My Writing Week: Issue 21, Year 5.

Hi all,

It’s good to hear that writers I have interacted with online are having success in the publishing world.  Anthony J Langford has just had his excellent novella, The Bottomless River, published. I reviewed it in my last blog post.

I am currently a third of the way into Karen Tyrrell’s memoir Me and Her, which she recently published. It tells of her battle with bipolar and is an engrossing tale. Karen was gracious enough to allow me to interview her for an article I wrote for Divine last year.

And David Kitson has found an agent for his excellent self-published ebook Turing Evolved. I have previously posted a review of Turing Evolved on this blog.

The quality of their stories/writing tell me that it is ridiculously hard to find a traditional publisher these days. But their determination and a changing publishing industry show that there are new ways to succeed.

New Divine Article.

Divine posted a new article of mine about people with disabilities donating blood. Part personal account, part news story, I found the blood service is doing their best to make donating blood accessible for everyone. But there are still barriers to some people, including myself.

Divine has put up two of my articles in May. I now have twenty articles on the site.

Suzane Collins Dominating Book Sales in Australia.

Suzane Collins is the author of the Hunger Games young adult series. I am a bit behind in my newspaper reading, but I have noted that for the last two weeks of March and first week of April she had seven titles in the top ten book sellers in Australia. I haven’t noticed a domination like that since Stephanie Meyers. Just shows what a movie version of a young adult novel series can do for sales.

My Writing.  

You would think that with winter here and no need for me to spend hours watering, weeding, digging up veggies, picking fruit and battling fruit fly and Mexican beetles, that I would be writing more. But no, I have recently discovered an outstanding ability to procrastinate. For some reason I want to check my email multiple times per day and I need to Google every lost friend/acquaintance that comes to mind. I just seem to want to play around on my computer, anything but write. And it’s a shame, because when I do write, I enjoy writing Jack Logan, Astronaut. I am currently near the end of chapter 44 having written a grand total of 88,300 words.

      

Review of the Bottomless River, by Anthony J Langford.

 

The Bottomless River begins in a small town in rural Victoria in Australia. Three mates, Tom, Jen and the male point of view character, regularly get together at a river bank for harmless fun and banter. But their innocent world changes one night when they get drunk. The main character cannot forgive himself for what he has done.   

The Bottomless River surprised me with the quality of both its writing and story.  It has an emotional punch thrown by believable characters. Their dialogue is as natural as the river the teenagers meet by, echoing the voices of people I grew up with.

  

The novella’s author, Anthony J Langford, comes up with plenty of original similes as he explores guilt and regret. The main character’s inner turmoil seemed so realistic that I thought the writer had to be writing from experience.

To get the full impact of the novella I recommend reading it in one go.