Margaret Atwood has gift ideas for aspiring authors, a good twist on the Christmas shopping lists that come out the time of year – and not just books.
Bookworm enables epub book reading. Because what we book addicts need is more enablers.
Neil Gaiman’s Twitter Audio project has released the audiobook. Listen online or download.
*** Blog on hiatus – two weeks ***
The Chronicle Review features an article on reading a book in four different ways (hard copy, audiobook, dedicated ebook reader [Kindle], and iPhone reader [eReader]). You can also hear the writer discuss her experiment at ABC’s Book Show. Big call: she says iPhone is the Kindle-killer. I concur. There’s a reason Amazon bought Stanza and has made Kindle-purchased books available on the iPhone…
I really liked this: “Tomorrow’s readers will immerse themselves in their favorite books…based on deeper needs. It will be just the sort of seamless decision we make every day when we decide whether we will place a phone call, send an e-mail message or text message or photo or video, handwrite a note, or make a personal visit.” Nice.
Um, David Eddings died. A month ago. That bit of news just whipped right past me.
The biweekly Writing World newsletter features a good article about midlisting in its first July newsletter. It kind of matches what I’ve been saying about writing and commercial success lately, except the professional writers interviewed here are do move with market trends – but they have the contacts that let them know what those market trends are in advance. New writers without contacts are going to struggle to do that, but the rest of it – be prolific and flexible, have a very thick skin, and understand that most writers won’t be massive bestsellers but can still make a living – is all good advice. Read it in the archives.
So, who DOESN’T look at a screwdriver and thinks ooh, this could be little more sonic? Captain Jack Harkness, that’s who. Torchwood’s back on tonight in the UK.
Aside from the fact that I can never remember which way round her double surname goes, Bujold is one of my favourite fantasy/SF writers, particularly for her Miles/Vor series. A Civil Campaign comes a long way into the Miles book, and is one of most openly romantic of the series, being the one in which Miles courts and wins the fair Ekaterina.
I listened to this as an audiobook rather than read it, and because of that it did take me some time to get into it – it was my first audiobook experience and it took me a while to learn how to listen properly. But by about a quarter of the way through, the audio experience was a bonus: I could start it playing and sink into the familiar tones of the very good reader, like sinking into the familiar world itself.
The other limitation was that I hadn’t read the book in which Miles actually meets Ekaterina, and so was missing quite a bit of backstory. At first I was a bit dismayed with how shy and retiring Ekaterina is – I wanted a strong, bold woman for Miles. But as the story progresses, it’s made clear why she is that way, and her strength also shines through.
The subplots, with the bugs and the transexual and the other pairings, are all a lot of fun, and the resolution of the main romance plot, in the council chamber, is a great moment.
As a straight fantasy genre romance, I think the very early (first?) book in the Vor series which is the meeting of Miles’s parents might work better – there is less backstory and complicated relationships to manage for the reader. But as a romance for Miles, with his readers behind all the way – slapping their foreheads at his stupidity for that garden plan and cheering him on when he starts making progress – this is a great read – lots of banter, lots of fun, and some very telling character moments.
The dates for next year’s Perth Writing Festival have been released: Fri 27 Feb – Mon 2 March 2009. Full program will be out in late January but I’m very excited to see Sebastian Barry is coming. Not that I’ll be in Perth then. But still. I adored his touching and beautifully-told novel A Long Long Way, an Irish perspective of World War I in the context of Home Rule (Irish soldiers treated as traitors by their own people for fighting an ‘English’ war, and by the English because of the politics going on back home).
Regular readers will know of my love for Stanza, an ebook reader for iPhone and iPod Touch. Now there’s another one: BeamItDown. The name (not especially intuitive to trying to remember it, I have to say) refers to its delivery system: instead of statically delivering the text and having you click to ‘turn’ the page, it scrolls the text down the page like a teleprompter, or indeed, like a scroll.
Currently, you can buy public domain book collections very cheaply (eg the Jane Austen collection for $2.49), or try the software free on The Christmas Carol or T’was the Night Before Christmas. I don’t know if they intend to roll it out for mainstream/modern ebooks (it may perhaps require yet another format), but certainly they are frequently adding more and more classics. Even if the ‘unique selling point’ of the scrolling doesn’t grab you, it’s a useful way to experiment with reading on your iPod/Touch if you don’t have the WiFi transfer capability that Stanza requires.
While I’m talking about book-related things for the iPod/Touch, LibriVox are doing wonderful things in turning public domain books into chapter-by-chapter Audiobook Podcasts in iTunes. Listen to the classics, or volunteer your time to record chapters.
NaNoWriMo finishes today. This collective keyboard-bashing effort has been going for ten years. Professional writers tend to look down their nose at it, with some justification, since it does minimise the skill and craft of writing in favour of the word count (quantity over quality) and I can see how some professionals would be offended by that. There’s also the risk that the high pressure of it could persuade some potential writers that it’s all too hard and cut them down before they ever get started.
On the other hand, writing is one of those professions that both fascinates people and that plenty of people think they can do, so why not encourage a try at it in a supportive environment (if nothing else, maybe they’ll be a bit more respectful afterwards). I did it in 2003 and found it useful for teaching me that I can write to a word count even when dropdead exhausted from a long day at work, so I would never completely discount its value. What makes me shudder is when successful finishers casually say they plan to give it a last quick proofread and send it off to a publisher tomorrow. Poor, poor slushpile.
The Bad Sex in Fiction Award winner was announced during the week. Excerpts from the shortlist can be read here. Let that be a lesson to you, writers: “weeping orifice” is not necessarily all that attractive in a sex scene, and perhaps avoid the “like devoted siblings” metaphors.
