Advertisement

Badge of Honour

Add to Technorati Favorites

Being a Writer is Like…

I just won a prize in a competition. The competition was run by the Seven Writing Quotes site and the prize is Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur (ed.) To win, I had to complete the simile: “Being a writer is like…” Here’s what I said. Being a writer is like standing naked in the [...]

All The Way: Out Now in The Future Fire

With all this frantic editing and book publicising going on, I forgot to mention something very important to me. My short story, ‘All the Way’ has just been published in The Future Fire. If you don’t know this magazine, you should probably download some of their PDF editions and have a browse. The Future Fire [...]

Revealing My Obsessions

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t [...]

Australian Parallel Importation Rules to Remain Unchanged

A bit of Australian internal politics, guys. You might want to just retweet this and move on if that’s not especially interesting to you. However, if you ever read an Australian book, read on. Those who have campainged hard to ensure that parallel importation restrictions on books are not removed or amended, should be congratulated. [...]

Time for a Chat

I think this is the first time I’ve ever had my name on a flyer. My publisher, Lyrical Press Inc. is organising an event on one of its Yahoo groups. They’ve invited me to take part as one of about 20 Lyrical authors who will be talking about, well, I’m not quite sure, but I [...]

Book Sellers Face an Uncertain Future

Like many ‘emerging’ Australian writers, I’ve been concerned that the government is thinking of lifting parallel importation restrictions (PIRs). This is legislation that helps Australian publishers compete by giving them the opportunity to publish works over here and keep out overseas editions of the same work. Virtually all countries, including the US and UK have [...]

“Swan Song” Hits the Streets

The Concept Sci-fi Magazine 2009 Short Story Competition Special Edition is now avaialable online. It contains just three stories, the winner, “Bringer of War” by Iain Cairns, and the two runners-up; “Volume Control” by Matthew Fazakerly, and “Swan Song” by yours truly. Download it now and have a great weekend read. It’s free! Congratulations to [...]

Parallel Importation: An Opportunity for Australian Publishers?

If the Australian Government and the big-chain booksellers have their way, the Australian publishing industry will be all but dead in a few years’ time. There are very few Australian literary agents now, but they too will have gone. For Australian writers – especially new ones – the only chance of being published will be [...]

Flash Fiction 40 Anthology 2009 Free on Smashwords

Now that’s fast! The competition was only opened in May this year. Since then, there have been all the entries, the judging, the editing and the production. Now, in July, the top 40 stories from the Editor Unleashed Flash Fiction 40 competition are available in an anthology, edited by Maria Schneider, and available for free [...]

One in Seven

Continuing yesterday’s competitions theme, I see the Editor Unleased/Smashwords Flash Fiction 40 competition has announced the 40 lucky winners.  (That’s me, about half-way down the list, under the user ID graywave.) As there are 40 winners and there were only 280 entrants, that puts me roughly in the top 20%. I remember a day, many, [...]