My Writing Week: Issue 18, week 5.

Hi all,

I have a cold which is trying to sap any remaining energy I have. My colds tend to hang around no matter what I do or how many antibiotics I take.  But I have continued to struggle along with my writing.

Divine Articles.

Today, Divine magazine finally posted my article on the health effects of global warming. They have had the article for a while and unfortunately the editor has been sick, so the site had not been putting up a new article every day, leading to a backlog. My article is not opinion, it is all taken straight from IPCC and Australian Climate Commission reports. It is written from the Australian viewpoint. The worst effected state would seem to be Queensland – heat, dengue fever, cyclones, viruses, floods etc.  

Yesterday I submitted a new article to Divine about the difficulties, and how some of them are overcome, people with disabilities have donating blood. I interviewed the Red Cross Blood Service’s media person and also went to the Bourke Street blood donor centre and talked to its manager. I am hoping this article does not take as long to get up on Divine.

Creating a New Website.

I created a website, basically an interactive story, for my Master of Creative Writing about seven years ago, and thought it was about time I updated it. Fortunately Bravenet which hosts my site has new website building software that creates a more professional looking site. I cut, pasted and then edited biographical information into it, and I have linked my Divine articles and interactive story to it. I now have to figure out how to get the newly created homepage under the old url.  Then I will unveil the website to the world.

I have been thinking about doing a website design course and becoming a website designer, but it would seem that the tools already available are so easy to use, and so cheap, that the demand for website designers is probably very low. At least that is the impression I get from my limited research.  Having said that, the other day I was looking at a business website in Wangaratta which had tiny white writing on a yellow background, it was impossible to read.  That business definitely needs a web designer.

Books.

I have been doing a pretty good job of keeping the book industry afloat in the past month. I bought two novels and an audio CD for a birthday present from the Book Depository, and then used up all but $2 of a $50 book voucher at a Collins Bookstore. I have made a few trips to Melbourne lately and I visited the speculative fiction bookshop Minotaur in Elizabeth Street and searched through its shelves for Australian authors. I could not find that many and ended up with two novels. 

And now Mother’s Day is just about upon us and I have bought my mother two books. One of them is The Sundowers by Jon Cleary, an Australian author, which I could not find in Australia or the Book Depository. I eventually found it on Amazon, who charged be about $16 postage to get it here by Mother’s Day. The Book Depository had sent me a 10% discount voucher so I was able to get her a Lee Child novel for $7.50 (including postage) also. So all up I’ve spent $130 and also used a $50 voucher. And four of the nine novels I bought were written by Aussies.

Things We Didn’t See Coming.

One of the novels I purchased was the excellent Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam.  It is a series of eight long stories, all in chronological order, and all about the same character. The stories start when he is a young child on New Year’s Eve 2000. The stories then extend into the future until he is fifty. Each story has an ending that I didn’t see coming, some were twists, but others were finally finding out what was going on in the story. It’s a short book, which I class it as literary science fiction. It won The Age book of the year award in 2009. I will eventually post a proper review of it.

Jack Logan, Astronaut.

I actually wrote a whole 800 words of my novel one day last week, instead of the scraps and bits I do on most days just to give me the feeling that I am a fiction writer.  I have now written 85,400 words and I am probably a little over halfway through its second section. I anticipate the third section will be about half the size of the first two sections so I still have about 40,000 words to go. That is unless some of the characters try to rip the story away from the main storyline. I must quickly kill most of them to ensure that doesn’t happen.