Graham Storrs

I’m developing a relationship with Amazon.
It used to be a simple relationship. I bought books from them. Well, not quite simple. I occasionally bought books when their low price plus the exorbitant cost of shipping to Australia worked out better than a local bookshop, or it was a book you just couldn’t get here. So [...]

Vlentine’s Day is always overshadowed at our place by my wife’s birthday, which falls on the 13th. (She was actually born on Friday 13th – which is how she ended up with me, I suppose.) If I haven’t demonstrated sufficient love and caring by the end of the 13th, there’s no hope of recovering my [...]

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they [...]

I now have the galleys of my novel TimeSplash and they have prompted me to say this to all aspiring novellists.
When you write a novel, make sure it is as rich, deep and subtle as you can possibly make it. Make all the characters complex and interesting, in fact, make them fascinating. Make sure that [...]

Writers are pretty nice people on the whole. The amazing response from writers in support of Haiti has been very gratifying to see. Australian SF writer Marianne de Pierres today recommended Medecins Sand Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) as an effective group to support if you want to help people over there. John Scalzi also recommends [...]

My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What [...]

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a [...]

Dear Mr. Conroy,
I see from your recent announcement that you and the Labor Party are still determined to go ahead with installing national Internet filters. As an Australian writer, I cannot stress how strongly opposed I am to this measure. Whatever your good intentions for filtering child pornography – and I give you and the [...]

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 High [...]

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 [...]