My writing week 3 (13)

I felt like a writer last week. I wrote more, concentrating on a short story that is turning into a novella, and I wrote my first critique of the year, which was also the first for a writing group I joined last year. I even wrote a few well thought out comments on other writer’s blogs.

I finished reading Greg Egan’s Incandescence, which I found a very difficult read, but it had some interesting thoughts on society. I will post a review of it later this week.

I have also been reading the huge Pen Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature and I discovered, not to my surprise, that most of Australia’s early poets finished their lives as destitute drunks. I don’t think there was much of a market for poetry among convicts and those escaping the poverty of England, and many of the poems were deriding authority figures, thus destroying the one potential paying market.

Studio, the revamped Ovation on Foxtel has a few shows on writers tonight (Monday). Writers on Writers is back on and there is a doco on William Gibson. I will either watch or record them.

And now it is time for my weekly look at the Kindle ebook top 100 bestseller list. The mixture of cheap books remains similar to the past three weeks with 21 selling for $2, 11 for $2.25 to $3.50 and one for free.

The ipad was released in America a couple of days ago and it has received very mixed reviews, with complaints about the quality of its display (how could they get that wrong?) and a lack of ebooks to purchase, so I won’t be rushing out to buy it when it finally gets to Australia. I will stick to the free Kindle for PC, which I actually used last week.

Graham.