My writing week 3 (14)

Hi all,

It has turned cold in Wangaratta, hopefully that keeps me inside writing. I won't have to water and weed the garden as much, YAAAAA. I was getting sick of mowing the lawns every week or so too.

My word count increased for the third week running last week. Most words I have written for a year, but considering my eyesight wasn't great over the past twelve months and I spent most of my writing time editing a novel, the largest word count in a year is no big achievement. The word count better improve again this week.

The short story/novella I am writing is soft science fiction/fantasy a bit of a change from the hard science fiction I have written previously, where nearly every speculative element of the story has to be a plausible reality in the future.

I read a few interesting articles for writers in The Age. Patrick Carman has written a young adult novel called Ghost in the Machine, which requires the reader to view a video on the web after reading each chapter. I am not sure how often this sort of interactivity has been done before, probably a bit with textbooks. Greg Egan could have made Incandescence easier to understand if he had included links to short videos of the physics concepts he was describing, complete with alien terminology. I think this kind of interactivity will really increase with ebooks, especially those on an ipad - once they fix up its display.

According to Jason Steger's Bookmarks column, the ipad bookstore has 60,000 paid titles and 30,000 free ones. "Nine of the 15 New York Times bestsellers were on offer at $US9.99, one at $US10.99, two at $11.99 and three at $12.99." Apple look like they are going to charge the same price as Amazon for ebooks.

I mentioned a few posts ago of Robert Silverberg's 20,000 words a day and Georges Simenon's 80 *pages* a day. Jane Sullivan in her Turning Pages column mentioned that Prentiss Ingraham "occasionally wrote 35,000 words overnight". He wrote 600 books.

Stephenie Meyer's vampire novels seem to have finally disappeared from the Australian top ten bestsellers lists. They will probably return with the release of the next movie in the series.

I watched the repeat of the recent Tuesday Night Book Club last night on ABC2 and I now want to read both Solar by Ian McEwen and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Solar is a satire about global warming and, as it would seem humanity is not going to do anything about it, I might as well have a laugh.

Graham.