthave been an easy day’s writing because I can’t remember any issues. I finishedchapter thirteen, or so I thought. I wrote 1837words for a total of 27641.

Day sixteen: Iwas tired. I changed the ending of chapter thirteen and then wrote chapterfourteen which ended up feeling a bit like a fill in chapter. It might notsurvive an edit. But I need something to break chapter thirteen from chapterfifteen. I wrote 1947 words for theday. Total 29588.

Day seventeen: Irealised that for consistency I better start making a plan of the interior ofthe spaceship much of the story is set on, which I did. Wrote 1839 words. Total 31427.

Day eighteen: Didsome research on heart rates. I had written 900 words by lunch, but founddistractions after eating. Eventually got back to the writing and wrote 2140 words. I am two-thirds of the wayto the 50,000 mark with 33561 wordsin total.

Day nineteen:Another daily count in the 1830’s with 1833words. Total of 35394

Day twenty: Reallydid not feel like writing. It was a real struggle to get the words out until aflash of insight near the end of the day. I wrote 2099 words for a total of 37493.

Day twenty-one: Ifelt just as tired as the previous day, which is not the way to start a week. Ihave decided to divide the novel into three parts. At the moment I am nearingthe end of part one, so I reckon the novel will be around the 110,000 words. Iwrote 1999 words for the day for atotal of 39492.

I am averaging 1880 words a day. I am now 4492 words ahead ofschedule. I am very much looking forward to a couple of days off writing.

In other news, Bravenet apologised for sending any emailmessages I sent the previous week to their spam account. They have given me amonth’s free hosting.

I also finished critiquing a novel and reading PatrickWhite’s intriguing, over punctuated Voss.I will review it when I have finished NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo Week 2

2011-11-13T22:14:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

It’s been a busy week ofwriting and frustrations about writing and technology. I have wondered iftechnology would intervene in my attempt to get to 50,000 words for National NovelWriting Month (NaNoWriMo). Although I have had no computer mal-functions sofar, trying to solve problems with my email (Bravenet) have taken time awayfrom writing.

My email has probably beendoing the worse thing it could possibly do: telling me it has sent messageswhen they haven’t been. I was debating edits to an article I had written forDivine, and suddenly he stopped receiving my emails. He ended up ringing me tofind out if I still wanted the article published. I did.

I have contacted Bravenet tosee if they care enough to actually fix the problem. They took months to fix aprevious problem where my word attachments were being turned into a mess ofsymbols at the receiver’s end. Needless to say, once I have time, I will bemoving my website and email hosting somewhere else.

New Article on DiVine.

I have a newarticle up on DiVine today and it is about weight loss. It is particularlyaimed at people with disabilities. One thing I knew, which was reaffirmed by myresearch, was that many weight loss programs have a physical exercise element.Physical exercise can be very difficult for people with certain disabilities. Ifound a very interesting site in Sparkpeoplewhich is a bit like a Facebook for people who want to lose weight. It hasgroups for people with disabilities and groups for chair exercises. BecauseDiVine is a Victorian Government site, I had to severely reduce references Iwanted to make to Sparkpeople.

NaNoWriMo.

My goal for the second week ofNaNoWriMo was to write more words on each day of the week than I did for theprevious week.

Day eight:I spent a while discussing (at least I thought) edits on the DiVine article soI did not get to writing to 2pm.I still managed to write 1788 wordswhich was a fraction over the previous Tuesday’s total. I had written 14416 words in total.

Day nine: Iwas very angry when I started writing; not the greatest frame of mind to writein. I did some research and found a suitable point in space for the story to beset in. I finished chapter six and then wrote up a lot of notes. The novel’splot is looking very good. I wrote 1740words for a total of 16156.

Day ten: Morequick research, this time on the brain and what parts of it do. There were nointerruptions as I was blissfully unaware that my email wasn’t working. I wrote1771 words for a total of 17927.

Day eleven: Ifelt like crap all day, with a sore back of the head, sore hands, even asplinter – which I removed – in the tip of a finger. If I was going to concededefeat on writing my daily quota, this would have been the day. Instead, Iwrote until I finished chapter nine. With lots of small chapters, this novel isdifferent from the other two I have written. I wrote 2100 words to scrape over the 20,000words.

Day twelve:I was distracted by finding my email wasn’t working. Again I didn’t startwriting until after 2pm.But I still made the quota and I still bettered last Saturday’s word count. Iwrote 1839 words for a total of 21866.

Day thirteen:And I failed to better last Sunday’s word count. I finished chapter eleven andthought that would be a good place to stop for the day. I figured out I amwriting at about 500 words an hour, but I am not going back past the currentsentence I am writing to edit. I also spend about half an hour a day sorting mynotes out. And many hours thinking about the novel. I wrote 2059 words for the day and a total of 23925.

Day fourteen: Again I was distracted by my stupid email. I am fed up with Bravenet andI sent them an email telling them so. I would not recommend Bravenet to anyone,their customer support is probably the worst I have encountered – and I havedealt with Amazon to get a Kindle replaced. I managed to settle the mind and dosome writing. I wrote 1879 words andpassed the halfway mark for a total of 25804words.

I only missed bettering theprevious week’s daily word counts on one day. I am now 2471 words ahead of schedule.

My NaNoWriMo week.

2011-11-06T23:48:00.001-08:00

Hiall,

Ihave just finished the first week of National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo.The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. This is howI faired:

Day one: I started abrand new novel. The ideas for the novel had only been pulled together over theprevious few days. I was not sure whether I would get anywhere near the 1667words required on average per day.

Thefirst chapter was to introduce the main character, his predicament and his somewhatdrastic reaction. I wrote this chapter in first person. I finished the chapterand then thought about stopping for the day as my word count was at 1630, justbelow the average of 1667. But I was reminded by a friend that it’s easier tobegin writing the next day if you have a scene set and started, so I wrote thefirst 70 words of chapter two. I wrote 1700words for the first day.

Day two: When walkingback from the pool, I thought up a better way to open chapter two, so Iscrapped the start and began again. I then had to stop and walk to the dentistand then spend a lovely hour and twenty minutes getting a root canal finished.

Chaptertwo is written in third person and the story is told from three different POV.I felt like I was creating distinct voices for each of them. I wrote 1710 words for a total of 3410.

Day three: I went back and did some editing (naughtyGraham) and deleted about 100 words. The writing for chapter two became moretechnical as characters followed step by step procedures. I finished chaptertwo and started chapter three. I wrote 1647words for the day, so I did not make the average daily quota. 5057 words in total.

Day four: On the wayback from the pool I found myself stopping to write a lot of notes and, onceagain, I thought of a better beginning to a chapter I had started, so Iscrapped some more words. Chapter three, like chapter one, is one long scene,and when you don’t need to stop and think about setting a scene it is a loteasier to punch out the words. After I finished writing, I spent some timesorting out my notes for the novel. I wrote 1760 words for a total of 6817.

Day five: I woke up a few times during the nightto write down ideas for the novel. When I got up the next morning, Iimmediately snatched up my notebook to write more notes. When I finally began writing, I finishedchapter three and was well into chapter four before stopping.

Iam finding that writing at this pace certainly helps with remembering what is happeningand keeping a character’s voice consistent. I wrote 1760 words for the second day in a row, for a total of 8577 words.

Day six: Writing seemedvery easy. I finished chapter four and was well into chapter five when Istopped, rushing to 2197 words and atotal of 10774. I am finding themore I write, the more I want to write.

Day seven: A few thingsinterfered with my writing time, like the editor for Divine sending me anedited version of my next article with changes, some of which I did not agreewith. I spent a lot of time composing an email that explained why I thoughtsome of his changes diminished the article. Then the house insurance billarrived and a long discussion broke out about whether we are under oroverinsured. Did yet another online insurance contents estimate – came out muchthe same as the previous ones. Just as well I had written around 800 wordsbefore I checked my email and mail. I then managed to write another 1000 words orso for a total of 1854 and a weekone total of 12628.

Afterweek one I am 959 words ahead of schedule. I have amazed myself with my output.I have written more in seven days than I usually write in seven weeks.

My Writing Week: Issue 44 Year 4

2011-10-30T19:59:00.001-07:00

National Novel Writing Month.

Last week I finished andsubmitted my next article for DiVinemagazine. The article is about weight loss for people with disabilities. I thenfinished re-writing a short story. Before I had time to think about what to donext I saw a post about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and decided togive it a go.

For those who don’t know,NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in November. About300,000 people worldwide usually attempt NaNoWriMo.

Those who have read thisblog would know about my miniscule word output, so me deciding to write 50,000words in a month is a bit like someone who just occasionally jogs around theblock deciding they are going to run a marathon on every day of November.

Once I committed myself to theidea of NaNoWriMo, I had to come up with a scenario to push me onto thestarting line. I considered using a 2000 word excerpt of a young adult novel Ihad written for my masters as a starting point. Alternatively, I could haveadded 50,000 words to one of my novels in progress. The better one is at about15,000 words, while the other one is at 40,000 words and not getting anywherefast.

But I knew I would morelikely achieve the 50,000 words with something new, as I find the early wordsof a novel a lot easier to write. The later words seem to come out slower,probably due to attempts to keep the plot and characters consistent.

I decided to use a novel scenarioI have had floating around in my head for years. On Friday, between sets ofweights and watering the veggies and pot plants, I wrote down pages of notes. Ihave been frequently adding to those notes over the past few days.

I have a main character, atheme, a scenario that covers the whole story arc, an internal and an external problemfor the main character to solve, a problem for the secondary characters tosolve, and a problem for the main character and secondary characters to solvetogether. I have figured out the firsthalf of the novel – assuming it doesn’t take a more adventurous route.

For the first time, I amgoing to write chapters from alternative points of view. I am even going tochange from first person to third person with the alternating points of view. Thisapproach was very effective in Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood.

And of course the novel I amgoing to write is science fiction.

So I will probably not bemaking much noise on the web for the next month. I hope to update my blog everynow and then with how my NaNoWriMo race is going.

My Writing Week: Issue 43, Year 4.

2011-10-23T21:27:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

Amazon’s Latest Publishing Exploits.

In the past couple of weekstwo articles about Amazon’s publishing ambitions have backed up my thoughtsthat they will soon dominate the publishing industry. The firstarticle in Publisher’s Weekly wasabout the launch of Amazon’s new publishing imprint called 47North. Thisimprint will publish Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.

47North had signed 15 titleswhen it launched and included a series by Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. Alltitles will be available in print, Kindle and audio formats.

The article also mentions anauthor who signed up to Amazon publishing because of their better ebook royaltyrate. Traditional publishers, it would seem, are going to have to raise their25% ebook royalty to compete with Amazon.

The secondarticle appeared in the NY Times. It starts by announcing that “Amazon willpublish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and ebookform.” “Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors.And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics andagents used to provide.”

Literary agent RichardCurtis is quoted as saying “everyone is afraid of Amazon”. Amazon is offeringauthors the opportunity to cut agents out. One of Amazon’s executives says “theonly really necessary people in the publishing process are now the writer andthe reader”.

I have been thinking thatagents are probably going to have to reinvent themselves if they are going tosurvive into the future.

As for book reviewers(critics) there are thousands of them on the web, but will they disappear fromthe press? I know I have yet to buy a book based solely on its reviews onAmazon, but I do look at them. I am aware that the five star reviews for a bookcould be written by friends or aliases of the author. While the zero starreview might be written by a disgruntled writer who is angry at the world. Inlast week’s blog post I listed books I want for Christmas. I read good reviewsof all the books I wanted in The Age.

The article also said thanan author’s contract with Amazon forbade her discussing its details. This isworrying.

Contagion

While watching Contagion I pondered what viruses theperson who packed the lollies I was eating may have had. The film could make aperson as paranoid about germs as Jawsmade people scared of sharks. I found Contagionengrossing. Its one of those rare films, for me these days, where myattention only briefly wandered.

It’s a story about theoutbreak a flu type virus that kills millions around the world. Stephen Soderberghdirected it and it is very like another movie of his Traffic. The story is told from multiple viewpoints in a ratherunemotional style. But it is deceptively subtle. You need to watch and think.

I left the film wondering ifI had just watched a science fiction film or just a medical thriller. For astory to be classified as science fiction, science has to be essential to theplot. In other words, if the science is taken out, there is no plot. If thescience was taken out of Contagion,then a fair bit of the plot would have gone with it. There would have been nosearch for a vaccine. The film would have been mainly about the civil attemptsto contain the virus, so about a quarter to a third of the film would have gonemissing.

If the film had been sciencefiction, it could have gone the way of the AndromedaStrain and remained mainly in the research labs. I think such a film wouldnot have been as good. I doubt whether Contagionwill be judged as science fiction for the Hugos.

My Writing Efforts

After a lot more research, Ihave all but finished my article on weight loss for people with disabilities.The research has made me feel fat, but at least I now have a lot of informationabout losing that fat. I hope to submit the article to Divine by Wednesday. I only brieflyworked on the short story I am writing.

My Writing Week: Issue 42, Year 4

2011-10-16T21:37:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

If I Had Written Terra Nova…

I am still watching theAmerican made in Australia science-fiction dinosaur series Terra Nova. The last couple of episodes have shown promise, but haveonly just passed being mediocre.

In the last episode a viruscaused memory lose and the scientists trying to stop it forget what they weredoing. This is not exactly an original plot for science-fiction. I quicklyworked out that the main character’s cold virus would kill the amnesia virus, butunfortunately it took the supposedly brilliant doctor a lot longer.

I still don’t like the maincharacters. They are too selfish. The main family has no hesitation puttingtheir comforts ahead of the survival of the settlement; they are a bit likeapprentice Doctor Smiths from Lost inSpace.

Terra Nova’sreal problem is it is trying to be a family drama set in a world of dinosaurs,rather than a science-fiction series.

If I had written Terra Nova, I would have started with themain character’s living their lives in 2140. I would have shown them at workand school and interacting with society. This would have given the characters achance to start behaving like people from the future and not from thenoughties. While they lived their lives, I would have shown the porthole beingdiscovered and then explored, and then how they figured out it was on adifferent time-line. Then I would have shown the first settlers establishing TerraNova.

I think a much more originalseries would have resulted, with more believable characters who I actually careabout.

Christmas Book Wish List.

A few relatives have beenasking what I want for Christmas, so I gave them a list of books to choosefrom:

The Courier’s New Bicycle, Kim Westwood, HarperCollins

The Waterboys, Peter Docker, Freemantle Press

Machine Man,Max Barry, Scribe

Black Glass,Meg Mundell, Scribe

Things we Didn’t See Coming, Steve Amsterdam, Sleepers Publishing

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu, Corvus

Ark, Stephen Baxter, Gollancz

Freedom,Jonathan Franzen, Fourth Estate.

Just about all these choicescome after reading good reviews for them in the Age.

John Carpenter’s The Thing.

In preparation for seeing thenew prequel to The Thing, I once againwatched John Carpenter’s remake of TheThing. For those who don’t know the film: an alien space craft isdiscovered buried in the Artic ice. Its occupant, once thawed, invades humanbodies and mimics their owners. Paranoia quickly takes hold at the Artic baseas one by one they die. It is truly a great science-fiction film.

I am a great fan ofCarpenter’s horror and science fiction films, like Escape From New York, TheFog, Halloween, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, The Princeof Darkness and They Live, even his remake of the Village of the Damned which Wikipedia calls a misfire. Carpenter alsoturned me into a great fan of Kirk Russell.

Reviews suggest the newprequel of The Thing is nowhere nearas good as Carpenter’s version, but how could it be?

Proofreading.

Every now and then I havecause to look over previous posts on this blog and I quickly become ashamed andfrustrated with the number of typos I find. My punctuation and grammar reallyisn’t as bad as some might think when reading my blog. Obviously just editingon screen (up to three times a post) is not working. So I did some research onhow to improve my proofreading.

I could identify with MarkTwain who said:

“You think you are reading proof, whereas you aremerely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes& vacancies but you don't know it, because you are filling them from yourmind as you go along.”

So this week I have decidedthat after an initial edit on the screen, I will print a draft post and checkit on paper (so much for saving paper). I will read the text aloud. I will evenread the text backwards, sentence by sentence as suggested in proofreadingarticles. In the future I also plan to leave a draft post for a day beforeproofreading it. But some typos are sure to still slip through.

And those who read this using Notes on Facebook, therandom removal of spaces between words is caused by Notes, not by my lack ofproofreading. I have notified Facebook of this problem. For a cleanerversion click on the note title until you get to my blog.

My Writing

Last week I did a lot ofresearch for my next Divine article on diets for people with disabilities. Ialso typed a few words closer to finishing rewriting a short story.

My Writing Week: Issue 41, year 4

2011-10-09T21:26:00.001-07:00

Hifrom slightly agitated Graham,

Yahoo’sbrainless menu system.

Idon’t have the patience for inane and illogical website navigation systems. Inever liked Yahoo’s busy look and cumbersome navigation system, and only use Yahoowhen I need to access an online writing group to download a file. I was tryingto access that group today, but Yahoo told me I had to create a profile first. WTF:I already had a profile. I closed the box and tried again, but it repeated itsdemand, so I clicked on create a new profile.

Anew box opened, telling me to add a new email address. Why, so Yahoo could spamme twice? I added a new email address. It then wanted me to add a new alias forusing yahoo groups. When fuckyouyahoo was rejected, I tried grahamclements. Itsaid someone already used that, probably me, and I should choose another aliasbetween 2 and 16 letters. I typed gjc, but it said choose a longer alias, itseems their system can’t count.

Ieventually found an appropriate length alias. And then it asked me to choosewhich profile I wanted to use. The reason it seems for wanting me to create anew profile was so I could choose between them. Unbelievable.

Writer'sContract Terminated After She Self-Publishes.

Hawaiianauthor Kiana Davenport had her contract for a novel with a traditionalpublisher cancelled after they discovered she had recently self-published two shortstory collections. The publisher also demanded she return her $20,000 advance.

Kianahas written a well readblog post about what happened with lots of comments. Most of the commentscondemn the publisher. A lot complain about the Big 6 publishers treatingauthors like serfs.

Eventhough Kiana’s short story collections had been rejected by her publisher andothers, if I had been in Kiana’s situation I would have done the courteousthing and told the publisher I was going to self-publish.

Whycouldn’t the publisher have just told Kiana they were upset and asked her notto do it again? According to the author the publisher had a fear and loathingof Amazon. Perhaps the discussion between the publisher and the author/agent wastoo bitter for them to continue working together. Or perhaps the publisher reallywas just use to treating authors like serfs.

Icouldn’t help thinking the publisher might have had other reasons, legitimateor otherwise, for terminating the contract.

TheBig 6 US Publishers.

AsI don’t have a novel manuscript of publishable quality yet, I am have donelittle research about publishers. I had not heard of the Big6 publishers before reading Kiana’s blog post. I have since done someresearch and the Big 6 are:

Hachette

HarperCollins

Macmillan

Penguin

RandomHouse

Simon& Schuster

Mostof the Big 6 have dozens of publishing imprints. Macmillan owns science fictionpublishers Tor and Orb. Penguin similarly owns Ace and Simon & Schusterdistribute for Baen. As far as I could tell, the evil overlord Rupert Murdoch onlyowns HarperCollins.

Atthe moment most of my interest and research in relation to publishing concernsthe ebook revolution and self-publishing versus traditional publishing.

MyWriting.

Oncemore, I wrote every day last week, but as in previous weeks, I did not write thatmuch. I have just about finished rewriting a short story, which I willhopefully finish this week while starting research for my next couple of DiVine articles.

My Writing Week: Issue 40, Year 4

2011-10-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

Hi from Grumpy Graham,

I felt so tired last week,moody too. I also worried about pains? strains? in the lower back. But I stillmanaged to write a little every day.

I have nearly finished thesecond draft of a short story that has grown from the nice size of 5,000 wordsto an awkward 6,600 words. Perhaps I am enjoying the voice I have created for itsmain character, a curious dog, too much.

I also got into critiquing anovel. I have previously critiqued a now published novel from the same author.

Terra Nova

I am one of the few peoplein the world who wasn’t a producer or writer of the new science fiction seriesTerra Nova. It premiered on Australian TV last night. I think there must havebeen at least ten producers as well as four writers for the first episode.

The series is set near theend of this century in a grimy and overpopulated world. A porthole isdiscovered that can take people back 85 million years. It is a differenttimeline, so they can’t stuff up the future. A settlement is established andhumans get to flee the bleak future to live with the dinosaurs.

The plot for the firstdouble episode had holes wide enough for a herd of dinosaurs to stampede through.The one that really irked me was the fact that the main family consists of acop and a doctor who for some reason had a major compassion and brain fade whendeciding to have a third child. They could only legally have two children. Thismeant that they would have to hide the third child from the authoritiesforever: what a great life for the kid. So I have the parents pegged asarseholes at the moment.

The characters all seem tohave been transported from the 1990’s, not the 2090’s. Apart from the dialoguebeing full of 1990’s clichés, the kids behaved in the same spoilt manner astoday’s kids, not that of kids who have had to live in very austere times wherean orange is a rare and special treat and where authorities seem to ruthlesslytackle law breakers.

Other plot elements includea group of settlers who have broken away from the settlement and a mad missing sonof the settlement’s commander. The son runs around writing predictive equationson rocks.

I thought the dinosaurs beingnear bullet proof was ridiculous. You reckon if they were going to send peopleback to a world full of dinosaurs they would at least take decent weapons,like machine guns with uranium depleted shells that the US army currently uses to shoot up tanks or even a fewrocket launchers.

Unlike Primeval, this seriesseems to be trying to take itself seriously, and if the first episodes areanything to go by, I think it will struggle.

And I really appreciatedChannel Ten putting up graphics telling me an ad break was coming up soon. Itgave me ten or so seconds to decide what to do during the break: perhaps ringup Channel Ten and tell them to piss off the graphics.

Bookshops Closing in the UK.

I have read a number ofarticles in the past few months about the diminishing number of bookshops inthe UK, but none as foreboding as the figures contained in Sept10’s Bookmarks column in the Age. It said that in the past six years 2,000 highstreet bookshops have closed in Britain, leaving 2,178. English authors have 2,000 lessplaces to sell their books and 2,000 less places to promote their books. Onlineshopping and ebooks were blamed for the decline.

My Writing Week: Issue 39, year 4

2011-09-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

Hiall,

Newarticle on Divine: Men’s Sheds.

Ifyou have always wondered what men get up to at a Men’s Shed, I visited one acouple of weeks ago that resulted in an articlefor DiVine magazine.

FixedFacebook Newsfeed

Anyonewho uses facebook would have noticed they have turned the newsfeeds into evenmore of a popularity contest, with the top section dominated by the topstories. I was annoyed as it made it more work to see what all my friends wereup to. So after trying several things like changing the language setting to UKEnglish – this worked for one day – I stumbled on to a solution within the topstories. Here it is:

I highlighted lists on the left hand side of my homepage and clicked on the more that appeared.
I clicked on create a list.
I called my list friends.
I clicked on add friends.
I then clicked on the pictures of all my thousands and thousands of friends.
Now when I log in I make sure I am in the friends’ list newsfeed by clicking on it.

He/sheat the Start of a Sentence.

Onewriting comment that caught my attention last week said that really goodwriters only use he or she to start a sentence three to five times a page.Whether this is true I don’t know, but less repetition can’t be bad. So Icounted the he/she starts in my latest story. Page one: five (hey, I’m a goodwriter, just), page two: twelve (damn, let’s change a few), page three: three(no problems there)… I assume the same goes for using I when writing in firstperson.

DavidHick’s Nominated for Literary Award.

Iwas surprised to read that David Hick’s autobiography, Guantanamo: My Journeywas shortlisted for the non-fiction prize in the QueenslandPremier's Literary Awards.But I wasn't surprised to hear that it didn’twin. Although it is a compelling book, it is not of outstanding literary merit. It is not badly written for someone who didn’t complete high school. I must post my review of it soon.

DiVineArticles: A Breakdown.

Ihad a twelve month contract with DiVinethat ends in a week. In that time I wrote twelve articles. Both of my samplearticles were also used by DiVine. Happily,DiVine and I are keen to continue working together. They pay professionalrates, but the catch for all you writers out there is that you have to have adisability and live in Victoria.

Thefourteen articles I wrote covered: ebooks, writers with disabilities,disabilities in science fiction, dementia, studying online, gardening,recycling televisions, universal remote controls, the Wangaratta Jazz Festival,cataract surgery, and the Wangaratta Men’s Shed. A diverserange of subjects.

Someof the articles were from personal experience, others from research on the web,others were the result of email interviews, and many involved ringing peopleand asking them questions. Only one, on the Men’s Shed, was the result of meattending a venue and personally interviewing people. I am setting myself the challengeto interview in person more often, but face-to-face story opportunities arelimited in the bush.

Ireckon my best article for DiVine was on writerswith disabilities.

MyFiction Writing

Iam still editing my short story, which is unfortunately getting bigger – it isnow 5,600 words, and I am changing plenty of he/she’s.

Includingmy writing of the DiVine article, I wrote every day of last week once again.

My Writing Week: Issue 38, year 4

2011-09-18T23:48:00.000-07:00

Hiall,

Eventhough appointments and gardening ate into my writing time last week, I stillmanaged to do a bit every day. I continued re-writing a short story and startedwork on my next article for Divine magazineon Wangaratta’s Men’s Shed.

Ihad been putting off contacting the Men’s Shed because I wasn’t sure whether itwould work as a story for Divine. In particular, I was concerned whether peoplewith disabilities were welcome at the shed.

Iinitially procrastinated by deciding I needed to get a new camera for pictures for the article. Thesoftware for my two second-hand cameras did not seem to be working anymore.Once I purchased a new camera, I then used the excuse of not knowing exactlywhere the shed was.

Eventhough it was magpie swooping season, I planned to walk out to the shed onfather’s day, visiting my father’s grave on the way. But it rained. That put contactingthe Men’s Shed off for another week as I really could not be bothered going ona long walk on Monday to Saturday. I already swam or did weights and exerciseson those days.

Thenext Sunday it still looked like rain, but I managed to walk out to the Shedwith only a bit of drizzle at one stage. The shed is situated at the Wangaratta sale yards and it took me an hour to get there

Fortunatelyno one was at the shed, probably all at church or hungover, so I took some ratheruninspiring photos of the shed and walked home. I was only swooped by onemagpie, just after I turned to return home, but the weather had given me an excuseto carry an umbrella to ward it off.

Knowingthat I could walk there, my procrastination finally came to an end and I rangand talked to the president of the Men’s Shed last Wednesday. I arranged toattend their “meeting” that day. It was a nice sunny day as I took a bit of ashort cut and followed the railway line out to the shed. Along the way, I cameacross one of the now infamous mud holes under the railway line.

WhenI got to the shed, they told me about all the work they do for people with disabilities– repairing bikes, running camps, making wheelchairs. And then I saw a guidedog that belonged to the vision impaired co-ordinator of the shed.

Theshed had easy access and a toilet for people with disabilities. Some of themembers had even heard about Divine magazine. Needless to say, the WangarattaMen’s Shed was perfect for an article.

Iinitially thought I had too much material to fit into a 500 word article, but Ieasily managed to include all the information in the first draft. Now I justhave to jazz up the writing a bit.

Priceof Ebooks to Rise?

Ithink it might be wishful thinking, but the CEO of the Australian PublishingAssociation, Maree McCaskill, reckons the price of ebooks will increase. In anarticle in the Sunday Age (28/8/2011) she says:

“Companieslike Amazon are designed to exact the best deal for themselves. Australianpublishers have to bargain pretty hard to get the best deal for their authorsand publishers to make money on it. I predict prices will go up because theyuse it as a loss leader to establish a market and it’s not sustainable.”

Ithink she is referring to publishers when she says it is not sustainable,because I am sure Amazon would make a profit even if all the Kindle ebooks wereselling for 99 cents. It is also clear that she is thinking about authors withpublishers selling their ebooks for $2 -$3, not authors without publishers(those who self-publish, and those with traditional publishers who keep orregain their ebook rights).

Readings and Bookish ebooks

TheAge article mentioned how independent retailers like Readings were fightingback by selling ebooks online. I had a second look at Readings just to see theprice they were selling their ebooks, most were more than $9.99. Douglas Adams’Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was atypical $15.99, Amazon had it for their Kindle at $7.99. Embassytown by China Mieville was $21.99 at Readings, it is notavailable at Amazon and $20.49 at the Book Depository. Sabriel by Garth Nix was $15.26 at Readings and $9.99 atAmazon.

Forthe majority of ebooks Readings isn’tanywhere near competitive on price with Amazon. For Readings ebookbusiness to make money they will have to rely on the willingness of Australiansto pay much more, in most cases, for their ebooks. Unfortunately, I don’t thinkmany will. Overseas customers will not pay $15 for an ebook when they can getthe paperback for far less, so I think Reading will get no overseas sales.

My Writing Week: Issue 37 Year 4

2011-09-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

Hiall,

Ifinished the first draft of a short story that I have been slowly plugging awayon for a few weeks. My main character’s voice had evolved by the end of thestory, so I immediately started rewriting it. The story is only 5100 words atthe moment, which is small for me, hopefully it doesn’t get too much bigger.

Iwrote every day of the last week – spending more time writing than the previousweek.

Torchwood

Torchwood:Miracle Day, finished on the weekend. I very much enjoyed it, although theepisodes varied in quality. The first few episodes were all action as thecharacters fought for their lives. There was not a lot of character developmentor back story until midway through the series when we got an episode concentratingon Captain Jack Harkness’ past.

Ifound the episodes that concentrated on Oswald Danes (Bill Pullman) the least enjoyablebecause they did not seem to be moving the plot forward. I also had a hard timeliking Rex, the CIA agent.

Alot of familiar faces from science fiction popped up during the mini-series,Nana Visitor from Deep Space Nine, John de Lancie (Q) from the Star Trekfranchise and Francis Fisher from Eureka.

Thefinal episode satisfactorily brought the mini-series to a conclusion. There wasa final twist, which I think most people would have seen coming.

Torchwoodvs Doctor Who

DoctorWho really pales in comparison to Torchwood. At the moment, Doctor Who generally lacks suspenseas it lurches from problem to solution in quick succession. The most recent episode, Night Terrors, was a tad more suspensefuland had a bit more tension. I was glad it had moved from the “death of thedoctor” story line. As we know the Doctor will not die, so I find no suspensein their continual harking back to him being zapped in the first episode ofthis series.

ThoseEvil…

Readthis quote in an article in the Age GoodWeekend about censoring video games:

“theincreased prevalence of gross forms of wickedness is due to a general poisoning, mental and physical, which fillsthe minds and the veins of its victims with a more deadly venom than we havehitherto known.” This was written in 1869 by US Methodist Reverend J.T Craneand he was referring to novels in general.

AuthorsLosing Contracts Due to Collapsing Retail Market

Accordingto the Bookmarks column in the Age, mid-listAustralian writer Peter Klein had a publishing contract for his next bookcancelled by Pan Macmillan because of insufficient orders to justify a printrun. Two other authors have suffered the same fate. The publishing director atPan Macmillan said that 20 per cent of the market had gone with the closure ofBorders and Angus and Robertson, shops that consolidate mid-list authors. Supermarketsare not interested in writers who sell less than 5000 copies of a book.

Thisis something to consider before buying books online from the UK or US.

My Writing Week: issue 36 of year 4

2011-09-04T20:51:00.001-07:00

Hiall,

Lastweek I wrote every day for the second week in a row. But unlike the week beforewhen it was all non-fiction, last week it was all fiction. I am still notspending anywhere near enough time writing, but some writing is better thannone. Hopefully I can build on last week’s efforts this week.

Ispent a bit of time on other writing relating activities, like setting up agroup’s page on Facebook for this blog.

NewArticle on Divine Magazine

Isubmitted a new article to Divine online magazine last Monday and, much to mysurprise, it was up on the site by Wednesday. That’s two articles for August.

Thenew articleis about why I love gardening. The article is an attempt at a morewhimsical tone. Over the past year’s 13 articles for Divine, I have attempteddifferent styles and tones, from serious informational, to personal accounts oftragedy, to uplifting interview based articles.

BookSales Up in Australia

Anarticle in the Age states that book sales rose 0.4 per cent by volume in 2010,with 66.2 million books sold. The bad news is that the value of those soldbooks dropped by 4.2 per cent. But with those sales not including purchasesfrom Amazon and other overseas vendors like the Book Depository, the number ofbooks purchased by Australians would be much higher.

BookDepository Vs Amazon

Asthe two large online booksellers merged recently, the above heading could beconsidered inappropriate, but there are still differences in price, postage anddelivery time. I recently used the Book Depository for the first time afterdeciding Amazon’s postage costs added too much to the cost of a purchasing asingle book.

Thebook I wanted to buy cost $15.20 on Amazon, but postage pushed that up to $24.95. At the BookDepository, the book cost $20.19, with no charge for postage. The book also arrivedin less than a week, much quicker than the three weeks or more I have waitedfor Amazon to deliver.

Reviewof Under the Dome by Stephen King

Warning,spoilers. Iposted a reviewof Stephen King’s science fiction thriller Under the Dome last week. I didnot want to have spoilers in the review so I did not say that I reckon Kingmight have been having a go at his readers. In the book a dome was placed over theinhabitants of a small town by an alien race so they could be amused at theantics of those trapped inside. But King was inviting his readers to havesimilar voyeuristic intentions by enjoying the carnage wreaked on theinhabitants of the dome. I enjoyed the book, so does that mean I would make agood callous alien?

Review of Stephen King's science fiction epic, Under the Dome

2011-09-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

Under the Dome by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finally finished Under the Dome's 880 pages. What an epic, so much death and destruction, so many arseholes - King certainly enjoys writing about corrupt fools and the fools that follow them.

The novel starts with an invisible force field suddenly enclosing a small town. It traps the local cafe cook, Barbie, an ex-Iraq veteran, as he tries to flee small-town persecution. Barbie then has to deal with the local council, headed by car dealer Jim Rennie. Rennie also happens to be a major drug manufacturer and religious psycho. In real life he would be an ideal Tea Party Candidate. Unknown to Rennie, his son, Junior, is suffering major delusions and has embarked on a murder spree. Much mayhem results.

When I first started reading Under the Dome, I was struck by the distant third person it was written in, partly because I had recently read a lot of books written in first person. The distance that King stands back is a lot like watching a movie, and it did not allow me to really get to know the characters.

But what a cast of characters, it was huge. The story is told from about twenty different character's point of view, usually corrupt arseholes or the people resisting them. The fools that followed only had brief appearances as they were usually lead over cliffs. I can't help but think that King was commenting on the real world ignorance of the American electorate.

I found the novel sagged a bit in the middle. It was foreshadowed that the main character would end up in jail. I waited and waited for this to happen. Once he was in jail, other more interesting characters took over the telling of the story.

It took an awful long time to find out who made the dome and why, but that just added to the suspense - would Barbie and his mates be stopped by Rennie and his lackeys before they have a chance to get rid of the dome.

The novel posses an underlying question, are the novel's readers guilty of the same motivations as the creators of the Dome?

There is a reasonable resolution, but most of the fun is getting there.

Under the Dome is a very enjoyable science-fiction thriller that could make a great big budget mini-series.

View all my reviews

My writing week: Issue 35, year 4

2011-08-28T23:34:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I wrote every day last week. That’s a huge change from recent weeks. But it was all for an article I am writing on gardening for Divine. As the article does not have any fabulous quotes from great interviewees, and does not impart any startling information, its style was all the more important. I ended up writing something a bit more whimsical then my usual writing.

Divine recruitment

Divine online magazine have started a recruitment campaign for Victorian writers with disabilities. The articles you write should have a disability element. I have enjoyed writing for them, and hope to continue to do so.

Still not writing any fiction

Then will I have a good fiction writing week? I haven’t had one in months. Too busy trying to duck the shit life has been throwing at me over the past couple of years.

The pessimist in me is yelling, why the bother. You will probably just start getting into a fiction writing groove and then a gigantic wombat will crap all over you. My optimism is still on an extended holiday. Last I heard, it had been disappeared somewhere in Afghanistan.

But, hopefully this week I can make a start on a fiction writing routine.

99c seems to be the price for ebooks

I have not checked the top 100 Kindle bestsellers since the end of April. This is what I found then:

Fifty-two of the ebooks were $2.99 or less, with 28 at 99c and 12 at $2.99. Twelve were $9.99. There were none priced at $12.99.

When I just checked, only four Kindle ebooks were $2.99. Four were also $1.99, but a whopping 41 were 99c. Twenty were priced between $3 and $7.98. Six were $7.99 and only 22 were more than $8. So 99c is increasingly its lead on a race to the bottom.

And remember, free ebooks have a separate bestseller list. If trends from last year have continued, free ebooks would now probably make up 100 per cent of a combined kindle bestseller list.

My writing week: Issue 34, year 4

2011-08-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I have been debating whether to post anything about my latest health concern. People who still read my blog – which is supposed to be about writing - must be getting sick of me telling them about my latest illness. I know I am. But I have previously felt obliged to mention the illnesses because of the effect they had on my writing, especially my motivation.

Another reason for not mentioning this latest illness is the stigma of it being a lifestyle illness that can be avoided getting off your fat lazy bum. For the past twelve years I have swum three kilometres, three times a week. I lift weights three times a week. I have a set of exercises (push-ups, sit-ups and dumbbell exercises) that I do four times a week. I walk everywhere, including to the main shopping area of Wangaratta (a 5km round trip) four times a week. I also spend a lot of time gardening. But I still was diagnosed as a diabetic a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately exercise couldn’t change my genes; diabetes runs through my family.

An initial blood test a year and a half ago showed my blood sugar was up. At the time I was more concerned with my father’s failing health and my cataract surgery. I made a few changes to my diet and hoped the blood sugar would fall, but the pessimist (realist) in me knew I probably had diabetes. I finally got around to a second blood test a couple of weeks ago.

The unfairness of the illness and its implications only hit home last Monday when I endured a diabetes education session at the local hospital. Since then I have had to test my blood sugar four times a day. My mood has changed according to the rises, plateaus and falls of my blood sugar. I have been experiencing a lot of anger: I really reckon ulcerative colitis and asthma were enough to cope with.

The diagnosis does explain why I have been so tired over the past months. My writing motivation has been shot for months. In other aspects of life I have just seemed to be going through the motions. And the pessimist in me continues to whisper: what next?

So I did absolutely no writing last week.

My challenge now is to try rise above my blood sugar count, outrun my dashes to the toilet and inhale some motivation to write.

Graham Clements.

My writing week: Issue 33, year 4

2011-08-14T21:02:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

I am trying to direct my thoughts towards my next article for Divine magazine. So far I just have a general theme on how gardening can affect the way a person thinks. It may end up being mainly from my perspective, because I am yet to find any local potential interviewees. Hopefully my thoughts and a bit of research on horticultural therapy will be result in an entertaining and worthwhile read.

I reckon that if everyone did a bit of gardening the world would be a better place.

Need an Apostrophe?

I saw a cartoon in the Age last week referring to a debate about the lack of an apostrophe in much of the paraphernalia for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. I am “occasionally” a sloppy punctuator so I went back to see if I had put an apostrophe in the festival’s name in a previous post. I had, but I made the festival exclusive to one writer by labelling it the Melbourne Writer’s Festival.

The festival and I am not alone in misplacing apostrophes. A local pet shop opened with the symmetrical Craig’s Critter’s. After a few months the second apostrophe was painted over. Last week I noticed they had repainted the store and its sign now says Craigs Critters.

My Writing

I am still not doing much writing. I only made time to add a few words to a short story last week.

My writing week: Issue 32, Year 4

2011-08-07T23:47:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Disabilities in Science Fiction.

I have a new article up on Divine about characters with disabilities in science fiction. The ending of the article has changed since its original posting as some emails about last minute revisions went astray.

Rise of the Apes

I saw the prequel to Planet of the Apes on the weekend. I wasn’t expecting it to be very good, especially after Tim Burton’s unneeded remake of the classic original, but it surprised me. It is probably the best science fiction movie since Inception (I know that is not saying much as their have been very few reasonable science fiction movies in the past year or so).

I was expecting the plot to revolve around trained apes revolting, happily the plot was much more original. A scientist’s experiments on apes, with a drug that he hopes will cure brain disorders, has unforeseen consequences (and no, the apes are not let out by a bunch of radical greenies).

The main scientist’s father, played by John Lithgow, has Alzheimer’s. Lithgow’s performance reminded me of some of the sad behaviour of my father who had dementia. If I had seen the movie before I submitted my article about characters with disabilities in science fiction, I would have included him as someone who had an intellectual disability.

The special effects are the best I have seen since District 9. The apes were computer generated and for most of the movie look real. But don’t go to see Rise of the Apes for its special effects, see it for its better than B-grade script.

David Hicks being Ripped Off?

If you haven’t heard, the Commonwealth Director of Public Persecutions has decided to try and take David Hicks’ royalties from his autobiographical Guantanamo: My Journey. I would assume the DPP would also be after any advance Hicks received. I read in the Age that the book has sold 30,000 copies and Hicks has received around $10,000. That works out to be about 33cents a copy. Something is very wrong here. He should have received at least $70,000 at 6-10 percent of the $30 - $50 selling price.

For the record: I have read Guantanamo. It reinforced what I had read in the AGE and seen and heard on the ABC. David Hicks was and never planned to be a terrorist. He never assisted terrorists. He was more a naïve adventurer who became a victim of John Howard’s attempts to appease George W. Bush.

My Writing

I did a bit of writing of a short story.

My writing week: Issue 31, Year 4

2011-07-31T23:36:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

Another week has passed without me overindulging in writing. Everything in moderation they say. Well at least with writing I seem to be getting that right.

Characters with Disabilities in Science Fiction.

I wrote an article for Divine online magazine about characters with disabilities in science fiction. Before I started doing some research I was scratching my head a bit to think of such characters. In the end I discovered/remembered plenty of paraplegics, vision impaired and those with artificial limbs. Not so many hearing impaired and characters with intellectual disabilities. When I wrote the article, word constraints had me cutting out a number of examples.

My article is much more than just a list. It questions the use of technology in relation to characters with disabilities, and I comment on the future of characters with disabilities in science fiction.

Turing Evolved.

I finished reading David Kitson’s excellent self-published ebook, Turing Evolved. I reviewed it in my last post. It’s about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, androids and what it means to be human. The plot really moves along with plenty of action. Only problem with it is that it needs a good edit, but I only occasionally found myself shunted out of the story by its changes in tense and occasional typos.

The download was free. I suggest you download it from Smashwords as there are no paragraph indents in the copy on Amazon. David asks for a donation at the end of the novel. I sent him $8 using paypal. I am prepared to pay $10 for a fully edited ebook.

Melbourne Writers' Festival.

I had a look through the Age Writers' Festival program today and there was nothing that had me wanting to spend three and a half hours travelling to Melbourne. No science fiction that I could see.

So, hopefully, this week it will be back to writing a short story which was progressing nicely last time I did some work on it.

Review of Turing Evolved by David Kitson

2011-07-28T19:22:00.000-07:00

Turing Evolved by David Kitson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A really good read. Full of fresh ideas about artificial intelligence. The central theme is about attempts to create an artificial entity that has free will and makes its own decisions to the benefit of humanity.

The plot revolves around a man who is thrown out of the military after reporting a his comrades for their terrible actions during a virtual simulation. He was a symbiotic pilot of robotic weapons called Demons. He then gets a job helping people come out of long stays in virtual worlds.

He meets and falls for an artificial guardian of mankind called an Angel. The Angel, Rachel, falls in love with him, but Jonathon has trouble with the idea of love between human and machine. The Angels are built by one of his long-term virtual world extractees, Peter.

Meanwhile his ex-comrades try to extract revenge on Jonathon. There is a lot going on in the plot, but all of it revolves around what it is to be human.

There is a twist at the end, which I didn't see coming, but made perfect sense.

The novel is written in first person. It really needs a good edit, but don't let that put you off. David Kitson may also soon have a cleaner version up for download. It is a free ebook.

Why publishers have not taken a chance on Turing Evolved is a mystery to me? Perhaps they prefer safer science fiction with staid old plots.

View all my reviews

My writing week: Issue 30, Year 4

2011-07-24T22:48:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

I have been busy researching an article I am writing about characters with disabilities in science fiction. At first I thought there were very few such characters in science fiction, but just thinking about the subject has prodded my memory. How could I have forgotten John Varley’s brilliant story Persistence of Vision? It is about a commune set up by the deaf and blind. And then there is The Day of the Triffids.

I then recalled a story where an avid reader discovers an intact library after a nuclear war. But then his thick glasses are broken. It turned out to be a Twilight Zone episode.

I am still searching for the name and author of a novella I read years ago where people with disabilities are forced into specially constructed tanks to fight wars. They are viewed as dispensable. I think it was written by an Australian.

My research reminded me that Darth Vader had his arms and legs amputated and replaced with artificial limbs. His raspy voice is because of his burnt lungs. He also helped his son, Luke, join the ranks of people with disabilities by cutting off his hand.

I still haven’t discovered many science fiction characters with cognitive or mental disabilities. That is apart from the Star Trek franchise which is full of characters who could be said to have Asperger’s syndrome – Spock, Seven of Nine, Data, the holographic doctor. And the Dalek’s and Cybermen from Doctor Who who were bred/altered to lack empathy.

If you have any memorable science fiction characters with disabilities, please mention them in the comments section.

I am writing the article for Divine magazine. I was very happy to find out last week that after my contract with them ends in September, I will still be able to submit, and get paid for, articles.

Apart from my research, I added a few words to a short story.

And for those of you who might be wondering: my sister finally got out of hospital after five weeks and has returned to her home. It seems the second nose plug graft has worked.

Graham.

My Writing Week: Issues 28/29, Year 4

2011-07-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post. I’ve been having a break from all things writing, giving the brain a rest from what has been a stressful year.

I watched a lot of science fiction over the past week and a bit, including the last few episodes of the excellent British apocalyptic series Survivors. I also watched the last half dozen episodes of series three of Fringe – very good too, leaving the series in an very interesting position. The last couple of episodes of series four of Doctor Who were only so so. I suppose Doctor Who survived Peter Davidson, I hope it can survive Matt Smith. But then again, I think it has more to do with the absence of writer/producer Russell T Davies.

Speaking of Russell T Davies, the new series of Torchwood, Miracle Day, is fantastic, full of suspense and wit. Two episodes in and we still don’t know why everyone has stopped dying. My bet is on aliens. The third episode of Falling Skies was only average. It looks like Steven Spielberg is involved in another ordinary science fiction series, remember the turkey Seaquest DSV.

I watched a few movies too, including the sequel Wall Street 2 which is set during the GFC. In the movie Gordon Gecko signs copies of his book in Borders, now there is some irony for you.

New Article on Divine – Recycling Televisions

I have a newish article up on Divine on recycling televisions. Regional Victoria, where I live, has just been through the switch off of the analog signal and had the resultant great telly chuck out. Council waste facilities were flooded with old televisions. In the near future manufacturers will take back old television sets and recycle them.

People with Disabilities in Science Fiction

This week, what is left of it anyway, I will concentrate on a new article for Divine. This one is about the portrayal of people with disabilities in Science Fiction – book, television and movies.

My article won’t be just the nice portrayals like Jodie LaForge in Next Gen. There have been some mightily mistreated and evil people with disabilities in science fiction. Gattaca was all about discrimination against those who aren’t perfect. Davros in Doctor Who was the epitome of evil.

I note that there have been a lot of vision impaired and paraplegics in science fiction, not so many manic depressives or hearing impaired.

Any examples of people with disabilities in science fiction would be appreciated.

My Writing Week: Issue 27, Year 4

2011-07-04T00:07:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I am feeling a bit more awake and alive this week. Last week I was recovering from having some teeth removed. I really did not expect to be so weak and giddy. But my hairdresser who is about to have all four wisdom teeth out said she had scheduled two weeks off work to recover.

New Article for Divine Magazine

In between sleeping up to twelve hours a night, I managed to research and write an article on recycling televisions. It seemed the right time to write it too with a lot of things happening with recycling electronic waste. On Thursday the Victoria government announced a new scheme. I did a lot more research for this article than other articles due to me knowing nothing about the subject.

Part of the research included ringing the director of the Product Stewardship Association. My brain haze had me losing my train of thought during the interview. He helpfully asked me to email him questions, but then didn’t get back to me. Just as well one of the organisations involved in implementing product stewardship did email me back with a great quote.

If you want to know what product stewardship is, you’ll have to read my article when it is put up on Divine online magazine soon. Product stewardship will affect how you dispose of your electronic waste in the future.

I also managed to do some writing of a short story last week.

Bookstores, Abbott and Selfish old Murdoch

I’ve been catching up on my newspaper reading and read an article written two weeks ago where the federal Small Business Minister, Nick Sherry, is quoted as saying that bricks and mortar bookstores will be wiped out in five years time. Needless to say Australian bookstore owners disagreed.

If other online bookstores are like Smashwords, who refused to recognise my perfectly OK debit card, maybe Australian bookstores will have less to fear from online competitors.

Apart form online sales, local bookstores are caught in a general drop in consumer confidence in Australia. Much of this drop is due to Tony Abbott and the Murdoch press’s bullshit about how much everything is going to increase in price if a carbon tax is put in place.

I wish Murdoch would do the world a favour and hurry up and die.

The power hungry bastard will probably never realise you can’t take it with you. A lot of the world’s ills can be sheeted back to his media’s self-interested view of the world. So glad the federal government has intervened to stop his successful tender for an overseas Australian broadcast service, we don’t want Asia listening to Murdoch’s distorted view of Australia.

My writing week 4 (26)

2011-06-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

I Survived Another Trip to the Dentist.

The big news of the week is that I seemed to have survived yet another trip to the dentist. This one was to no ordinary dentist, it was to an oral surgeon in Melbourne. I visited him on Friday to have some teeth out. I was particularly concerned bout one wisdom tooth that he had to remove. It had a vicious hook that went very close to a nerve in the bottom jaw. So far so good, I don’t seem to have lost any feeling in my lips or mouth. I got the teeth out in the chair, while awake, saving $2600.

The oral surgeon was adamant that I should be accompanied by someone when I left the surgery. I had originally arranged for my sister to accompany me. But she is currently in hospital dealing with bacterial meningitis. The first operation to stop brain fluid leaking out her nose didn’t work, so she underwent a second operation on Tuesday of last week. We are hopeful that this altered surgery worked.

So I arranged for an Aunty who lives in Melbourne to accompany me to the oral surgeon. She told me about Red Cross cars being available to country people returning from surgery in other locations. I had planned to catch the afternoon train/bus home, but what happened if I had excess bleeding? So after much messing around we arranged for a Red Cross car to drive me home.

On the bus on the way into Melbourne on Friday my Aunty rang, she had had severe pains in the stomach and had been at a hospital most of the night. So she would not be able to accompany me. I wished her well and then waited for calls from the Red Cross and oral surgeon, but they did not come.

My recovery from the ordeal was hampered by my white trash neighbours. They decided to have a party on Friday night. I went next door at ten to ask them to keep it down. They told me it was garage boy’s birthday. I told them I had just had oral surgery and they seemed to agree that the party would not go that late. At 1.30 am I rang the police. Probably just as well I did as the drunken/drugged youths could have gotten out of control. Five minutes after my call the party moved from the backyard back into the garage with the volume of the music turned down.

Successful Ebook Authors Don’t Make that Much Money.

I read an interesting article about author John Locke who has sold over a million downloads of his self-published ebooks. He sells them for 99c. And even with those massive sales, he only gets a return of about $35,000 an enovel. So if one of the most successful enovelists is only getting about half the average yearly wage for his novels, what do the millions of other enovelists get?

Interesting that the author of the article suggests there are two distinct markets, one containing people who buy only ebooks priced around 99c and another group who only buy ebooks at around $9.99. There are a lot of ebooks priced between these values, I wonder how well they sell.

My Goodreads Reading Challenge.

Half way through the year and I am falling behind in my Goodreads challenge of reading a book every fortnight. I have read only eight books so far this year. But I have not helped my chances of achieving the goal by choosing thick epics like Under the Dome by Stephen King.

Still Having Problems with My Broadband.

Problems with my broadband connection continued. So I bought a new modem on Thursday. The link to ISP didn’t drop out for the rest of week, something it had previously been doing up to 20 times a day. But the link still seemed slow.

My Writing.

On the writing front, I started some research for my next article for Divine magazine. This one is about recycling televisions. How have you disposed of old televisions?

I also did a bit of writing of my short story during the few minutes I was not dealing with life.

My writing week (4) 25

2011-06-19T23:20:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

I eventually had a better week last week after a woeful start. I even did some writing towards the end of the week too, starting a new short-story. I am determined that it will be a short story and not turn into a novella or novel. I got the idea for the story when I saw a rainbow (awww shucks).

I am over my cold, yaaaa, so last Wednesday I went for my first swim in 27 days. My pent up annoyance with life must have had something to do with me swimming my best time this year. I find swimming a great stress reliever. I saw the rainbow on the way back from the pool on Friday.

I seemed to have fixed my internet link by replacing the aging cable from computer to phone socket and the filter/splitter. My link to the ISP has not dropped out since.

And Divine magazine has accepted two more article ideas I have, more about them in future posts.

But my sister’s graft to fix brain fluid leaking down her nose seems to have failed over the weekend. Her surgeon has not seen her since bleeding started on the weekend. She had been trying to arrange to be transported back to a Wodonga hospital, but that seems unlikely now.

Different Points Of View

I am reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome. When I started reading it, its distant omnipresent POV really surprised, even disturbed me. Most of the other books I have been reading lately have had a first person POV or a close third person. But it only took a couple of chapters to get into his distant POV.

When I write, I often think I am subconsciously influenced by what I am reading. So it was no surprise that I started writing the rainbow short story with a very distant POV, without even thinking about what POV to use. But a very distant point of view does suit the story I want to write. I don’t want the reader knowing, other than by interpreting his actions and comments, what is going on in the mind of the main character.

Future of Reading

I was reading an article in the Age about children in the digital age which said “the report found that even in an era of widespread electronic-screen exposure, print remained a constant in children’s media diets, although it varied dramatically according to age. About 90 percent of children aged 5-9 spend about an hour each day either reading books to themselves or having them read to them by adults.” So coming generations might not hasten the demise of the print book as much as I have been thinking they will.

Graham.

my writing week (4) 24

2011-06-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Yesterday, a deluge of health issues and other problems felt like it was going to sweep me down a river of despair, into a sea void of hope, filled with sharks that ripped apart... You get the idea. But today, a few dykes have been built to hold back the storm waters.

More about that next week, as this post is about last week. Particularly it is supposed to be about my writing efforts last week. Well, surprise surprise, I actually did some writing on four days last week, which is pretty good when compared to previous weeks.

Of the days I didn't write, one day was spent on a train and bus, escorting my mother down to visit my sister at St Vincents in Melbourne. My sister was getting anti-biotics dripped into her as she waited for an infection to clear so they could operate. They wanted to put a bit of skin grafted from her stomach up her nose to patch a leak. Brain fluid, for lack of a better term, was leaking out her nose. She had the operation on Sunday and it seems to have worked. Yaaa for my sister.

The trip to Melbourne did not help my cold. I was hoping to give it back to the citizens of Melbourne, but they didn't take it. They didn't seem as grumpy as when I first started what is set to become regular visits about a month ago. Perhaps that was because my grumpiness now exceeded theirs.

My sister had volunteered to accompany me to the oral surgeon in a little under two weeks. There is no way she will be able to do that, so I had to find a new volunteer.

My computer started acting up last week. The internet connection kept dropping out. I wondered if it was my wonderful never-cause-a-problem computer or perhaps the modem. Then my thoughts turned to my ISP provider. But what if the aging cable from the phone to the computer was the problem? Or the filter? Or, worse still the telephone line. Perhaps the nick in the cable I caused with the shovel while digging out drain pipes was finally causing problems. All I knew was that it would probably take a slow process of elimination to fix, something I really didn't feel like doing while I was as sick as a half dead dog.

The only good thing about having a cold, is that I have been reading a lot more than usual. I finished reading volume 4 of the Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, which I reviewed in my last post. I have read volumes one to four. Of the lot, volume 2 would be my favourite, followed by volume 1 and then volume 4.

I have been watching Outcast - a British science fiction mini-series, set on a newly colonised planet where everyone speaks with British ascents. So far, it is a lot better than similar attempts, as it is aimed at adults and has lots of dark secrets.

Speaking of adult science fiction, I am looking forward to the new series of Torchwood. It is to be screened on the cable channel BBC TV from July 9. Its premise is that suddenly no one dies anymore on planet earth. The last series of Torchwood was easily the best television science fiction produced that year.

Anyway, it's back to reinforcing the dykes.

Graham Clements.

Review Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Vol 4

2011-06-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

Year's Best Australian Science Fiction And Fantasy 4 by Bill Congreve

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had read all three of the previous volumes of The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Like the previous volumes, volume 4 is an uneven collection with some good stories and some just so so. Unlike the previous volumes this volume did not have one particular story that stood out and shouted, aren't I great.

The best story for me was Richard Harland's horror tale Special Perceptions. It is about a delusional man's decent into madness. It really gave me the creeps and had me checking my own delusions.

As in volume two, Greg Egan had a story, Glory, set in the universe he created in the novel Incandescence. Glory asked the question, will knowledge eventually destroy the universe?

I also enjoyed Rjurik Davidson's science fiction story Domine, more for its style than its substance. The story made me work as I tried to figure out the relationships of the main characters to each other.

Rick Kennett's The Dark and What it Said also succeeded as a scary horror story that kept me guessing.

Most of the fantasy stories left me thinking, so what? Fantasy, especially epic fantasy, struggles in the shorter form. I enjoy fantasy novels, but fantasy short stories tend to be instantly forgotten. They fail to engage me with their simple themes of good versus evil and loyalty.

The best fantasy story in the collection was An Account of An Experiment by Adam Browne, which did explore a few themes like learned traits, and had some originality about it.

So overall, I liked many of the stories, but many of them lacked that something special, like a new idea or a major insight into humanity, that makes a story memorable.

Graham Clements.

View all my reviews

My writing week 4 (23)

2011-06-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I still have a cold. The pharmacist's prediction that the latest batch of antibiotics would fix it in 48 hours has proven wrong. I was talking to an ex-neighbour the other day and he told me his wife had had this seasons "cold" for four weeks. Is it just me, or are colds hanging around a lot longer these days? I do have an autoimmune disease, so perhaps it is just me, and my ex-neighbour's wife. It's been two and a half weeks of lethargy so far. It's becoming depressing.

My sister may be in hospital for three weeks, as she waits for the infection to clear up before they operate on her. She has bacterial meningitis. I am hoping to escort my mother down to Melbourne to see my sister sometime this week. My mum does not feel secure in going by herself.

More on Ebooks

I have fallen behind in my newspaper reading (like everything else) so some of this might be old news. But I read that Charlaine Harris has joined Stephenie Meyer, Stig Larson and James Patterson as million ebook sellers. I was curious to see how much they charged and had a look on Amazon. Most of their ebooks were around the $8 mark. With their newer ebooks being around $10.

Another article in The AGE said that The Book Depository in the UK had a special deal with the Royal Mail, which exempted them from paying postage when they sent books to customers overseas. So it is no wonder they offer free postage. When you consider Amazon does not pay state sales taxes in the US and both don't pay Australia's GST and then they don't have the cost of running physical stores, they really have massive cost savings when compared to Australian bookstores.

The same article said ebook sales were currently only 3% of the Aussie market and expected to rise to 30% within a decade. I wonder where they plucked those figures from.

If more companies like Medibank start offering free Kobo ereaders, than maybe the ebook portion of the book market will be far greater than that in a decade. In the US ebooks are predicted to be 50% of the market in five years by a few people including the head of Sony.

I finished reading Cory Doctorow's polemic YA science fiction novel Little Brother and reviewed it in my last post.

Graham.

Review of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

2011-06-04T23:04:00.000-07:00

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow was a very enthusiastic panelist at Aussiecon4 last year. He tended to appear on panels about the future of writing and publishing, a subject that interested me, so I found myself attending many of the panel discussions he appeared on. As a small tribute to his energy during Aussiecon, I purchased a signed copy of the novel.

The story is set in a near present San Francisco. The novel centers around a 17 year-old geek called Marcus. Marcus enjoys role playing games and computers, but unlike your typical stereotyped geek, he has a social conscience and is prepared to stand up for himself.

The story begins with Marcus and his friends playing a game where clues are left around the city. The group find themselves near the bay bridge when terrorists blow it up. In the aftermath Marcus and his friends are all arrested by the Department of Homeland Security.

Marcus is eventually released into a changed world, where the DHS has imposed a massive security and surveillance crackdown. As a way of getting back at the DHS, Marcus uses his considerable computer skill to battle this crackdown.

The novel is written in first person. It has large "information dumps" about how to set up particular computer systems to combat prying eyes. These sections are almost written in second person as he tells "you" how to do it for yourself.

Cory Doctorow worked for four years for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation so the subject of web censorship is near to his heart. The novel is very much an argument against censorship and surveillance.

I did find the main character just a bit too good, a bit too courageous. But in the end I enjoyed the novel. Little Brother is a young adult novel, but adults will also enjoy reading it.

Cory Doctorow is into free agency on the web, so Little Brother is available for free download. As I found it easier to read on my Kindle, I also downloaded a free version of his novel from his website.

View all my reviews

my writing week (4) 22 The sickee edition

2011-06-02T16:58:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I still have a cold. Doctor has prescribed different antibiotics with a repeat. He gave me a medical certificate until next thursday. But the pharmacist reckons the antibiotics will do the job in 48 hours. I hope so, as I may need to go to Melbourne again on the weekend. My sister has bacterial meningitis and may need to undergo surgery in the next few days. She admitted herself to Albury hospital on Wednesday and was flown to St Vincents in Melbourne last night. She has had the condition before, about a decade ago - brain fluid leaks from the nose - and they fixed her up.

Her health concerns make my my cold and dental issues pretty petty. I will have to get used to going to Melbourne as I have two root canals and two crowns to be done at the dental hospital as well as a couple of other procedures. If I had to pay for it all it would cost about $9000. Of course I could wait the three years for the local dental clinic to do the job, but then I think I would just be getting two teeth removed.

For those who have had root canals, it is best to get a crown plonked on top as root canal doesn't seem to last otherwise. I will need to travel to Melbourne 13 to 17 times over the next few months to get everything done. Well at least I can read on the train.

And finally in this sickee edition, I have a new article up on Divine, this one is about cataract surgery. The surgery is nothing to fear and can drastically improve your eyesight.

I have a suspicion my next article for Divine might be about the dental system. I am getting a lot of first hand experience.

Now its time to go back to bed.

Graham.

My writing week (4) 21

2011-05-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I was supposed to be down in Melbourne for a dental appointment today, but my cold has worsened and I cancelled the appointment. So instead I get to write about my lack of progress in writing last week.

No fiction writing last week, but I did finally finish and submit an article to Divine online magazine. The article basically says cataract surgery is no big deal and the benefits to your eyesight can be astounding. I speak from personal experience and that of a number of relatives. It seems that with my genes I was doomed to have cataracts.

Carol Ryles pointed out a series of blog posts on the future of publishing written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Kristine does a good job of showing that book publishing is not the same as the music industry, so any comparison between the publishing industry and how the music industry has supposedly survived the digital revolution is out of place.

I am a miserable grump when I have a cold. That demeanour would have helped me fit in with the people of Melbourne if I had travelled there today. I hope to have the cold and grumpiness under control by Thursday when I make a trip to Albury to see another oral surgeon.

Graham.

My writing week (4) 20

2011-05-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Amazon set to become world's biggest publisher.

I thought that headline might get a few people reading. Readers of this blog would know that I have said that Amazon, Google and Apple will probably be the biggest publishers of books in the near future. Amazon already sells thousands of self-published titles, and recently launched four publishing businesses.

Amazon Encore will buy underperforming, but well reviewed, books that have already been published and republish them. It will specialise in first time writers.

Montlake Romance will publish digital, physical and audio romance books. In an interview, Jeff Belle, vice president of Amazon Publishing said they will eventually publish books in other genres, including science fiction.

Amazon Crossing will publish English translations of foreign books.

Domino will publish non-fiction books.

So watch out. Amazon might achieve what Rupert Murdoch has tried to achieve, total domination of the publishing industry.

Dentists are cold people

I write this belated post between dental appointments and sneezes. Last Friday, the 13th, I visited an oral surgeon in Melbourne about having some wisdom teeth removed. I then returned to visit the dental hospital in Melbourne, on Monday, to see if they would remove the teeth for free. The dental hospital appointment was only a preliminary meeting, I need to go down next Monday for a more thorough examination.

Meanwhile, my local dentist has done a couple of fillings and the preparatory work for a crown. The work for the crown turned out to be a bit of an ordeal, it took 1 and 3/4 hours. For about an hour of that the dentist had drills and other instruments in my mouth.

Here's a riddle for you, if you are seeing three different dentists/dental organisations, how many will attempt to change the time of your appointment? The answer is: all of them.

It would seem that somewhere along the way, I have caught a cold, which suddenly came on very strongly yesterday. Hope it has weakened by Monday.

So I have done very little writing. I almost got my article on cataract surgery finished last week and that's about it.

Why waiting for appointments and travelling on trains and busses, I did manage to get some reading done. I finished reading Margaret Atwood's brilliant The Year of the Flood, which is a prequel to her Booker short-listed Oryx and Crake. I reviewed it in a post yesterday.

Graham.

Review of The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

2011-05-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A brilliant book which is perfect for the times we live in. It's message is that humanity through action or inaction will destroy itself. The book mainly concentrates on genetic engineering but has society slowly decaying from lack of resources in the background.

I read this novel because it is a prequel to the equally brilliant Oryx and Crake - which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Year of the Flood shows how civilisation collapsed and humanity died out before the story of one of the few survivors begins in Oryx and Crake.

The world is dominated by giant corporations. These corporations are heavily into genetic engineering. There are many genetically engineered animals created in place of the many extinct animals like pandas and platypus. Humans are genetically engineered mainly for aesthetic reasons.

The novel begins after the waterless flood occurs and then takes us back a decade or so earlier to show how the flood happened. The story concentrates on a girl and woman whose end up at an environmental cult called the Gardeners. The Gardeners are vegans who recycle everything. They survive on food grown on a huge rooftop garden and anything they can scavenge.

Ren's mother deserted her father and took her to live with a Gardener. Her story is told from her early teens. Toby's story begins just as she reaches adulthood. She works in a burger joint that sells secret burgers. They are called secret burgers because you never know what their ingredients might include. Toby is rescued from a rapist manager by the Gardeners.

Adam one leads the Gardeners. His sermons connecting the bible and the environment litter the novel. He knows the end is coming. He is trying to teach his fellow gardeners how to survive it.

I found the innocent but quickly learning voice of Ren very believable. Atwood writes he portion of the story in first person. She changes to third person for Toby's tired but stoic voice.

I was continually stopping to marvel at the insights to the world and people in the novel. How humanity has little hope of surviving because of the hoplessness that pervades us doing anything about the huge environmental and social problems that we face. We lack hope of changing so we do nothing to change.

I also found myself laughing a lot. Srcastic and ironic humour flows through the book.

Everyone should read this novel. It shows were our lack of hope could lead.

View all my reviews

My writing week 4 (19)

2011-05-08T23:48:00.000-07:00

Divine Article on Universal Remotes

I have a new article up on Divine about universal remote controls. The article was inspired by the inability of my mother to control a set-top box. The buttons on its remote control were too small for her arthritic fingers to control. She has the same problem with the remote for a Sony DVD recorder. I am hoping that someone who reads the article will suggest a universal remote control that is suitable for her.

Divine Cataract Surgery

If you have cataracts that are interfering with your life, but are too worried about getting them removed, you should have a read of my next article for Divine about cataract surgery. It details my first had experience. Cataracts run in my family. Both grandmothers had problems with them. My mother has had them removed, as have uncles and aunties on both sides of the family.

Source Code

The movie Source Code is nowhere near as good as Inception, but it is better than most of the crap alien invasion and comic book garbage being served up as science fiction lately. Source Code is directed by Ducan Jones, who also directed the Hugo award winning Moon. It’s more of a thriller than action movie. Like Moon, it relies more on story than special effects.

Source Code is set on a train in the near future in Chicago. I will give you no plot details as, like Moon, they will be spoilers.

My Writing

Family visited. Garage boy next door seems to have become garage boys with the accompanying increase in noise. It seems they want a war. I returned fire at their parents this morning. When not thinking up scenarios for future battles, Divine magazine took up my writing time: writing an article and arguing over edits for the other.

Television Misinformation

I could do with a week long drinking session. Numbing the brain would help me forget the misinformation surrounding me. I even got sucked in by the fake pictures of a shot-in-the-head Osama Bin Laden on the telly.

I remember a few years ago hearing about research into television news which showed that it frequently left people less informed than before they viewed it. Last week’s collections of sound and vision bites on the news from ABC, Nine and Seven definitely confirmed this.

Graham.

My writing week 4 (18)

2011-05-01T21:22:00.000-07:00

My Epic Novella, Part 739.

I slaughtered a few of my novella's darlings last week, replacing them with just as many fabulous? ordinary? deplorable? words, so the word count stagnated. But at least I did some work on it.

I want to start researching/interviewing and then writing my next article for Divine magazine this week, but I am determined not to use that as an excuse to neglect the novella.

Divine Article on Cataracts

My next article for Divine magazine is about cataracts. If you have cataracts or have had surgery to remove them, I have a few simple questions for you:

1. Where are/were the cataract/s on your eyes and what effects did/do the cataract/s have?

I had one dead centre of my left eye and had to try and read around it.

2. If you had surgery to remove them, describe your post op vision.

I had surgery on both eyes. I could see a mountain range in the distance for the first time. Black was once again black and not grey. I could see my freckles again.

3. If you didn't have surgery, why?

You can leave your response as a comment or send an email to graham@grahamclements.com

Doctor Who

The thrill of Doctor Who seems to have disappeared with Russell T Davies or perhaps it is just Matt Smith. Being a writer, I prefer to think it has more to do with scripts that are now too fast paced, with no time for tension. I only tuned in out of a sense of duty to watch the first episode of the new season on Saturday. I ended up watching the first fifteen minutes and then recording the rest.

In contrast, I keenly await the return of Fringe on Go next Wednesday. A series full of tense and edgy scripts.

My writing week 4 (17)

2011-04-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

After weeks of doing little writing, except Divine magazine articles, I actually did some editing of my novella last week. Yaaa me. And things are looking good for this week as I have caught up with other activities like gardening and newspaper reading. I still need to strip the rest of the paint off a picket fence and paint it, followed by painting new guttering.

Novella

It is amazing how the plot needed to change in my novella after I substituted an ipad for a newspaper. My main character had been reading a newspaper, but as the story is set about a decade into the future, I decided to give him something more advanced, an ipad. He then needed something to carry it in, so I gave him a backpack.

In the novella he has to make a hasty exit. He had previously just dropped the newspaper and ran, but now he had to try and bundle his ipad into his backpack while lurching for the exit. Those in pursuit catch up with him. Previously they grabbed at his clothing, now they had a backpack to latch on to. The backpack is lost, but when found it provides evidence to back up his alibi. The police had been a lot less believing when he just lost a newspaper.

The novella is now 24,000 words.

Ebooks Seem to be Getting Cheaper

I just checked Amazon Kindle’s top 100 bestseller list for the first time in a couple of months. Fifty-two of the ebooks were $2.99 or less, with 28 at 99c and 12 at $2.99. Twelve were $9.99. There were none priced at $12.99. Last time I checked, twenty were $12.99, six were $7.99, nine were $2.99 and twenty were 99c. No other prices had significant numbers.

Ebooks Most Popular Book Format in US

I have read reports from Amazon that they sell 115 ebooks for every 100 paperbacks, but that was just Amazon. Now, according to Jason Steger’s Bookmarks column in last Saturday’s Age, the Association of American Publishers is reporting that the ebook is the most popular format out of adult hardbacks, paperbacks, mass-market, children and young adult hardbacks and paperbacks.

They AAP says print sales fell 25 per cent in the first two months of this year, while ebook sales jumped 169 per cent. And the full impact of the collapse of Borders in the US is still yet to be felt according to Publisher’s Weekly.

The data continues to suggest that print books will be much rarer in the future, replaced by dirt cheap and free ebooks.

Graham Clements.

My writing week 4 (16)

2011-04-17T23:25:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Global Warming

I’ve been catching up on my newspaper reading and the global warming debate is not going well. Clive Hamilton in last Wednesday’s Age sums it up well:

“What do Australians want? The answer is clear. We want symbols of action but not action itself. We want to hear words that make us fell good about ourselves but none that ask us to make any sacrifice. We care about climate change, but we hate the idea of having to do anything about it.”

Even with my household’s limited resources and income we have tried to decrease our contribution to global warming, while people on much larger incomes do nothing, except whinge. We have installed solar hot water and a rain water tank. We upgraded the gas heater to one with a thermostat. Every light fitting has one of those energy saving light bulbs in it. We grow a lot of our vegetables and fruit. We don’t have a car, instead we walk everywhere.

The only good thing about global warming is it makes it very easy to write about future dystopias as the lack of water, food and land, will inevitably lead to civilisation’s collapse in the next century. Just as well I don’t have any kids to worry about. I wonder what those with children think the future holds for their offspring. Are they ignorant (the science is clear) or just selfish.

Arrhhh Dentist

I spent more time arranging dentist appointments and visiting doctors and medicare to get onto the EPC programme last week. By the end of the week it was all organised. $4250 of my dental costs will receive a rebate of around $2750. For a moment I felt a bit of relief, but then got the quote from the dentist - $6090. There were three crowns instead of one, fortunately one of the crowns is not urgent. So the EPC will cover all the work by my dentist except for that third crown. I still will need to pay an oral surgeon around $2400 for the removal of two wisdom teeth and other tooth.

I have set myself up for a really enjoyable week starting the 10^th of May when the dental works all begins with three fillings. On the 13^th of May (and it is a Friday), I trip down to Melbourne to see an oral surgeon for a consultation. The next Monday I go down to Melbourne to the dental hospital. I am hoping they have an oral surgeon at the training hospital who will extract the wisdom teeth for free or not much more. The next day, it is back to the dentist for the start of the first crown.

Oh the horror, the horror.

In the future dentists will be able to plant stem cells into jaws and grow replacement teeth, which will be protected from plaque by nanomachines. I can’t wait.

Writing

Besides organising all things dental again last week, I spent a bit of time as DIY Graham. The plumbers arrived and laid the new pipes I then filled in the trench, which wasn’t as easy as that sounds because I had to make sure the heavy clay soil got under the pipe and down its sides. I also planted a tree.

The next door neighbour’s son – who lives in the garage – decided that the best time to chop wood for his fire was in the middle of the night. I dragged myself out of bed to inform him that it was not. I suggested he make himself a nice pile of chopped wood during the day. He also woke me up on two other nights with his music. I suggested to him that I might contact the council.

I am wondering whether he is legally able to live in the garage. I remember when I lived in Sydney in a share house that one of my co-occupants was kicked out of his mum’s garage by the council. He was a moron as well.

The combination of tiredness, anguish and other things to do, meant that once again I did very little writing last week.

I have decided to change the title of my blog to: Why I didn’t Write Last Week. The change will be made as soon as I get time…

Graham Clements.

My writing week 4 (15)

2011-04-10T22:58:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I had a bugger of a week last week. It all seemed to be about damage control. I went to the dentist and found out I needed a bit of work. She directed me to an x-ray clinic for a mouth shot. I found out I need to go and see an oral surgeon to get a wisdom tooth and its neighbour pulled. Their roots are too close to a nerve for the dentist to pull.

Just the removal of those two teeth will cost me somewhere between $1500 and $2000. I also need a root canal ($1500) and a cap on a front tooth ($1450) and some other things done. All up the initial bill was around $6,000. As I am trying to survive on a part-time writing job and newstart, I don’t have that sort of money lying around.

But by the end of the week, it looked like I can get onto a special medicare programme for those with chronic illnesses (like my ulcerative colitis). It pays up to $4650 over two years. My GP says I am eligible and is currently, I hope, doing the paperwork.

I’ve made appointments for consultations with two oral surgeons – even the consultation will cost, after a medicare rebate, $70 and one of those consultations will involve a trip to Melbourne.

The need for the dental work is partly my fault and that of the previous dentist. Seems he was cheap because of the quality of his work. Lots of his ex-patients are now getting their fillings replaced. I was stunned when a 12-14 year old entered the waiting room and said he had to have three fillings replaced. I only went to see that dentist because he took over the surgery from the previous one.

I said my fault too. I did not get my teeth cleaned last time I saw that dentist a year and a bit ago. It was in the middle of getting my cataracts removed and placing my dad into a nursing home. I was somewhat distracted. And of course I could have done a better job cleaning my teeth.

While arranging and doing many things dental, we found out the drain pipe down one side of the house were clogged with tree roots. So water from the roof was just flowing under the house. Not wanting the house’s stumps to rot, we had arranged to get the drain pipe replaced. To save money I have the dug the pipe up. It was full of cavities. I just finished digging it out this morning.

Universal Remote Controls Article

I just submitted another article to Divine. This one is on universal remote controls. You know I could not find anyone who had tested remote controls for use by people with disabilities. Remotes are hard enough for people to use who are able-bodied, but imagine you have motor control issues, like arthritis, or poor vision.

Self Publishing Ebooks

In promoting my latest article on Divine about self-publishing ebooks, I got into a debate on one of the writing sites I frequent, where an article on Salon by Laura Miller was mentioned. That article epitomises the reasons for and against self-publishing ebooks. And it has a lot to do with marketing.

The article mentioned Angela Hocking, who is now an ebook self-publishing millionaire, has just signed a traditional publishing contract. She is happy that she won’t now have to spend all her time marketing. While Barry Eisler knocked back a half-million dollar contract from his publishers for two new books because he wants to self-publish them. Part of his reason is he didn’t like the marketing his publisher had done on his previous books.

Other Writing

At the end of last week I actually did some editing of the much neglected novella. But then while taking a walk I thought of a great idea for a story. It might distract me further from the novella.

My writing week 4 (14)

2011-04-05T22:05:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Last week was one stressed out week, but compared to how this week has started it was like sitting in front of the telly watching a Red Dwarf marathon with a keg of beer.

One good thing has happened in the last couple of days, I have a new article up on Divine about self-publishing ebooks. It contains a warning that authors should not expect to make any money out of selling ebooks.

Hopefully I will make time to finish an article on universal remotes that I was supposed to finish last week.

No editing of novella, little reading, just one moment of stress after the other. I am definitely on a roll.

Graham.

My writing week 4 (13)

2011-03-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

My computer behaved itself all last week. That’s nearly two weeks without a problem. Was a clean with canned air all it needed? Or have the lower temperatures meant that it has stopped overheating? Or did a test that said it had repaired something have a positive effect? Who knows.

The fact that my computer didn’t play up meant that I had time to do some writing and stop worrying about a computer shutdown losing the sentence that might have begun the paragraph that would have expanded into a Hugo award winning novel.

Wrote an article on Universal Remote Controls

After doing a lot of research on universal remote controls, including fiddling with one, I wrote my next Divine article. I now just need to polish the article before submitting it, hopefully this week.

I also wrote down lots of notes for my next two articles. At the moment, every time I start to worry about running out of ideas I quickly think up two or three.

I even did some editing of my novella. Perhaps this week will be the week I get stuck into it. Yeah, well, you can only hope.

My Copy of Datura Highway Arrived

I rescued a copy of Datura Highway from the letterbox: the postie had bent it to fit in. What a philistine. Obviously has no concept of the value of books.

I had critiqued Datura Highway for Daniel King and I am acknowledged in the acknowledgements.

The cover looks a lot better than it does on the web. Not that it was a bad cover, it just looks more alive.

Datura Highway is a fantasy thriller. I have written a review for it on Amazon.

Read Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson

I finished reading a horror novel by Australian Trent Jamieson called Death Most Definite. It’s set in Brisbane and is a great read. I posted a review of it today. I will definitely be buying its sequel.

Graham.

Review of Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson

2011-03-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Set in Brisbane (where I lived for five years so I was familiar with much of the settings), it's a horror novel with some wit. The reluctant hero Steve is a "pomp". The souls of the recently departed must pass through a pomp to travel to the afterlife. The trouble is, someone is killing all of Australia's pomps. What is worse, stirrers (angry murderess souls) are jumping into the bodies of anyone who dies and causing havoc.

With the aid of the soul of a beautiful recently killed pomp, Steve has to discover who is killing the pomps and why, while preventing the stirrers from causing regional armageddon.

The novel is told in the first person, which I found refreshing. It is also full of witty dialogue. The world that the author has created is thoroughly believable. Tension is maintained throughout the novel which rarely has a quiet moment. And the novel reaches a very satisfying conclusion. It is not a nasty horror story, it is one told with a positive brightness. If you liked the television series Dead Like Me, you will probably like this.

A very enjoyable read. I will be buying the sequel.

Graham Clements.

View all my reviews

My writing week 4 (12)

2011-03-20T22:25:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

My Computer Works

After numerous tantrums the previous week, my computer behaved. Not once did it shutdown or freeze or beep or flash a blue screen error message. I ran it with the cover off most of the week as I waited to see if the fans weren’t operating when the above problems occurred, but you know what they say about a watched pot.

The beeping from the previous week indicated that the computer had a ram problem. So at the start of last week I decided to get some more ram. My computer has 2GB of ram which can be upgraded to 4GB. I placed an order with PC Sanity: one of its computer techs is a friend on facebook. He emailed an invoice to pay before the ram would be sent.

But my computer refused to open the invoice. The invoice was in Excel, and my Office XP version could not read it. I sent an email to Jeff at PC Sanity and he said I needed to get my Office updated. Right, all those computer recoveries I had done in the past few months had removed all the Office updates. So I updated it. Took a few hours, and I then could access the excel invoice.

But I found out that PC Sanity wanted me to transfer the payment to their account. I walked down to the bank. They said that it was hard for them to make the transfer and they could not guarantee its success. They told me I would be better off doing it myself over the internet. But I didn’t have internet banking. They signed me up.

It was Thursday and my computer had continued to behave like someone who had its internal organs exposed: following the surgeon’s instructions exactly. I did use the on Friday, too busy doing other stuff.

On Saturday I picked up my ordered canned air from Dicksmiths. I used it to blow dust around the inside of the computer. I then tempted fate by putting the cover back on. The computer still worked. It worked on Sunday. It has worked so far today. So I am now having second thoughts about buying ram. (Sorry Jeff – but the computer will probably crash tomorrow and when I get it going again I will be promptly paying the invoice).

Slack Week

I had the house to myself most of last week and a sore right elbow was telling me to take a break from my exercise program, so I decided to take a holiday from everything. I watched a few DVD’s – really enjoyed The Box, which was directed by the guy who directed Donnie Darko.

Next Divine Article: Universal Big Button Remote Controls

The only writing activity I did last week was exchange a few emails with my editor about my next article about universal big button remote controls. If you have used one, please leave a comment about what you thought of it. My mum who has arthritis needs one.

Graham.

My stuffing around with the computer week 4 (11)

2011-03-13T21:14:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Last week was consumed by computer problems. I finally got to the stage where I rang up a computer repair guy, but he couldn’t visit until this Thursday. I want someone to visit rather than lose the computer to a computer repair shop for months.. The fact that the computer will work for days or months without a problem has made me reluctant to send it for repair too. Sometimes I wish the thing would just go bang.

I have found the onscreen manual that came with the computer totally useless as I search for some definitive test that tells me what the problem is. Every test I have put the computer through has said it is fine.

An online search said the computer might be overheating due to dirt and faulty fans. I pulled the cover off and blew some dust around. I then turned it on, and it worked perfectly for two days.

But on Saturday morning I turned it on and it started beeping at me. By then I had finally located a list of what the beeps meant. The beeps indicated there was a problem with the ram. While I counted the beeps, the computer did something different: it went to a blue screen that gave me the option of running a series of hardware tests. I told it to run the tests, but again they said the computer’s hardware was perfectly okay. The test did repair a fault in the startup process. So maybe that was all it was. I would be a fool to hope so.

Saturday was also a very humid morning, so I thought the computer might have overheated. I pulled the cover off the computer and while coverless turned it back on. The only two fans I could see were spinning. I could feel air coming out of two other vents were I assume there were hidden fans.

The fact that my computer can work for days, sometimes months without playing up indicates that some change must occur (unless the computer has a random problem chip that turns on just after the warranty period ends). The temperature is one thing that is always fluctuating in Wangaratta. The computer problems started in November when Wangaratta started experiencing a lot of humidity. We have had an unusually humid summer.

Sometimes I leave the door of my writing room open, sometimes I have a fan on, sometimes the airconditioner on. It is generally more humid in the afternoon. Unfortunately, until now, I haven’t been taking note of the weather conditions when the computer plays up. Perhaps overheating is the problem.

A detailed list of instructions on how to clean the computer on the HP site said to use canned air. I could find none in all of Wangaratta. I ordered some at Dicksmiths. When it arrives I will give the computer a proper clean.

But I can see why people give up on a computer and just buy a new one.

I was thinking of buying a laptop to use while my desktop is getting fixed. I then would also have some portable computing. But what if the desktop can’t be fixed? I don’t think laptops are great for writers to use all the time. The smaller screens can cause eyestrain and the compressed keypad can cause wrist problems. I read in the Age that younger users are reporting all sorts of back problems from using laptops. So if I get a replacement computer, it won’t be a laptop and it definitely won’t be a Compaq or any other form of Hewlett Packard computer.

So I did no writing last week, just stuffed around with the computer.

Graham.

My writing week 4 (10)

2011-03-08T19:51:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

New Article Submitted to Divine.

I finally submitted my a new article for Divine online magazine at the beginning of this week. The article was originally going to be about the effects of ebooks on the publishing industry, but I had an awful lot of information that was not going to fit into a 500 word article. So I decided to narrow it down.

I figured that most people don’t care about agents or publishers or even booksellers for that matter, but they might care about the author. As well, the effect ebooks will have on the publishing industry as a whole is still very unclear, with many publishers adopting the “she’ll be right” attitude. But the effects ebooks will have on self-publishing are more evident. So the article ended up being about the effect self-publishing ebooks will have on authors.

This is the second article about ebooks I have written for Divine. The first article was about how ereaders make it easier for people with a disability to read. Hopefully the new article will be up soon.

Talking about Ebooks

Very surprised to read, in Jason Steger’s Bookmarks column in Saturday’s Age, that Penguin is selling a lot of ebooks. They account for 6% of Penguins sales worldwide. I would have thought their customer base would have been desperately holding onto buying print editions. But perhaps a lot of children use ereaders to read Penguin texts for school.

Computer Problems

My computer has been playing up. Freezing, restarting, beeping, black screen, error messages, streaks across the screen. I did a full recovery yesterday, but it still froze twice and then beeped at me this morning. I found a way to stop it beeping, pick it up a few inches and drop it. I think, I hope, please….that the problem this morning was due to not installing updates for the computer’s hardware, which I have now done.

The cause of the original problems was probably me ignoring the advice of a Hewlett Packard customer service officer by downloading some windows updates.

I am thinking of buying a laptop. Any suggestions would be appreciated. It’s not so much not wanting to, it’s more of a fear of buying a piece of crap that lasts only three weeks.

Guantanamo

I finished reading Guantanamo by David Hicks last week. I had remarked in an earlier blog post how it seemed too well written for someone who didn’t get to year 10 at school. Well it turns out he studied year eleven while at Guantanamo and while there he also wrote two novels. He came across as a reasonably intelligent and curious, but very naïve (although he was only about 21 when captured), person.

He was bashed, drugged, starved, tortured, subject to constant surveillance, for over five years. All for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Reading his book confirms what I had read in the Age, that he was a sacrificed to make Howard look good with George Bush. What an absolute scumbag Howard is. He deserves to be jailed.

In the end, of about 800 of the “worst of the worst” that were sent to Guantanamo only 35 are still there or have been put on trial. I will write a review of the book soon.

My Writing

Computer problems, Divine article, still the occasional asthma attack, so only a bit of editing of the novella last week. Will more computer problems wreck any writing opportunities this week?

Graham.

Review of Datura Highway

2011-03-06T21:05:00.000-08:00

Datura Highway by Daniel King

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Daniel King has written an exciting fantasy/psychological thriller that kept me guessing - and hoping - until the very end. It's a novel with an original plot, which is hard to do these days.

It begins with the main character, Daniel, finding himself in a huge warehouse full of symbolic statues, and not quite knowing how he got there. The only information he has is a list of vague unrelated items in one of his coat pockets. In another pocket he finds a alien looking weapon. He vaguely recalls he was investigating a murder.

As he starts to search his surroundings he runs into Mimi, a school teacher who doesn't mind smoking cannabis. Perhaps that explains her slightly odd behavior. More through luck than detective work they begin to progress through what appears to be some sort of weird test.

I loved the world-building in this novel. The world is totally strange, not in an over the top way, but in a what the hell is going on way. I loved the challenge of trying to figure out what the items on the piece of paper meant before they were revealed. I hoped the murder would be solved without Daniel having to kill Mimi.

I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys a good mystery that goes somewhere different, you may find your comfort zone slightly stretched. It is a very good read.

View all my reviews

My writing week 4 (9)

2011-02-27T20:06:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

I had a busy week last week with a few things happening on the writing front.

New article on Divine.

My article on writer’s with disabilities was posted on Divine. The article features multi-award winning Australian science fiction author KA Bedford. I also interviewed Karen Tyrrell for the article, a writer who I think is very close to joining the ranks of those with a published book. The article is the largest I have written for Divine and its responses indicate it is one of my best.

Acknowledged in Daniel King’s new novel Datura Highway.

Last year I critiqued a terrific manuscript, Datura Highway, for Daniel King. The novel has just been published by Vexil Publishing and is available on Amazon. I did not expect the very nice acknowledge of myself he placed in the novel.

Datura Highway is a fantasy/science fiction/mystery novel. It begins with the main character in a very strange building full of statues. He doesn’t know how he got there, but finds a list of obscure clues in one of his pockets. As he travels through the huge building, the meaning of the clues, and the twists they entail, become apparent.

I enjoyed the story’s fast pace, symbolism and freshness. It kept me guessing until the end. I would recommend the novel to anybody who enjoys a good mystery, especially those who are into speculative fiction. I intend to post a review in the coming days.

My writing.

I did not write much last week. Asthma, at least I hope that is all it is, continued its assault over much of the week. I blame the humidity and constantly changing Wangaratta weather. Perhaps increased pollen in the air, due to more growth because of more rain, has something to do with it. My early morning swims in the coolish outdoor pool might be part of the problem too.

I also had a few appointments that decreased my writing time on most days.

I had planned to get stuck into my next article for Divine. It is about how ebooks might affect the publishing industry, particularly in Australia. I already have a lot of information to whittle down for a 500 word article.

So it looks like my rewriting/editing of my novella will, once more, not progress far this week.

My writing week 4 (8)

2011-02-20T19:30:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

If you haven’t heard yet, Angus and Robertson and Borders were placed into voluntary administration last Thursday. There stores are expected to continue trading as normal. There are 103 stores Angus and Robertson stores. Sixty-one franchises should not be affected. Borders has 26 stores.

We don’t have an Angus and Robertson or Borders in Wangaratta so it won’t effect my book buying. I have never been into a Borders, but had thought of them as a big American company who probably would not promote Australian authors as much as an Australian owned bookstore would. A Reading’s customer, in one of the Age articles, described Borders as a two dollar shop, making it even less likely that I would venture into them.

But it is a shame to hear that Angus and Robertson is in trouble.

Online sales were not the cause.

Online sales might have had a slight influence on Borders and Angus and Roberston’s problems, but economic analysts are saying the major cause was their owner REDgroup’s debt.

According to Age analyst Michael Evans “the private equity owners of REDgroup Retail, Pacific Equity Partners, had a simple plan – bulk up its existing bookstore business by buying a fresh revenue stream in Borders, strip out costs from overlap, then flog the combined business to the public in a float”.

Other booksellers also blame poor management and business models. Chris Redfern, who owns a bookstore in Albert Park, is quoted saying Borders had “appalling management, hopeless customer service and a poor range of books”.

Author Richard Flanagan was scathing in his opinion piece on the retailer’s troubles. He said REDgroup was “overly indebted, seeking to make up the growing difference between its mounting debt burden and its more humble income by using its businesses to fleece customers and suppliers”. He gave as an example the attempt to charge publishers up to $20,000 for shelf space.

He said, “while REDgroup's chairman, Steven Cain is now telling the federal government the company's failure is in part because of the government's decision not to open up the book market to parallel importation and thus, supposedly, cheaper books, that didn't stop the company routinely charging above recommended retail prices for its books. If it was worried about retail pricing, it wasn't reflected in its own pricing structure”.

REDgroup’s troubles are bad news for authors.

Flanagan saw the demise of Borders and Angus and Robertson as bad news for the Australian Publishing industry, saying it will cause many large publishers to “continue the process already begun of sacking staff and slashing their Australian lists, telling authors that despite their promise or their record that the market has vanished. To survive they will concentrate ever more on the books stocked by the discount department stores - Kmart, Big W and the like: celebrity titles, overseas mass-market hits, cookbooks”.

Some good news in the book retail world.

John Manigan reported in an article in Sunday’s Age that Melbourne’s Little Bookroom opened a new branch on Friday. It specialises in children’s books. One advantage the owners of the Little Bookroom think they have over online booksellers is that a parent can come in to their store and ask well informed staff what book is suitable for a certain age group. Expert knowledge is seen as a major advantage for small independent stores.

I have begun to worry over the past few years that most bookstores in Australia will close because of online trading, but as REDgroup’s debt seems to be the cause of Borders and Angus and Roberston’s problems, I can still hope that not all Australian bookstore owners are in similar financial trouble. I can’t blame their closure on online sales or ebooks.

My writing efforts last week.

In between reading many articles about Borders and Angus and Robertson, I did manage to do some editing/rewriting of my novella. I actually progressed further into the novella too. But this week I will be spending some time gathering all the information together for my next Divine article on how ebooks might affect the publishing industry. If you’re a publisher, feel free to send your thoughts to graham@grahamclements.com.

My article about authors with a disability, featuring interviews with multi-award winning science fiction author KA Bedford and very close to being published writer Karen Tyrrell, should be up on the Divine website this Thursday.

Graham.

My writing week 4 (7)

2011-02-13T20:30:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

I hand no excuses last week for not writing. Well maybe. The humidity and constant temperature changes set my asthma off so I was feeling a bit run down most of the week. Still, after submitting my latest article to Divine on Monday, I had plenty of time to spend editing my novella.

But I can’t seem to edit; I just end up rewriting, changing nearly every word I wrote. I spent a fair bit of time on the novella last week, compared to previous weeks anyway, and ended at nearly the same place. I find myself checking what I rewrote the previous day and revising that and going back to the start to see how it flows since I made all those changes, and then rewriting that. So I am not getting anywhere.

But I don’t spend anywhere near enough time writing. When I do, I usually start getting involved right at the time I know I have to stop and do something more important. The task is always greener.

Goal Setting: Who Needs It?

I keep on reading blog posts about articles on goal setting and committing to writing, but I usually loose interest in reading them, because most of them are just repeating common sense.

Many of them stress the need to make writing your number one priority. But I have a few other number ones. Family. Exercise. Staying informed – a must, I think, for a science fiction writer. How else am I to theorise on future trends if I have no idea what the current situation is? And what about reading? But there do seem to be a lot of writers who don’t read much, especially the wannabes.

Why I Want to Write.

A few of the articles on writing goals suggest writing a list of why writing is important. Well here goes.

1. It gives me an interest.

Shit I better come up with some more essential than that.

2. I want to learn, to grow, to think, to use my brain.

There are many other ways I could do that.

3. I want to influence the way people think.

Come on, say it: I want to change the world.

4. I want to tell an original story.

That appears to be bloody hard to do.

5. I want to leave the reader with a lasting thought or idea.

I read too many stories that are like most action movies: forgotten the minute I leave the cinema. When looking through my bookshelves I see titles that I know I enjoyed reading, but have absolutely no idea what they were about.

I have no thoughts about becoming famous, and rarely think about being published. The ebook revolution is going to make becoming a published author mighty hard for the foreseeable future, unless I choose to self-publish a free ebook. This might have my sub-conscious asking: what is the point writing if no one will ever get the opportunity to read my stories?

6. Obviously it is important that I get paid for my writing.

I am currently paid, very good rates, to write an article a month for Divine magazine. Perhaps that has diminished some of my need to be paid for written fiction. Maybe in October when my contract expires, the desire to be paid might lead to increased motivation.

At the moment I just want to complete one of the various stories/novels I have written and get a positive response from at least a few people who read it.

A timeline to complete a novel or story might be handy, but recent experience has shown that any plans I make are usually totally smashed by other things in my life. So I am currently reluctant to make plans. I prefer to just wander along and hope one day I finally finish a story.

Who knows, maybe I am just in throes of deciding whether to just give up. Maybe my subconscious has decided it is all too hard to succeed or maybe I am just losing interest in writing fiction. But then I will be out walking, checking out how much the creek’s waters have risen in the past few days, and suddenly ideas and descriptions and sentences will come flooding into my head. Some of these thoughts will be for Divine articles, but others will be about the stories I am writing. I am particularly excited when they are about my novella. So there is a part of me that definitely wants to write.

This week I hope (I typed plan, but then deleted it) to write more.

Graham.

Review of Years Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume 2

2011-02-09T20:57:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

This is the best of the three volumes I have read in the Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy. I had thought volume one (2005) was good, but that was mostly based on the stunning first story, Singing My Sister Down by Margo Lanagan. I felt a bit let down by volume three (2007), with its depressing concentration on death as a theme. Volume two (2006) is easily the best.

I liked most of the stories in volume two. I didn't find myself thinking: what was that all about? Or more depressingly, not another good versus evil sword and sorcery story. What's more important, I actually remembered what some of the stories were about days after reading them. The two standout stories were the two novellas. The shorter the story the less likely it will have an impact on me. Speculative fiction stories need to be long so the author has time for world building. So novellas generally appeal more to me than stories under 5,000 words.

Greg Egan's Riding the Crocodile tells of attempts by near immortals to challenge themselves by making contact with the mysterious Aloof at the centre of the galaxy. This novella was part of the background for Egan's novel Incandesence published a couple of years later. I have read that novel and I found it a hard, but rewarding read because of its ideas. This novella is a lot easier read, it doesn't require a physics degree to understand the concepts, but it still explores many science and morality based ideas.

The other novella was Dirk Flinthart's The Red Priest Homecoming. It's a sword and sorcery tale that doesn't suck. Why, because it's not about some novice becoming the prophetised saviour of mankind. No, it tells a tale from the point of view of a naive totally unmagical, totally unwarrior like young man, who finds out that his family have been infiltrated by sinister beings. He is more of an observer than a hero. He finds his preconceptions of others drastically changed by the end of the story.

Of the shorter stories I particularly liked Skien Dogs by Leanne Frahm. It's about dogs that have been upgraded to the intelligence of humans, but as a side effect they both have cancer tumours. I knew a twist was coming, but went the wrong way in thinking, so I was surprised by it.

I enjoyed Stephen Dedman's Watch short story about a man trying not to be the last to die just before midnight. It had a killer twist at the end. Martin Living's Running, which has thrill seekers try to outrun one hell of a destructive monster was also a standout.

Volume two has me looking forward to reading volume four, which is waiting on my shelves to read.

View all my reviews

My writing week 4 (6)

2011-02-06T20:12:00.001-08:00

Hi all,

Authors with disability article submitted to Divine.

I’ve just submitted another article to Divine online magazine. This one is about authors with disabilities and features great responses from interviews I did with KA Bedford and Karen Tyrrell.

I had a bit of trouble verifying some of the information I had originally included in the article, especially in regards to whether some famous writers had epilepsy. Epilepsy sites were claiming Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe as epileptics, but I could not find any original biographical source to back that up.

It appears they claimed Charles Dickens because of his great descriptions of epileptic characters, but perhaps someone close to him had epilepsy. Lewis Carroll seems to have been included for similar reasons, especially some of the scenes in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There’s argument that Edgar Allen Poe could have just been suffering from the effects of too much booze. And Agatha Christie’s private life, was very private. As a result, I removed any reference to epileptic authors from my article.

Hopefully the Divine article will be up in the next couple of weeks.

Amazon ebook sales larger than paperback sales

Amazon announced on the 27^th of January that for every 100 paperbacks sold it sells 115 ebooks. It also sells three times as many ebooks as hardbacks. But when paperbacks and hardback sales are combined, they still outdo ebook sales. The figures don’t include downloads of the millions of free ebooks available on its site. If they were, I think overall ebook downloads would have been considerably more than sales of print books.

I have neglected my novella over the past few weeks, something I plan to rectify this week.

Graham.

My Writing Week 4 (5)

2011-02-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

I am a bit late this week with my post. When it hasn't been too hot to write, I have been working on an article for Divine.

Where Have All The Free Ebook Gone?

I had my first look at the Amazon Kindle ebook bestseller list on Tuesday and found no free ebooks in the top 100. Had consumers finally decided there is no such thing as a free lunch and, rather than contribute to the destruction of the publishing industry and author incomes, decided to pay for all their ebooks? I don’t think so. There are still thousands of free ebooks on Amazon. What has happened, it seems, is that Amazon no longer lists free ebooks in the bestselling lists.

Why have they done this? Is it because a free ebook is not “sold”, just downloaded, and therefore it can’t be a bestseller? Or is it because Amazon wants to hide the dominance of free ebooks? Or is their some other reason.

I have been checking the top 100 bestselling ebooks about once a month for the past year and over that time the number of free ebooks in the list went from about a third to half. So by the end of this year, free ebooks could have made up two-thirds or more of the bestsellers. Amazon would not be making any money out of two-thirds of its bestselling ebooks, did it want to hide this fact from its shareholders? Or perhaps they were worried that consumers who looked at a bestselling list that included so may free ebooks would think why should I ever pay for them.

The new free on the bestselling list is 99 cents, with 23 of the top 100 at that price. To me, charging 99 cents is like saying, I’m not sure my ebook is good enough for someone to actually pay me for it. There were 13 ebooks priced from a dollar to $2.98. At the ebook guru recommended price of $2.99 there were 11. From $3-4.99 there were seven. From $5-$7.99 there were 18. From $8 to $8.99 there were 5 and at $9 and over there were a massive 21. One price was unknown (not available in Aust) and another was 95 cents.

Ebooks Now Available Through Readings.

Yes, you have read right, the Melbourne institution Readings bookstore is now selling ebooks online. Be warned the website is annoying to navigate with many deadends. They are selling a very limited number of ebooks from publishers like Text Publishing. They are using Monocle, open source software, so anyone with a web browser can read the ebooks. If your ereader doesn’t have a web browser, you wont be able to read their ebooks.

I was amazed at the prices that Readings were charging, they averaged around $15 per ebook. How much of the $15 would the publisher and then the author get? I will be interested to see if they bring the prices down so they can compete with Amazon.

Lack of Sleep Limited Writing.

It uncomfortably hot for sleeping last week and it didn’t help when Garage Boy decided to play his doff doff music until three in the morning. It was at that level where it was just discernable over the noise of my air conditioner. On another night I might have been able to ignore it and fallen to sleep. But not that night. I found earplugs and my white noise CD useless against the bass noise. I turned end to end in bed so my head was not next to the window. I told myself to ignore the noise, it was the heat keeping me awake.

I ended up going outside and screaming something like: I would like to get some sleep tonight, so will you turn the fucken bass down or put some headphones on you stupid little prick. The music went off. He has kept it down for the past week too. I have previously tried to reason with him, but abusive yelling seems to be the only thing that works.

Graham.

Review of Cat's Cradle

2011-01-24T22:16:00.000-08:00

Kurt Vonnegut certainly has his own quirky writing style, a really warped view of reality. I would say Cat's Cradle is less in touch with reality than Slaughterhouse Five. Cat's Cradle is written in a tone amused at the strangeness of human beings and the way they interact with the world. Unfortunately, I was never quite sure whether I am getting the joke. Still I found the antics of the naive world-weary main character irresistible.

The story begins with a writer, simply called John, wanting to write a book about how those close to one of the inventors of the atomic bomb, Felix Hoenikker, felt on the day it was dropped on Hiroshima. He interviews strange workmates and even stranger relatives. On the way we discover that Hoenikker has invented an even greater weapon of mass destruction called ice nine.

As John runs around the US and then the world interviewing those close to the scientist, the reader is left wondering what happened to the ice nine and will it be used.

John tells us at the start of the book he is a Bokononist a member of a new religion. The books of Bokonon tells us that "all of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies".

The book has a go at religion, technology and humanities urge to become extinct.

I was reading the book as an ebook and found I had difficulty remembering what some of the made up Bokonon terminology meant. That did subtract somewhat from my enjoyment of the book.

The ending surprised, smacking of futility and the stupidity of humanity.

I think Cat's Cradle is one which I will find myself reflecting on every now and then.

My writing week 4 (4)

2011-01-23T17:39:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

I was very busy with writing activities last week: my next article for Divine, my blog and my novella. I spent a lot of time researching such things as ebooks, authors with disabilities, skinhead clothing and the Indian language.

By the end of the week I had had enough. I began thinking about taking a break when I finish my next Divine article; a break where I don’t turn on the computer for a couple of weeks. It would be nice to go somewhere near the sea and swim, fish and wander the beaches.

Until I take that holiday, I’ve decided to treat my weekends more like weekends and leave the computer off on Saturday or Sunday, perhaps both. I left if off on Saturday and did nothing writing related when I turned it on yesterday, and I feel mentally revived today.

Will Ebooks Dumb Reading Down?

I finished reading the ebook Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut last week. I found it very hard to remember the definitions of some of his made up terminology. Maybe my memory is going. Maybe I should have made a list of definitions. Maybe it would have been easier to read in paperback where I could have highlighted the meanings. I only wish I had discovered the Wikipedia page on Vonnegut’s made up Bokonon religion before I finished the book, I could have printed it out and referred to it as I read.

Helen Venn mentioned on her blog an article that had some relevance to my inability to remember what a Karass was. The article Nick Collins in The Telegraph said that ebooks might make reading too easy and therefore more forgettable. If I struggle when reading a sentence or paragraph, I know that once I understand it, I am more likely to remember it. So, in the future might more complicated works be purchased only in print form and ebooks left for simply plotted romance and adventure stories? Hard science fiction might not be suited to ebooks, whereas space operas might. Or might the domination of ebooks lead to hard science fiction and novels with complicated plots no longer being published?

Where are all the Ebooks?

Once I finished reading Cat’s Cradle I had no more ebooks. It was time to download a new one. I had enjoyed reading Souls in the Great Machine, by Sean McMullen, book one in a series set in the future in North-east Victoria, where I live. Last time I had checked, Sean McMullen’s books weren’t published in Australia, so I felt okay about buying it as an ebook on Amazon. Problem was, it wasn’t there. None of his books were available as Kindle books. One of the great plusses of ebooks is supposed to be that backlist books would be available forever. Obviously this is yet to come.

I then went looking for Cory Doctorow, but none of his books were listed as Kindle ebooks on Amazon. Amazing for the champion of future publishing. I eventually found a link on website to Little Brother as a free Kindle download. As I had already purchased a signed print version at Aussiecon I did not have any qualms about downloading the free ebook.

After much messy around, I finally managed to get an ebook not purchased through Amazon to work on my Kindle.

Further on My Last Post About Cheap ebooks Destroying the Publishing Industry.

Some of you who read my last weekly post may have noted the resulting comments between Vicki Tyley (who has sold 35,000 copies of her mystery ebook Thin Blood) and myself. In it she mentions an article by J A Konrath which lists 28 authors whose ebooks are selling very well. For those who don’t know, J A Konrath is a huge cheerleader for ebook. But Helen Venn on her blog mentioned an article by Jim C Hines that questions the accuracy of JA Konrath’s data. I also questioned the usefulness of his data in my debate with Vicki Tyley.

I reckon Patty Jansen has got it right. She is selling her 11,000 word ebook novella My Name in Lights, for $1.99 on Smashwords. I think that is a reasonable price for a novella, not a novel.

Graham.

My writing week 4 (3)

2011-01-16T22:19:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

New Article on Divine

I have another article up on Divine, this one is about studying online for my master of creative writing at the University of Canberra. If you are considering studying writing at the University of Canberra I have a more substantial appraisal of the masters course and its lecturers on my website.

The Divine editor made a few changes to my article, even though I rewrote it and edited it many times. Oh well, changes to my writing always make me anxious. Some of them I can see why, the reason for others is not so obvious. I will examine them again when my ego has stopped raging.

More Torchwood

I was rapt to read that they are making another ten episode mini-series of Torchwood. Television is running out of quality science fiction.

Cheap Books at Booko

I had a look at an Aussie website called Booko a couple of days ago. It is a site that automatically searches for the online prices, including delivery, of books. Just type in the title or author. I checked my last few purchases. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood cost me $24.99 at my local Collins Bookstore, I could have purchased it online at Abe books for $11.37. But Solar, by Ian McEwan, cost me $32.99 at the local bookstore, the cheapest online was $28.44 at Abe books again. But I still will buy from the local bookstore even if it is $10 cheaper online.

Booko did not have ebooks, so I could not gleefully type in titles and see that I could get them all free from somewhere.

Lengthy Ebook Article in The Age

Speaking of ebooks, which I tend to do a bit, there was a huge article on whether they would destroy publishing in last weeks Good Weekend in The Age. I could not find a link for it, but I recommend reading it. It mentioned a journo Malcolm Knox who reckons ebooks could be a boon for authors, all they have to do is spend all their time social networking – forget the writing – to convince people to buy their ebook (This is my sarcastic bent on his comments).

But it did say that Vicki Tyley, who had been unable to get published in the US, put her mystery ebook Thin Blood up on Amazon for the guru recommended price of $2.99 and sold in excess of 25,000 copies. It did not say, however, how many were purchased by US citizens. She has published three novels in Australia. Still her US agent says he is negotiating a print publishing deal.

The article compared e-readers and publisher Richard Walsh reviewed the Kindle. He read Stied Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on it, and said that it destroyed the formatting of newspaper articles within the novel. Because of Kindle’s homogenised text, that formatting was lost and confusion reigned. Interestingly, later in the article, Larson was mentioned as becoming the first author to sell over a million Kindle ebooks. So there must have been a lot of confused Kindle users.

Walsh also said he had difficulty flicking forward to the end of a chapter and backwards on the Kindle. I have found no such difficulty as I usually read it a linear fashion, but there is a goto menu that allows you to bring up a table of contents and head to the end of the chapter. From the tone of the review, I think Mr Walsh wanted to hate the Kindle.

The one thing the article forgots to mention was free ebooks. So there was no discussion on how the over three million ebooks, and growing, might impact on the publishing industry.

What I Got up to Last Week

I spent a bit of time researching my next article for Divine last week. It is on authors with disabilities. So may famous authors had disabilities, including two of the big three science fiction writers. As about 20% of the population will have a disability at some time of another, a particular writer having a disability should not be a surprise. I have lined up interviews with two Aussie writers for the article too, which I hope to do in the next two days.

I spent a bit of time watching the floods. I used to live in Albion in Brisbane, one of the suburbs affected. My Aunty Anne also lives next door to the Safeway in Toowoomba, but luckily it was above the flood waters.

Down here in Wangaratta, the humid wet weather has been sending me troppo. The only thing it is good for is growing tomatoes. I picked 60 kilograms of them last week. We are running out of people to give them too.

I also did a bit of editing of the novella. After reading a blog post by John Scalzi, in which he aims to write 2,000 words by noon each day, I am determined to write more. I think 1,000 a day would be a more realistic goal, especially with all those tomatoes to pick.

Graham.

My writing week (year) 4 (week) 2

2011-01-09T21:34:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

After fixing my computer problems last week (I’m just asking for the thing to crash with a comment like that), I am feeling strangely over-confident and willing to strangle any challenge that wanders within arms reach.

Windows Vista was the Problem, Not My Computer

I did have some help from an excellent technician at Hewlett-Packard’s, but I did have to first believe him and then implement his solution. He told me, like someone who did not want to be overheard by Microsoft, that the problem was not with my computer but with Windows Vista, particularly its latest updates. So I did another recovery, but this time I stopped windows from automatically updating. Since than, five days ago, my computer has not crashed or stalled or turned itself off or come up with one of a multitude of error messages.

Safari a Better Browser Than Firefox

I was in the mood to experiment so I tried a couple of other web browsers in the hope that they would solve a problem I had with Firefox: a Facebook application was stalling.I installed Opera, but found it did not offer a solution, but than I installed Safari and the application no longer stalled. It also fixed another problem where my email stalled or failed to find emails. So my computer is like brand new now. Yaaaa.

Other Activities Last Week.

Apart from fixing my computer, I am spent a lot of time gardening last week. It seems that the so-far mild summer and plenty of rain, has lead to bumper tomato and bean crops. Last week I picked about 33 kilograms of tomatoes, including just under ten on one day, and about 27 kilos of beans, including 6.75 kilograms of climbing beans one day from a 3 by 1.5 metre patch. I have been spending about half an hour picking each day. Add this to the watering and weeding, and I spend about an hour and a half each day in the garden.

After a bit of consternation about whether to put the novella away for six weeks so I could then come back to it with a fresh view, I decided I wanted to get it critiqued as soon as possible, which means polishing it. But as soon as I started polishing it I started making changes. Looks like it could take a while.

I finished reading the very enjoyable comedy Solar by Ian McEwan. It is a short novel about a physicist whose private life wrecks his attempt to provide the world with clean energy. My last post is a review of it.

Graham.

Review of Solar by Ian McEwan

2011-01-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

I have not read any other Ian McEwan novels. I gather his other novels are serious dramas, whereas Solar was more of a tongue in cheek comedy. I never laughed out loud, but none the less I found it amusing as the pompous, insular, brilliant and sometimes inept main character schemed his way out of a number of awkward situations. One scene where is he trying to urinate in 20 below zero temperatures is very memorable.

Michael Beard is its central character. He has spent much of his life living off his fame after winning a noble prize for physics in his early twenties. He is constantly asked to be on boards, make paid speeches, lecture etc, while producing very little new research. Then one day he is asked to join the board of a research facility trying to find solutions to climate change. Fate then hands him the process of converting water into hydrogen using solar power, the ultimate clean energy.

Meanwhile his hectic private life of four marriages continues. He is so self-absorbed, and fat and unhealthy to boot, it is hard to believe that so many women want to have relationships with him, but they do. He thinks it is because they all want to convert him to a loving, sharing person. Instead he spends much of his time in hypocritical anger as his wives mirror his unfaithfulness.

In the end his lies bring his life crashing down, and put back the cause of fighting climate change. Much the way the lies form self-serving countries destroyed the Copenhagen climate change conference. I think that was the simile McEwan was aiming at.

I have followed the climate change debate for decades and nearly all of the climate change information mentioned in the novel sounded correct to me. I had not heard that Americans are busy buying up land in colder areas of Canada though, I suspect that could be self-servingly true.

A short novel (yaaa for short novels) it was an enjoyable read, even though the main character was larger than life.