Author Archive

Yes, another issue of The Specusphere has gone live, thanks, as always, to the expertise of our webmistress, Amanda Greenslade.

As usual, there’s lots to crow about. First the excellent Editorial on the current Hot Topic – Parallel Importation – by Astrid Cooper. Under Features there’s a super piece on Zombies by our worthy Editor-in-Chief, Stephen Thompson, and a most scholarly article in our Medical Bag series by Brendan Carson. Stephen Turner continues his series on aspects of the genre with Mentors and the Hero’s Journey, while Benjamin Solah contributes a report on the Melbourne Writers Festival. About People there’s a tryptich of articles by Up-and-Coming editor Astrid Cooper, featuring interviews with K.J. Taylor and Stephen M. Irwin and a piece on Astrid’s own work as a writer of spec-fic erotica.

Under Writing and Publishing we have contributions on writing a novel by Damien Kane, writing a novella by Benjamin Solah and a further argument against Parallel Importation by Paul Collins of Ford St Publishing.

And then there are all those lovely Book Reviews. Twenty-five of them! And we have a world exclusive – we’re sure we are the only webzine to feature a review of an Iain Banks book – by Ian Banks! Here’s the run-down:
Arrows of Time by Kim Falconer, reviewed by Satima Flavell
Book of Secrets by Chris Roberson, reviewed by Ian Banks
Deadly Desire by Keri Arthur, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alistair Reynolds, reviewed by Simon Petrie
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg, reviewed by Maurie Breust
Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston, reviewed by Maurie Breust
Hand of Isis by Jo Graham, reviewed by Satima Flavell
Horn by Peter M Ball, reviewed by Felicity Dowker
Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin, reviewed by Satima Flavell
Nekropolis by Tim Waggoner, reviewed by Ross Murray
New Ceres Nights edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wessely, reviewed by Simon Petrie
Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, reviewed by Maurie Breust
Orphan’s Triumph by Robert Buettner, reviewed by Maurie Breust
Outlaw by Angus Donald, reviewed by Joan Malpass and “Hypatia”
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, reviewed by Jennifer Kremmer
Shiny No. 5, edited by Alisa Krasnostein, Ben Payne and Tehani Wessely, reviewed by Ian Banks
Silver Dolphins Series Books 1 & 2 by Summer Waters, reviewed by Ian Banks
The Destroyer of Worlds by Mark Chadbourn, reviewed by John Paul Fitch
The Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb, reviewed by Satima Flavell
The Fire King by Marjorie Liu, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
The Last Stormlord by Glenda Larke, reviewed by Carol Neist
The Spy Who Haunted Me by Simon Green, reviewed by Simon Petrie
Transition by Iain Banks, reviewed by Ian Banks
White Star by Beth Vaughan, reviewed by Satima Flavell

Up and Coming features new books from Ford Street Publishers, Hachette Australia and Harper Collins, while under the Fiction banner we have stories from Martin Rusis and Greg Bishop.

Go on, get yourself over to The Specusphere and have yourself a darned good read!

Nyssa Pascoe, editor of A Writer Goes on a Journey, gave me the opportunity to host this month’s Blog Carnival. The host’s job is to note blogs of interest from the last four weeks. Obviously, posts will be selected that reflect the host’s interests of the moment, so I focus mainly on writing and on the Big Issue facing the industry at present: Parallel Importation.

Most publishers, writers and booksellers are opposed to Parallel Importation, which would see all import restrictions on books lifted. It could have dire ramifications for all branches of the industry, resulting in job losses and fewer books with Australian content on the shelves of the shops that survive. Instead, we could find ourselves restricted to American books, with American spelling and idioms. The only businesses that stand to benefit are the big chains such as Coles, K-Mart and Target. They already discount their books to prices that the “real” bookshops cannot hope to match, and if they are allowed to import more mass-produced and remaindered books Aussie authors will be hard pressed to earn a living. As it is, the average Australian author pays little or no tax, because the average Australian author does not earn enough. If a book sells at its Recommended Retail Price (RRP) the author might get 10% of that, at best. If the book is sold for less, the author will get proportionately less. There are, friends, too many $1.50s in a week’s wages.

Almost all other countries protect their authors and publishers and have no intention of changing. New Zealand is one that no longer does, and apparently book prices have not come down there by more than a few cents, if at all. Our British and American colleagues think we are mad for even considering it – but they will profit if we do, for it will then be worth their while to print huge numbers of books and sell them cheaply to the Aussie market.

Anyway, don’t just listen to me. Check out some of these websites for better explanations -

First, there is Richard Flanagan’s excellent piece in the SMH, to which many other commentators refer: http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/books/losing-our-voice/2009/05/29/1243456730637.html
Clear and helpful commentary can be found at:
http://savingaussiebooks.wordpress.com/
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/1415806.html
http://simongroth.com/2009/07/30/parallel-export/
http://stephen-dedman.livejournal.com/224986.html gives a slightly different slant to the argument.

So, having done my bit for the Down with Parallel Importation campaign, I turn to my own involvement in the industry; learning the craft of writing -

We’ve all been to a class or a workshop in which the leader gave us first line for a story and asked us to continue, haven’t we? Well, Heidi Kneale came up with a novel way of kick starting a story: last lines! She got some beauties, too, by asking for suggestions! http://hkneale.livejournal.com/168081.html
Patty Jansen blogged on the value of social networking to an author:
http://pattyjansen.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/its-only-useless-banter/
and then on how annoying unfamiliar references can be:
http://pattyjansen.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/do-you-want-your-reader-to-feel-like-this/
which was coincidentally followed up with this post on brand names from Rowena Cory Daniells: http://madgeniusclub.blogspot.com/2009/08/brand-names-and-world-building.html.

BookEnds, LLC – A Literary Agency blog gives tips on the submission process:
http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2009/07/submissions-101.html

Lee Harris of Angry Robot (the newest imprint of Harper Collins) tells the serendipitous tale of how Aliette de Bodard got her big break!
http://angryrobotbooks.com/2009/08/angry-robot-signs-aliette-de-bodard-lavie-tidhar/

Over at Ripping Ozzie Reads, Rowena Cory Daniells has written about Point-of-View, with particular reference to “deep third”. (It is also called “tight 3rd” and “close 3rd”.) “Deep third” is closely related to the technique known in literary circles as “Free Indirect Discourse” (FID). Check out Rowena’s post here.
And quite co-incidentally, Edittorrent (Alicia Rasley) has written a guest blog on when not to use “deep” POV at
http://jordanmccollum.com/2009/08/not-use-deep-pov/

Also at ROR, Rowena has posted on how to structure your work.

Juliet Marillier writes on inspiration through pictures, music, poetry and more here.

On the Borders Blog, Karen Miller discusses a number of topics as guest blogger. She kicked off with this one in which she cogitates on the sanity – or otherwise – of writers in general.

On research:
Gillian Polack’s Food History Blog is always good value and she has recently had some fascinating input from guest bloggers, Simon Brown, Mary Fortune and Lucy Sussex, Laura Goodin, and Alma Alexander.

Lisa Gold, Research Maven, gives tips on attaining accuracy in your work.

On Cabbages and Kings:
Patty Jansen took part in a forum with the PM on climate change. She blogs it here.

And Glenda Larke has the last word – on the trials and tribulations of travel!

Now there’s an intriguing title for you! It’s the name of a new e-book by my writing buddy Fiona Leonard. Fiona is a former Australian diplomat who spent three years living in Zimbabwe and travelling in southern Africa. Dancing with Zebras is an exciting tale about an adopted young woman’s relationship with her birth mother – but the story behind her adoption is strange and complex, filled with mystery and intrigue.

This is Fiona’s first novel and there are three good reasons why you should buy it:
1. It’s a bloody good read
2. You choose the price you want to pay – as much or as little as you like.
3. My name turns up (in good company) in the dedication

And, of course, if we don’t all buy the book Fiona and her family may have to swim back to Oz from America.

You can find Dancing with Zebras over at Smashwords. Check out Fiona’s Smashwords profile and read more about Dancing with Zebras.

And to find out what Fiona, her husband, daughter and dog are doing in America, check out their blog at http://www.yearinamerica.net

Next week I hope to have a really special blog post and if I am to meet the deadline it will go up a day early. So come back on Saturday for a Carnival!!

I know, long time no blog – but I’ve had internet and computer problems as well as being busy catching up with friends now I’m back in Perth for a few months! Today I’ll post about something I’ve had an ongoing interest in for some years: things that turn readers off a book.

I’ve actually researched this, both on the internet (by reading forums, mailing lists etc) and by questioning friends who are readers rather than writers. Writers tend to read rather differently from others because it’s almost impossible to turn off the editorial voice that says things like “Hmph – badly researched” and “How stupid to drag up that old trope” and “Oh no, not another vampire story…”

A reader who does not write, however, generally wants two things: an enthralling story and at least one character to identify with. Of course, ideas of what constitute an enthralling story and a likeable character are as varied as readers, which is why one reader’s soul food is another’s Bali belly material. It also means that the most unlikely book can attract at least some readers.

When we look at what turns readers off, however, there are several things that a wide range of readers will dislike. One is a waffly or confusing story. There are various factors that can contribute to this. The main one is lack of action. Many readers, and especially genre readers, want to see action on page one and want to see the action kept up throughout the book. Gone are the days when writers could spend a chapter or more setting the scene and introducing the characters. Modern readers want to become involved in an adventure of some kind right away. They also want plenty of sensory detail: first-hand experience of the sights, sounds, smells, textures and even tastes that the characters encounter. So boring writing that goes nowhere slowly or engages in lengthy description without a definite point of view doesn’t cut it. Too many point-of-view characters – some readers will not tolerate more than three or four – can also confuse and annoy readers.

In fact, point of view is probably the next thing on which most readers have a firm opinion. Unless the story is a real stand-out, most readers dislike the old-fashioned head-hopping or fly-on-the-wall omniscient styles. Most people relate well to the “close third”, which puts the reader right inside the character’s head, experiencing the character’s thoughts and physical sensations as closely as possible. Yet some of these same readers dislike the first person point of view, and I’ve been given two reasons for this. One is that although most readers love close third and its immediacy, some find first person, which is even closer and more immediate, somewhat threatening, as if they were being made to think another person’s thoughts and must lose their own. Another reason given for disliking the first person POV is that it’s obvious the character survives the trials and tribulations of the plot, since s/he couldn’t be recounting the story otherwise. Seeing as the main character almost always does survive, no matter what the point-of-view, I can’t really fathom this objection, but it has been given to me more than once as a reason for disliking first person narratives.

Which brings me to another widely held pet hate: the killing off of a favourite character. I’ve even heard readers say they will not read a particular author any more. “She killed off the man I really liked; the one I hoped the heroine would end up with,” one of my informants said of a well-known fantasy author. Readers can be very unforgiving sometimes!

Most readers dislike long, unpronounceable names. Names with lots of x’s, k’s, y’s, z’s and funny symbols supposed to represent sounds not found in English generally annoy readers. Solid text – long paragraphs that take up more than a quarter of a page – are another pet hate, as are long internal monologues and long stretches without dialogue. Excessive use of italics is unpopular, although readers’ tolerance for this varies widely: speculative fiction readers will put up with it if it represents telepathic communication, for example.

The final hate is of mucking about with time – flashbacks, flashforwards and big time jumps upset a lot of readers. Persons of a more literary bent tend to accept these more readily than genre readers, however.

What is your pet hate? What turns you off a book? I’d love to hear about it, especially if it’s something I haven’t covered above. So do leave a comment and let me know!

These past few days have been chaotic. We finally have a new issue of The Specusphere up and running and at the same time I’ve been trying to get ready to return to Perth, Western Australia. I have a series of house-sits lined up so I should be there until mid-year at least, which suits me fine because not only will I be able to meet up with writerly friends (I belong to two writers groups in Perth) but I’ll also be able go to meetings of the Shakespeare Club and The Society of Editors WA. I just missed the AGM of the latter (good timing, that – I have a dread of AGMs as it’s all too easy to get a job) but I’ll be there for the Shakespeare Club’s AGM. I always risk going to that one, despite my terror of raising a hand at the wrong moment and finding myself on a committee, because it’s nice to be there when they choose the plays to be read during the coming months. My faves are the middle period comedies and I hope we’ll do at least one of those.

But do check out The Specusphere, and most especially Astrid Cooper’s wonderful editorial in which she talks about the animal victims of the bushfires. She’s arranged a raffle to raise funds for the welfare organisations treating injured wildlife and looking after lost and sick pets. If you haven’t time to see The Specusphere right now, at least check out Astrid’s web site where she has a page about the raffle. Please send up a prayer for southern Australia. More bushfire weather is on the way, with conditions predicted to be as bad as the “Black Saturday” of three weeks ago when so many people died and many more lost everything they owned.

Back to the packing! I leave in less than twelve hours and I’ll need to sleep for at least a few of those! Talk to you again soon – from Perth!

Charles who-no-longer-uses-his-middle-name Finlay and is now known as ccfinlay, has a new fantasy series coming out this year. In association with his publisher, Del Rey, he is offering the first book free! I’ve downloaded it and the first two chapters are great: so great that I will buy the book, The Patriot Witch, in hard copy if I can find it (Del Rey books are not all that easy to find here in Oz). But you don’t have to buy the book – you can read the whole thing on screen. Follow the link above to learn more about CC Finlay and get your own .pdf copy.

“Charlie”, BTW, is an indefatigable rock and mainstay of the Online Writers Workshop, where I’ve served a couple of tours of duty and learnt a great deal from peer reviews. OWW has been a proving ground for some fantastic writers, including our own Karen Miller, and is well worth checking out if you aspire to write speculative fiction.

It’s always lovely to read about writers who actually make it into print. But today the magnificent Glenda Larke gives a reality check in the form of statistics from Locus magazine. Four hundred and thirty-six fantasy novels were published in 2008. When you look at sites such as OWW (link above) or Authonomy, which have thousands of members, all of whom aspire to be published, you realise that you must either write for the love of it or not at all.

The book list from the Guardian has, of course, been turned into a meme:-) I will not plague you with it, but if you do want to copy it, go to Stephen Dedman’s LJ and snaffle it from there. It’s much easier to read (although less interesting and educational!) as a straight list than as a catalogue of synopses and I found a few favourites that I’d thought were missing. So I stand corrected in regard to my reply to Juliet’s comment: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and Octavia Butler’s Kindred are, in fact, on the list. My faith in the Guardian is restored!

Last night was, of course, the annual presentation of the Aurealis Awards. There were some surprises, but I’d especially like to congratulate Adrian Bedford for his win in the Science Fiction section with his novel Time Machines Repaired by Request. Adrian’s books aren’t nearly as popular as they should be because he is published in Canada, which means his books can only be found here in his homeland in small, specialist stores. But if you like hard SF you will want to hunt them down.

If you’d like to read the full list of winners, go to The Specusphere. You’ll find it under “News” in the top right hand corner. Thanks to Lee Battersby for getting the list up before anyone else so that I could pinch it!

Another one from Bibliobibuli.

You don’t normally see any ads on my blog, right? So what’s this?
It’s a screamer of a book, complete with examples, that teaches you how to write a really, really, bad novel. You might also enjoy the website the authors have set up – be sure to watch the bookfomercial, do the quiz to see how much you would benefit from reading the book and check out the apocrypha.
If you’re like me, you’ll have a good laugh.

It must be the season for book lists. I smurched another one, this time from Lisa Gold, Research Maven

Over at the Guardian newspaper there is a list of 1000 novels some people at the Guardian think we should all read. The interesting part is that the list is subdivided in genres: (science fiction & fantasy, state of the nation, family & self, comedy, crime, love, war & travel). Skimming through the first 800-odd titles and synopses (the last section, war and travel, should be up by the time you read this) is an education in itself. I’d read at least a handful of books from each genre, yet in the section on speculative fiction, in which I fancy myself to be quite well-read, I found I’d only consumed about a quarter of the list. That’s possibly because it contains a preponderance of hard SF, and while I’d certainly read all the classics such as Asimov’s Foundation series, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and so on, there are books there that I’ve never heard of! And I’m disappointed that so little fantasy is included. I’ll be interested to read what other specfic buffs think of the list. Whatever list contains your favourites, you will probably find, like me, that you’ve read a smattering of all the other sections as well. But as with the list from earlier in the week, you will almost certainly find yourself asking “Who says we should read these particular books, and why? Why not others?”

Nevertheless, if you’re into lists of reading material this might be a good one to check out. If you do, please come back and tell me what you thought of it!

Smurched from Bibliobibuli

100 Novels Everyone Should Read … But Sez Who??

The Telegraph has a list of 100 novels ‘everyone should read’. It seems to be in reversed order of importance – but according to whose opinion, I wonder?

But anyway, when we see a list of books we have to play the game, right? The ones I’ve read are bolded.

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein

99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon

95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (Saw the movie – does that count?)

91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki

90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac

86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal

84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

83 Germinal by Emile Zola

82 The Stranger by Albert Camus (Well, I read excerpts in French…)

81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

76 The Trial by Franz Kafka

75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan

73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque

72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

68 Crash by JG Ballard

67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

59 London Fields by Martin Amis

58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald

54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

51 Underworld by Don DeLillo

50 Beloved by Toni Morrison

49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

47 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet

44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

43 The Rabbit books by John Updike

42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope

36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky

30 Atonement by Ian McEwan (Saw the film!)

29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec

28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

24 Ulysses by James Joyce

23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

22 A Passage to India by EM Forster

21 1984 by George Orwell (Saw the film…)

20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse

14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee

7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

1 Middlemarch by George Eliot

Hmm – barely 30% – and to be honest I only read most of those because they were set texts for something-or-another! There are several others there that I tried to read and couldn’t get farther than halfway, at best. And I have no desire to re-read any of the ones I finished, except maybe Pride and Prejudice and Bertie Wooster. And, of course, Hitchhiker’s Guide!

I fear my taste in books is as plebeian as my taste in music:-)