Astounding!
Gobsmacked! Yesterday, I was astounded three times by new information about elements of books and publishing. There are How Many Self-publishers in Australia? The first piece of astounding information occurred when reading Jane Sullivan’s Book Marks column in The Age. I am a bit behind in my reading so I was reading her August 2 […]
The Melbourne Writers Festival: A Climate of Extinction.
At the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, I attended two sessions with climate change and the future of the planet at their centre. One of the sessions was called The Science of Survival, a discussion of the book The Sixth Extinction, written by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. The book’s main contention is that the Earth is currently […]
First Flight – three debut authors at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
For the second Melbourne Writers Festival in a row I attended a session involving three debut authors. The session was free and held in a much larger room than last year’s session. The audience was young, probably many were aspiring writers. The authors were Holly Childs, Eli Glasman and Melinda Huston. The session was […]
Melbourne Writers Festival – Independent Publishers Panel
Independent Publishing: Where Next? One of the free sessions I attended at this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival was a discussion by three of Australia’s largest independent publishers about the current state and future of the publishing industry. The participants were Michael Heyward from Text, Chris Falk from Black Inc and Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe. […]
Melbourne Writers Festival – License to Thrill.
I went to the second weekend of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. I am still not sure about its relatively new venue of Federation Square. It seems so sparse and sterile when compared to the crush of buzzing crowds at the Malthouse complex. I had a good time though. I was entertained as I learned about writing, […]
Survey of the price of the top 100 selling ebooks in August.
I recently read an article in The Age that said the sales of ebooks were increasing, but the value of ebook sales had not increased. This suggests either the prices of ebooks are dropping or the price customers are buying ebooks for is decreasing. So I thought it was once more time to have a […]
A review of Lucy.
Lucy is a strange science-fiction movie. Not so much because of its subject matter, but more because it flirts with so many science-fiction sub-genres. But more about that later. The film begins in Taiwan, where Lucy, Scarlett Johansson, is exposed to a new experimental drug and finds her brain capacity greatly expanded. This increases her ability to acquire knowledge and opens up […]
Best Time to Blog.
I recently read a blog post titled A Scientific Guide to Posting Tweets, Facebook Posts, Emails and Blog Posts at the Best Times, by Belle Beth Cooper. The post had me thinking about the random nature of my blog posts. I have been trying to post once a week. For a while that used to […]
Medical Use of Cannabis
I wrote this article just over a year ago but I could not find a paying home for it, so here it is. Up until the twentieth century, cannabis was frequently used in western medicine. But more effective painkillers such as those containing opiates were developed. And then concerns about recreational abuse of cannabis lead […]
Time to Boycott Australian Goods and Services?
I am a bit meh about the government scrapping the carbon tax. The fact that it seemed inevitable has negated much of my potential anger. If anything, I just feel vindicated. It is what I expected would happen from about 2011, when I realised the Labor government had no hope of winning the next […]