My writing week 4 (10)

Hi all,

New Article Submitted to Divine.

I finally submitted my a new article for Divine online magazine at the beginning of this week. The article was originally going to be about the effects of ebooks on the publishing industry, but I had an awful lot of information that was not going to fit into a 500 word article. So I decided to narrow it down.

I figured that most people don’t care about agents or publishers or even booksellers for that matter, but they might care about the author. As well, the effect ebooks will have on the publishing industry as a whole is still very unclear, with many publishers adopting the “she’ll be right” attitude. But the effects ebooks will have on self-publishing are more evident. So the article ended up being about the effect self-publishing ebooks will have on authors.

This is the second article about ebooks I have written for Divine. The first article was about how ereaders make it easier for people with a disability to read. Hopefully the new article will be up soon.

Talking about Ebooks

Very surprised to read, in Jason Steger’s Bookmarks column in Saturday’s Age, that Penguin is selling a lot of ebooks. They account for 6% of Penguins sales worldwide. I would have thought their customer base would have been desperately holding onto buying print editions. But perhaps a lot of children use ereaders to read Penguin texts for school.

Computer Problems

My computer has been playing up. Freezing, restarting, beeping, black screen, error messages, streaks across the screen. I did a full recovery yesterday, but it still froze twice and then beeped at me this morning. I found a way to stop it beeping, pick it up a few inches and drop it. I think, I hope, please….that the problem this morning was due to not installing updates for the computer’s hardware, which I have now done.

The cause of the original problems was probably me ignoring the advice of a Hewlett Packard customer service officer by downloading some windows updates.

I am thinking of buying a laptop. Any suggestions would be appreciated. It’s not so much not wanting to, it’s more of a fear of buying a piece of crap that lasts only three weeks.

Guantanamo

I finished reading Guantanamo by David Hicks last week. I had remarked in an earlier blog post how it seemed too well written for someone who didn’t get to year 10 at school. Well it turns out he studied year eleven while at Guantanamo and while there he also wrote two novels. He came across as a reasonably intelligent and curious, but very naïve (although he was only about 21 when captured), person.

He was bashed, drugged, starved, tortured, subject to constant surveillance, for over five years. All for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Reading his book confirms what I had read in the Age, that he was a sacrificed to make Howard look good with George Bush. What an absolute scumbag Howard is. He deserves to be jailed.

In the end, of about 800 of the “worst of the worst” that were sent to Guantanamo only 35 are still there or have been put on trial. I will write a review of the book soon.

My Writing

Computer problems, Divine article, still the occasional asthma attack, so only a bit of editing of the novella last week. Will more computer problems wreck any writing opportunities this week?

Graham.