after much pfaffing about, all at my end, my publisher has settled on a release date for my third novel, A Long Time Coming. July 10, 2012 is the date and I’ve got a bucketload of editing to do between now and the New Year to get it ready for that date.
all good … i’ve neglected it long enough to have regained interest in it. all i have to do is find the time and the energy.
the good news is this nightmare year is nearly over and my head is right for it. so all systems go.
just finished reading this and it’s an absolute cracker. it will scare the crap out of you, however.
i’ve had my brush with golden staph … not MRSA, thankfully, but hard enough to get rid of. took me six months all up and sometimes i still wonder.
but MRSA is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. ms mckenna does a terrific job of explaining the intricacies of biochemistry, microbiology and a whole bunch of other ologies without being tedious. in fact, it was gripping and i read it pretty much straight through.
makes you never want to take antibiotics again. at the very least it makes you want to ask your GP why he’s prescribing you antibiotics for a viral infection like bronchitis (did you know only 10% of bronchitis cases are caused by bacterial infection?). happened to me so many times i can’t even begin to tell you.
i tell ya, scary stuff, and well told.
my latest blog post over at goldcoast.com.au:
WAIT a minute, what?
Borders and Angus & Robertson are going out of business? Are you kidding me?
Almost as surprising is the fact that I actually agree with Stephen Conroy about something.
The federal Communications Minister most rightly said that the closure of the two biggest booksellers in the country is `a tragedy’, reported AAP.
The bigger tragedy is that it is almost entirely the government’s fault that Australian bricks-and-mortar booksellers can’t compete, neither with their overseas rivals nor their online ones.
Not this specific government, you understand, but the Australian Government in general, thanks to the 1968 Copyright Act, or more specifically a small but malevolent part therein.
I’ve written before about the costs of buying new books in Australia and the Productivity Commission found that books in Australia are 27 per cent more expensive than in the US, and 13 per cent more expensive than in Britain.
See, it’s all about PIRs — that’s Parallel Import Restrictions to you, buddy.Specifically, and I’m quoting the Productivity Commission’s report here, because they are much better at explaining this than I am: “Under the PIRs, if a particular novel or textbook is published in Australia within the 30-day limit, booksellers cannot import and sell stocks of the same book from, say, the UK, the US or Asia. This enables rights holders to charge prices (or obtain royalties) in the Australian market with the certainty that they cannot be undercut by commercial quantities of imports of the same titles.”
God, how boring does that sound?
In other words, gentle readers, the publishers have made sure the booksellers can’t import cheap copies from overseas when there’s a much more expensive Australian edition available.
No wonder Borders and A&R have gone down the gurgler.
I recently bought a used copy of a favourite childhood book — The Wool Pack by Cynthia Harnett.
It’s out of print, so I thought it would be a bit of a mission, but no.
Lo, the wonders of the internet. A few minutes of concerted Googling and I had purchased a copy from a UK bookseller for, wait for it, 1.99. That’s pounds. And, at the risk of seriously depressing and former Borders employees out there, that included postage.
Now, of course, the Gerry Harveys of the world will have another excuse to bleat about how online retailing is killing their profits.
And, as I’ve said before boohoo, Gerry, boohoo. Adapt or die.
I’m sure the good folks at Borders and A&R would have loved to have had the chance to adapt, but the PIRs didn’t give them that chance, once Aussies started figuring out a Kindle edition of a book can cost three times less than a hold-it-in-your-hand-and-feel-the-paper edition.
Yesterday I spent the morning at the Gold Coast Bulletin’s Book Club — yes, we do actually read books and broaden our minds with intelligent conversation, despite being journalists — and the enthusiasm for the written word, particularly among my younger colleagues was a breath of fresh air.
What a pity two fine companies like Borders and Angus & Robertson won’t be able to make the most of that enthusiasm thanks the cronyism of local publishers.
… i’ve read three of ‘em — Solar by Ian McEwan, The Promise by Jonathan Alter, and The Wave by Susan Casey — all excellent.
and now i’ve bought a few more off this list.
my latest blog post over at goldcoast.com.au:
I LOVE reading. LOVE it. Always have, always will.
For that we can thank parents who were teachers and being an only child — because reading was the best way to entertain myself.
Of course, it means I’m permanently sleep-deprived.
Right now, I am sleep deprived because I was awake till dawn reading a cracking book that I just couldn’t put down. Actually, I was reading a cracking book that I just couldn’t switch off.
Yes, gentle reader, after swearing that I was a book purist — none of this emotionless, soulless e-book reading for me — I have been converted.
As ever it is the iPad to blame.
Yes, I’ve had a Kindle app on my iPhone for months and months, but honestly, reading on that little screen is a bit of a pain in the bum.
So, now that I have a book-sized screen to read on, there has been no stopping me.
I’ve read four books in about two weeks — The Big Short by Michael Lewis (a blow by blow analysis of how the US financial system collapsed), A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, homo erectus!!), The Promise: President Obama, Year One by Johnathan Alter (US politics, yum) and Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi (the story of her eating disorders and sexual identity).
And I’m in the middle of another — The Wave by Susan Casey, a terrific read that is half popular science about freak waves and half surfing odyssey in the wake of the world’s best big-wave warriors.
That’s the one that kept me up till dawn.
I enjoy holding an actual book as much as the next person, but it’s come down to economics.
If you love reading in Australia then you will know that books cost a ridiculous amount of money here. Try buying a new released novel under $30 and you’ll see what I mean.
The reasons are many and various — from import restrictions, to printing costs, to the GST to outright money-grabbing by local publishers — but the bottom line is the Productivity Commission found that books in Australia are 27 per cent more expensive than in the US, and 13 per cent more expensive than in Britain.
E-readers like the Kindle (Amazon) and iBook on the iPhone and iPad have changed all that.
All of those books I mentioned above (with one exception) were less than $10 from Kindle.
The exception is Portia de Rossi’s memoir which was $18 from iBookstore, Apple’s equivalent to Amazon.
I’m sold.
I take my iPad with me everywhere, anyway, so now I have a book with me everywhere.
Actually, I have 16 books with me.
I like to mark my books — highlight the bits I like, the bits I really want to remember. With the Kindle and iBook apps I can do that without damaging a book.
And I can read in the dark, which takes me straight back to my childhood, reading under the covers with a torch.
Seriously, get an e-reader. Anything that gets people reading more easily, has to be a good thing.
economics … it’s hardly thrilling stuff, eh? but paul krugman, nobel prize winner and columnist for the new york times, is a freaking genius at making it interesting.
not just interesting, enthralling.
this is the updated edition, written since the 2008 global financial crisis.
if you ever had a feeling that globalisation sucked, but you could never put your finger on, or articulate why, let krugman do it for you. if you ever thought milton friedman and alan greenspan were twats of the highest order, but couldn’t quite figure out why, let krugman tell you.
this man should be US secretary of the treasury, not that ex-banking failure tim geithner. i suspect krugman’s got more sense than to get involved in politics, however. but jesus, i hope obama’s listening, reading or absorbing somehow the commonsense that krugman talks.
read it. seriously. krugman could make maths interesting, and coming from me, that’s saying something.
god i can’t tell you how much i love dystopian literature. science-fiction in general has been the longest love of my life, but dystopian sci-fi? omg, nothing compares.
yeh i did 1984 and brave new world pretty early, but it was John Wyndham who broke my cherry, so to speak. The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes, Trouble With Lichen. man was a freakin’ genius.
in my last year of high school my blessed english teacher – Pat Marshall, if you’re out there, thank you – introduced me to Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. written in Kentish dialect as it would be 2000 years after a nuclear war, the book was totally baffling to me until i read it aloud to myself in a west country accent. bingo. and bliss.
from there it was a couple of beautiful pieces from Stephen King – The Running Man, and a totally chilling, brilliant short story called The Long Walk.
and then, most recently, Cormac McCarthy. omg Cormac McCarthy. i haven’t caught the film yet, but if The Road isn’t the most perfect dystopian novel ever written, i’ll walk backwards to iraq. seriously.
oh i love them all.
and now i’m going to take a crack at it. not a novel. a short story. Last Man Anthology has put out a call for submissions. i’m going to give it a whirl, i think. while editing A Long Time Coming.
should be interesting. lol.
awesome! got word of this via Google alerts. don’t know who Fan Fiction Reviews is or are, but it was a nice surprise.
by the way, ALTC will be published by Regal Crest Enterprises early in 2011. we’re about to start the editing process, and once that’s complete, i will, out of courtesy to the publisher, remove the first draft from this website. so make the most of it, folks!
here’s an extract from the review:
… The story takes a few jumps back in time to events that influenced the current situation, but the author indicates such jumps clearly, avoiding to bewilder the reader. It also shows the mind set of a therapist at work, and, while I am in no way qualified to gauge how realistic that is, it is done very convincingly.
… There is no fairy-tale ending. Alas? No, it is happy nonetheless, and it makes much more sense than “happy ever after”. A comment on the authoress’s home page sums it up pretty well: “Loved and hated the ending.” Very well worth reading, a solid eight out of ten.
you can read the whole thing over Fan Fiction Reviews.
the ninth and FINAL chapter of my novel A Long Time Coming is now available online. you can access it via the sidebar over there *pointing right*
you can find it right here.
