You will remember the Alaskan Bookie site recently gave my time travel thriller, TimeSplash, a five-star review. Well, afterwards, Dorothy, who runs the site, asked me [...]]]>

Interviews are clearly like buses: you wait ages for one and then two turn up at the same time. That’s what happened today.

An Interview with Alaskan Bookie

You will remember the Alaskan Bookie site recently gave my time travel thriller, TimeSplash, a five-star review. Well, afterwards, Dorothy, who runs the site, asked me over for an interview. You can see the result on the Alaskan Bookie website. This is a particularly good interview in a couple of ways. Firstly, the questions were really enjoyable. I’m not sure quite why, but each one sparked a little excitement – which you might notice in my enthusiastic responses Secondly, I am very impressed with Dorothy’s professionalism. You can see some of this just in the way the interview is laid out. It is one of the best-organised interview formats I have ever seen, with all the right information available but presented in a very palatable format. Again, I’m not quite sure why I think this. I will have to sit down and analyse my aesthetic response to what Dorothy has done here. Anyway, if you want to see me in excited and enthusiastic mode, talking right at you, visit the Alaskan Bookie today.

An Interview with Kayelle Press

As part of the continuing launch and publicity efforts for the Hope anthology, Kayelle Press is running a series of brief author interviews with each of the contributors. Today is my turn and you can find my interview on the Kayelle Press blog. For me, this series of interviews is very interesting. Hope brings together some of my favourite Australian writers – including at least three I’d call friends – so it is nice to get a quick peek at what they say about themselves and the story they have contributed. You might not have the same level of interest, but if you want to hear from over a dozen writers, all at different stages in their careers, talking about a particular piece of work, it is a fascinating snapshot. And while you are over at the Kayelle Press site, why not pick up a copy of Hope? It is full of good stories and interesting articles. It is there to raise suicide awareness, something our society needs. Besides, Christmas is not far away and a book is always a great gift.

After all, it’s the Rapture tomorrow. This could be the last anyone hears from me. Which gives me such a cool idea. What if I just disappear tomorrow – take no luggage, no credit cards, leave no note, just vanish. I could then sit on a beach [...]]]>

Ah well, better luck next time.

After all, it’s the Rapture tomorrow. This could be the last anyone hears from me. Which gives me such a cool idea. What if I just disappear tomorrow – take no luggage, no credit cards, leave no note, just vanish. I could then sit on a beach in Northern Queensland reading the religious nutcases speculating in the press as to why I was the only one in the world taken in the Rapture. They would probably find some good reason.

So, if I do disappear, either God’s got a really cool sense of humour, or I have.

Meanwhile, you might like to know that writer, Sonya Clark, turned her Digital Author Spotlight on me today, and hosted a guest post from me. Yes, I began life as a digital-only author, but one day… So a big thank you to Sonya and to all of you who just clicked the link and went to have a look.

See you tomorrow – or will I?

Tweets: the number of tweets we have made since we started tweeting. I quite often look at that number when I’m considering whether to follow someone. If it is very high, I give [...]]]>

Our Twitter profiles provide a number of curious facts about us. In particular they give the following four figures:

Tweets: the number of tweets we have made since we started tweeting. I quite often look at that number when I’m considering whether to follow someone. If it is very high, I give them a miss. The last thing I need in my crowded tweet-stream is another 50 tweets per day!

Following: the number of tweeps we are following. I try to keep mine small by refusing to follow people whose tweets look dull, or who are marketing gurus (I make a few, rare exceptions), who are bots, or who are obviously just selling stuff. For all my vigilance, the number keeps growing.

Followers: this is the number of tweeps who follow you. You may think it odd, but I am constantly culling this number too – mostly using Twitter’s “block and report for spam” option. Spam on Twitter is a cursed plague. I block and report about twice the number of tweeps who are genuine. I think some of the people banging on about marketing insights and their no-doubt-brilliant self-published fantasy trilogy don’t even realise they have crossed the line and become spammers.

Listed: this is the number of tweeps who have added you to one of their lists (or the number of lists tweeps have added you to, which could be slightly different, but not significantly for our purposes.) I don’t do lists myself, but they do seem enormously popular as a way of organising one’s acquaintances.

It struck me how useful the ratios of some of these numbers might be. For example, marketing types are very keen not to “waste their time” following people who do not follow them back. There are even tools to help you see who these people are! Consequently, the savvy Web 2.0 tweep, will always have a Following that is almost exactly the same as their number of Followers – a ratio that is close to 1. When I see this, it makes me wary and, I have to say, reluctant to follow this particular ‘guru’. I don’t use my follows as a currency. I follow because the tweep looks interesting and is someone I wouldn’t mind chatting to. A tweep who sees a follow as a unit of exchange, seems to have missed the whole point of why most of us are there.

So here are three, key Twitter ratios and what I think they mean (with a couple of examples). Of course, I may be wrong about how to interpret these numbers, so I’m keen to hear your own interpretations. You might like to calculate your own ratios to see what kind of a tweep you are. To calculate them, take the first number and divide it by the second. It’s as easy as that. For example, if you are following five hundred people (Following = 500) and are followed by 250 people (Followers = 250) your Following to Followers ratio is exactly 2.

Following to Followers (F to F)

The closer this ratio is to 1, the more likely the tweep is to be a marketing guru.

The greater this ratio is than 1, the more likely the tweep is not trying to sell you anything.

The less this ratio is than 1, the more famous, beautiful, or fascinating the tweep is. (Famous because famous tweeps just have hundreds of thousands, or millions of followers and simply can’t follow that many themselves. Beautiful because I have observed that attractive young women always have far more followers than ordinary mortals – that’s why spammers always use avatars featuring this type. Fascinating because, well, I suppose there must be people out there who, even though they are not famous or beautiful, are still amazingly interesting – @shitmydadsays, for example.)

Listed to Followers (L to F)

The closer this ratio is to 1, the more these tweeps’ followers value what they say – because they have taken the trouble to put them into categories that are accessible to others. After a quick survey of about four random famous people, I can say that the Listed to Followers ratio does not seem to correlate with fame. Perhaps famous people are actually boring in real life?

Tweets to Followers (T to F)

If this ratio is significantly over 1, the tweep is probably a bore – either because they rant on about their own fascinating self so much, or because they are always chatting to their five hundred closest friends in long exchanges that have tweets in them like, “Lol. Me too!” or “I haz beans. You?” etc..

If this ratio is close to and preferably just below 1, then the tweep is probably actively engaged with their followers, but not excessively so.

If this ratio is significantly below 1, the tweep is likely to be in the famous/beautiful/fascinating category.

The following table compares Stephen Fry (famous, fascinating, but not beautiful) and Katy Perry (famous and beautiful, but not fascinating) to myself (neither famous, beautiful, nor fascinating).

Clearly, Stephen and Katy have the profiles of famous people on the F to F ratio, whereas I come out looking like a marketing guru! Perhaps only the truly famous and beautiful can get away with not following anyone at all hardly, and only tweeting occasionally. In fact, F to F and T to F ratios of 0.000 might become the new status symbol for the mega-famous. Certainly my own T to F ratio of over 4 is extremely undesirable. Am I really such a bore? Interestingly, my L to F ratio is ten times that of either Stephen or Katy, and I will take comfort in all the love that implies.

—-

*The number was so small that three decimal places just weren’t enough!

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books on 15th September 2010)

Danbert Nobacon, whose penname seems to be derived from an old knock-knock joke, is best known for his part in the rock band Chumbawamba. (“I get knocked down, then I get up again.” Yes, [...]]]>

Three's a good start.

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books on 15th September 2010)

Danbert Nobacon, whose penname seems to be derived from an old knock-knock joke, is best known for his part in the rock band Chumbawamba. (“I get knocked down, then I get up again.” Yes, that’s the one.) He describes his first book, 3 Dead Princes, illustrated by cult moviemaker Alex Cox, as “an unfairy tale for nine to ninety-nine year olds.”

And if you’re already wondering whether the terms “unfairy tale” or “anarchist fairy tale” presage something truly juvenile and awful, you can relax; 3 Dead Princes is a very sweet tale of a young princess who finds herself on a quest to save her father and their kingdom from ruthless invaders. It has all the usual fairytale elements—a kindly old king, a wise and resourceful fool, a stepmother, a witch, wicked villains, talking animals, hairy half-men, and so on—and the tale unfolds in a perfectly satisfying way.

Even the fact that the main protagonist, Princess Stormy, is a 13-year-old girl isn’t at all unusual these days. Her quest to find and rescue her father, the king, and to save her country from invasion, is a reversal of the usual way fairytales are done but, again, quite within the parameters of modern storytelling. And the anarchy? Well, as Nobacon explains at the end of the book, his notion of anarchy is a benign kind of communal democracy, stressing individual moral responsibility.

Yet in some ways this is quite a long way from being the usual kind of fairytale. In fact, a better way to describe it might be as a post-apocalyptic, hard science-fiction novel.

From early in the story, we understand that the world we are in is our own, many millennia in the future, as it recovers from a dreadful calamity that destroyed everything we now know. The half-human creatures, the giant talking bird, the dragon-like flying lizards—all are explained as ancient genetic tinkering, or the changes wrought by subsequent evolution. Even the magical artifacts are simply relics of our own long-lost civilization—a fact that is used quite poignantly at the end of the book.

Throw in a few other unexpected elements—an attempted rape, a lot of down-to-Earth realism from all kinds of characters, menstruation, and, of course, the three dead princes—and Nobacon turns out to have written a surprisingly good and intelligent story. Given this, the creation myth in the chapter “Does God Go to the Toilet?” seems oddly out of place, an excuse for some lavatory humor, perhaps, to pander to the kids. Yet this is in fact a link back to an earlier work by Nobacon, and strongly echoes the lyrics from his 1985 album The Unfairy Tale.

Parents looking for a book for a middle-grader would be hard pressed to find a more sophisticated yet accessible story. Yes, there is a bit of swearing in it, and yes, there are some fairly grown-up themes introduced, but as a springboard for sensible and informed discussion with youngsters about how we live and how we might live, it is hard to think of a better book (the publisher recommends it for YA readers age 12 and up). Even as an adult reader, the story is interesting and intelligent enough for you to find it worth your while.

In fact, the maturity of the book begs the question: Why didn’t Nobacon write it as a straight sci-fi novel? This would have given him the scope to develop characters that, while interesting, are quite sketchy. He would also have been able to fill in more of the backstory—the history of how the world got to be the way it is—and to make clearer the ideological basis of the book, without having to resort to an explanatory section at the end. There would have been less scope for cutesy neologisms, of course, but that might not have been such a bad thing. The charming and quite witty illustrations would also have had to go, which would have been more of a loss. Perhaps, in the end, the answer is that the book would have been less fun to write.

Because of its ambiguity about its target age group, 3 Dead Princes is a bit of a marketing puzzle. It is a very good fairy story that would appeal to brighter kids. It is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story replete with ideas, eschews the fantastical, and is full of a sense of the magical wonder of the real world. Yet its occasional ”bad language” and its challenging inclusion of themes such as rape and menstruation are likely to put many parents off buying it. And that would be a shame because, as a fairytale for youngsters, it would almost certainly encourage reflection and provide opportunities for discussion.

As an adult novel, being cast as a fairytale—even an unfairy tale—is liable to put most readers off. 3 Dead Princes might have enjoyed more commercial success as straight sci-fi. Perhaps the true audience for the book will be freethinking 13-year-olds who will find the world of Princess Stormy a place that will fire their imaginations.

Peter Watts, Canadian sf author beaten up and pepper-sprayed by a US border guard in December (see A270), was [...]]]>

I hope my favourite sci-fi newsletter, Ansible, won’t mind if I reproduce the following paragraph verbatim. Not only is this matter one that outrages me, but Ansible’s treatment of it is just brilliant. Anyway, enjoy:

Peter Watts, Canadian sf author beaten up and pepper-sprayed by a US border guard in December (see A270), was convicted on 19 March for ‘failure to comply with a lawful order’. Apparently it’s a felony to be even slightly groggy and hesitant when told to lie down on the ground by someone who has just punched you repeatedly in the face for asking a question. Sentencing should follow in late April. As they phrased it at Making Light: ‘Peter Watts has been found guilty of being assaulted by a border guard.’ Another notable victory in the War Against Tourism.

“The War Against Tourism”! I love it.

Of course, it’s no so funny for Watts. For his part in the incident where he was stopped, bullied, and beaten up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers – whilst trying to return home to Canada – he now faces up to two years in prison.