Just a quick note to let you know I have been interviewed by the lovely A.M. Harte on her quillsandzebras blog. Anyone who has read my book, TimeSplash, may wonder what is the only thing that my uber-villain, Sniper, and I have in common.  Well, the answer is…  just a click away at quillsandzebras.

At last, it’s February 15 New York time, and Once Upon a Bookstore, my publisher’s own online bookshop, is now selling copies of TimeSplash.

Get your copy here

Please, everybody, pass on this message. Retweet it, Digg it, Stumble it, and tell all your friends on Facebook. You can even mention it to people in real life, if you like.

And, if you do me the great honour of buying it and reading it, I’m dying to hear what you think of it.

(If you haven’t heard me talking about TimeSplash before and don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the website of the book that tells you everything you will ever need to know. And if you find you need to know more than that, there is also a blog of the book. Enjoy!)

Please say hello to the newest member of The New York Journal of Books‘ reviews team. And, while you’re at it, why not nip across and have a look at my first review for this new, online book review journal. (Actually, if you read my recent review here of Dawkins’ Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, you could skip that step, since it is almost the same. Almost, I say, but not quite. When you write a review for a review mag, you can’t adopt the same chatty, personalised, approach that I do in my blog reviews. And if that difference intrigues you, you might like to go and take a look anyway, to compare them.)

Why favour the New York Journal of Books with my erudition, you may ask. Well, I’ve been looking for some non-fiction projects to become involved in, lately, the kind of project that is both writerly and related to my interests, that will involve me more in the writing world, and which will raise my profile in literary circles. I’ve come to being a published writer from a long, long time of wandering in the wilderness. My name is much better known in other, completely unrelated spheres of life. Now I need to change that.

And by great good fortune, I came upon the NYJB. It’s a new venture (it started last month!) and, I think, an exciting one. As Editor-in-Chief and founder, Ted Sturtz says:

In light of the shift from print to online content, there is an opportunity to establish a purely online book review positioned to capture the ongoing growth of the online audience. Moreover, by gradually assembling a broad panel of highly-credentialed reviewers the journal is positioning to offer far more comprehensive coverage of new books than any other book review. While it will be critical to review major new titles as they are released, the Journal aims to review more books in niche or non-mainstream genres than are covered by the current major review publications. The NYJB aims to also review more books written by first-time authors and books published by smaller independent houses, providing respected reviews for authors and independent publishers that are generally spurned by the major review publications. The review also intends to review books in niches that are generally ignored by mainstream publishers. In short, the aim is to establish NYJB as a review widely recognized to be on par with the most respected traditional reviews, while reviewing a far larger number of books.

With so many highly respected review sources either folding or being drastically cut back, I’m very pleased to get behind the NYJB and to help create a top-class online review site in the tradition of (the struggling) Kirkus and the great New York Times Book Review. Authors and publicists, you should seriously consider adding the New York Journal of Books to your list of review sites for your next release.

The Queensland Writers Centre is touring blogs again. This time the tour has a theme: Writers’ Desks. For some reason writers’ desks are fascinating and pictures of same are hugely popular. So QWC is probably onto a winner here. However, when they asked me to put up a picture of my own desk as part of the tour, I was painfully aware that I’ve only recently done that.

Fascinating as my desk is, I can’t keep posting pictures of it. It’s not as if it has seasonal changes or anything. So I’ve taken the opportunity to correct a glaring omission from my last picture and show you my computer ‘desktop’. This should be just as interesting as the wooden one since, for me at least, the computer is where 95% of the work gets done.

The desktop that really matters

For those without broadband (or using Telstra NextG, which is almost as bad) I apologise for the size of this picture. Even so, it isn’t big enough for you to recognise all the icons. That’s why the animation provides labels for the following groups.

• Group A: Various mobile device managers (phone, camera, MP3 player and so on.)
• Group B: Internet stuff (browser, email, Skype, Twitter, and FTP client)
• Group C: Office software (mostly Open Office but also PowerPoint)
• Group D: Music score editing software. (Yes, I write music. It’s a little hobby of mine.)
• Group E: Image editing software (Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView and IconEasel)
• Group F: Media players (Windows Media Player and WinAmp)
• Group G: HTML editors (HTML Kit and Komodo Edit)
• Group H: Sundry utilities (antivirus, encryption, DVD writers, backup, 3G wireless client, and Celestia, which lets me view the universe from various perspectives)
• Group I: Various ebook readers and ebook creators.
• Group J: Stuff to do with my current writing project (the Open Office file itself, my multifunction tracking sheet, and a program called StoryBook that I’ve been trying out as a way of organising the background info – I’m not getting along well with it.)
• Group K: Games (basically, the only computer game I ever play is Freecell – a patience-style card game.)

I should also mention the background picture. I change my background quite often and it is usually an astronomical theme. This one is a long-exposure shot of the space shuttle taking off in Florida last year. I love pictures of astronauts on EVAs, Hubble deep field shots, and the ISS. Images like these help keep me inspired.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening February to April 2010. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog.

Tara Moss is running a series of posts over on her blog on writers’ desks and what they look like. So I took a snapshot of my own, to see what it might reveal about me. Well, what do you think?

It was the maid's day off.

Looking at it with an outsider’s eye, I suppose it looks rather scruffy. Even looking at it with my own eye, it looks that way. Well, if I’d have known you were coming…

Just out of shot on the left is a filing cabinet so full I can’t get another sheet of paper in it – yet I can’t bear to throw out any of the junk it contains, which I never look at. Over on the right, again out of shot, is a bookcase and some drawers. The drawers are full of rubbish and the bookcase is full of books, CDs (mostly software), souvenirs, and a collection of mugs, each of which has its own story.

Left to right on the desktop are:

• Some unattended admin (receipts, letters, etc.)
• My pens, pencils , post-its and what have you
• My notebook (with the only pencil I actually use lying on top of it – a beautiful, lacquered, Waterman propelling pencil that my wife gave me over 20 years ago)
• A small weather station, ironically placed right in front of the window (shades of Subterranean Homesick Blues) The window, by the way, has a fabulous view across hills and forests.
• My Asus EeePC netbook, with a music CD lying open on top of it (a Christmas-themed collection of rock songs, compiled by a friend in Switzerland.)
• Tissues, spare ink cartridge, printer…
• The round white thing is a Stargate Atlantis coffee warming pad. It is, perhaps, the most useless thing I own (my Airedale excepted), but it lights up in neon blue when you switch it on and looks cool.
• Behind the coffee warmer is a collection of family photos (so I don’t forget who they are), a tray filled with flash memory sticks, acquired here and there, a phone and, out of sight, a bunch of chargers, USB hubs, transformers, and such. I actually have the wiring for 13 electronic devices on this desk. You can see some of it dangling attractively down the back.
• Then there’s my external hard disc drive (for backups)
• My dear old computer (actually, my original dear old computer died a few months ago but I got a new dear old computer with the exact same specification for $300 on eBay)
• To the right of the computer is a hideous but extremely reliable and accurate clock
• Another USB hub and an MP3 player
• A copy of Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur, which I won recently in a competition and which I dip into while my machine is booting, or I’m waiting for software updates, or whatever.
• Just visible at the top right is the corner of my whiteboard. This has the ranges of various instruments and voices written on musical staves, phone numbers, passwords, and Linux shell commands.

Just to complete the picture, the room also contains the gutted remains of my original dear old computer on the floor, a guest chair, a pile of wires of various kinds, pictures around the walls that are mostly from work-related events, a small collection of poker dice, a box full of music CDs I keep meaning to give away, and my guitar.

If you can imagine me slumped in that big, black chair, typing with three fingers at this blog post, you pretty much have my working life in a nutshell. It’s a good room and, I have to say, a good life.

I’ve been looking at 2009 to check how I’ve been doing against my writerly ambitions. It’s pretty good, overall. I got eight shorts stories published and placed in two competitions. I also won a write-a-quote competition! I also had my two first print publications (both short stories in anthologies). Although I actually made money by selling stories last year, it didn’t amount to much. The biggest single return for a story was $68 (which amounted to 4c/word). On average, I earned about 1c/word last year. One trip to attend a local writing conference wiped out the whole lot many times over. If you count my time, trips to my writing group (which is 300km away and involves an overnight stay) and consumables, I doubt that a lifetime of selling short stories will ever compensate me for just this year!

Yet, strangely, I feel I’ve had a successful year.

More exciting by far was signing  my first book deal. Unspeakably wonderful as this is, sadly, it isn’t likely to make me much money either. As an unknown writer, trying to sell an e-book in a world where no-one has an e-book reader, with no publicity except what I provide for myself, in a genre that people keep saying is dead, I expect sales to be embarrassing at best. However, I will probably be happy with anything above crushing humiliation. (So please, buy the book and then tell your 5,000 Facebook friends how great it was – even if you have to lie through your teeth. You wouldn’t want my utter failure on your conscience, would you?)

The book, TimeSplash, took hundreds of hours to write and scores of hours to edit. I’ll make about $2/book on sales, so, even if I paid myself minimum wage, I’d need to make many thousands of dollars to cover all that time – and that would involve selling many thousands of books. Unfortunately, because almost nobody has ever published their first book as an e-book with no print edition, especially their first sci-fi novel – there are no good stats to suggest what sales might be. Even my publisher is working in the dark here. I’m a bit of an experiment. It could be zero. It could be a few hundred. If it goes as high as 1500, I’ll be blowing that month’s royalty cheque on a bottle of champagne.

So, it has been a good year. In fact, it’s been a great year. But there is as yet no prospect of making a living from writing. To do that, I’d probably need to be publishing four books a year, or more, and selling really well – and I’m not sure I want to be that guy. Publishing one has been hard enough!

Maybe I need an agent?

The e-Fiction Book Club has very kindly let me guest-blog with them. Jump across to that wonderful site and see what I had to say about opting for electronic publishing for my iupcoming novel TimeSplash.

While you’re there, why not browse the site? In a world where mainstream reviewers still won’t review anything but paper, e-Fiction Book Club is providing a great service to people who want to see reviews of e-books.

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 played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

When I was asked by QWC to take part in the Queensland Writers Centre Blog Tour, I leapt at the chance. Anything I can do to help QWC, I will, since QWC changed my life. I also think the Australian Writers Marketplace Online is a fantastic tool that writers the world over should subscribe to. So a big welcome to followers of the tour. I hope you’ve been enjoying the journey as much as I have. And for my regular readers, you can catch up on the rest of the tour at the QWC blog (details at the bottom of this post.)

They asked me the following questions:

Where do your words come from?

This probably sounds a bit weird but my characters write my books. My part in it is to create a world – I’m extremely meticulous about world-building – invent some interesting characters to go in it and an interesting predicament for them to find themselves in. After that, I just need to follow them through the story and let them say and do what their natures and the situation inevitably lead them to say and do. Not that I don’t work out the plot and the pacing, the key moments I need to hit, and the themes of the book, but even that is done by letting the characters’ actions unfold within the constraints of their world.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I grew up in the city of Hull in Yorkshire, a poor town in the North of England. I lived on a gigantic council estate, part of a big, extended family, half of which was on the dole on any particular day. Yet, thanks entirely to the amazing, generous, socialist policies of the times, I got a first class schooling, and went to excellent universities, for free.

Now, after a long career in software R&D and user interface design, that has taken me all over the world, I have settled in the beautiful hills of Southern Queensland in an area they call the Granite Belt. My house is on a peak at about 1000m, I’m surrounded by native bush and wild animals. It’s quiet, peaceful, and very beautiful.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

My first novel, TimeSplash, starts with the following:

“The music thundered. So loud it was hard to breathe. The way the dancing crowd heaved in time to the beat made Patty feel nauseous.

Or was that just fear?

There had been lots of splashparties. Since she became Sniper’s bitch that’s all they’d done, going from one to another right across Europe. But she’d never seen a party from up here before. Not from inside the cage.”

As you might suppose, it’s a thriller. It’s set in Europe about forty years from now and it took most of last year to write. It’s due for release on 15th February 2010.

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

I should probably say ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘The Da Vinci Code’ if I had any sense. At least then I’d be rich. But I obviously don’t because the kinds of books that come to mind are the ones that leave me gasping in admiration, awed by the skill, intelligence and sensitivity of the writer. Books like; ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ by Ursula le Guin, ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut, and ‘Fahrenheit 451′ by Ray Bradbury, to name but a tiny few of them. And that’s just the sci-fi novels. Don’t get me started on Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Kipling, Wilfred Owen… And, oh, to think of writing Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’!

What are you currently working towards?

That’s easy. I’m working toward building a career as a writer. As I say, my first novel, TimeSplash, is about to be published. I really need that to be a success if I’m ever to be given the chance to publish another. These days, as a new author, that means publicising the book myself, using whatever resources I have to drive sales. A writer today is very much an entrepreneur. Writing the books is only half the job. I’m not one of life’s salesmen. It doesn’t come easy. But I’m more than willing to do it because I am one of life’s writers, and I’ll do whatever I have to to ensure that I can keep writing and keep getting published.

Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…

…electronic. My novel, TimeSplash, is being published as an ebook only. There will not be a print edition. This is a bit of a gamble at the moment but you will see this more and more over the next few years. These days, the mainstream publishers are still trying to work out what electronic publishing is all about. My own publisher, Lyrical Press Inc., has specialised in electronic publishing for some years already. While the big publishers are tentatively publishing electronic editions in parallel with print editions, the electronic publishers are branching out into more and more genres, and print-on-demand. I think it’s inevitable that print will slowly decline until it is a niche luxury product. In the end, the economics of electronic publishing will drive out print.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

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 should imagine books, ebooks, romance, sci fi, and writing will all get a mention. Everyone is welcome. Ever wanted to meet 20 authors?

I’ve never been involved in one of these things before – being a newbie at Lyrical – but “chat, fun and prizes” sounds like it’s worth dropping in for.

Antipodeans, Europeans and Asians please note that dates and times are in American. (At this time of year, times shown in the flyer are GMT minus 5 hours.)  I’ll probably be dropping in throughout the event but I’ll definitely be around between 10pm and 11pm US EST (which is 1pm to 2pm Aus EST on 19th November, 3am to 4am GMT on 19th November – why don’t we all just use UTC?). I certainly hope to see some of you there – maybe not the Europeans!

One in 20 again!