First person writing has a long and illustrious history – from older classics like Dickens’s Great Expectations or R.L.Stevenson’s Treasure Island, to more modern classics such as Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Kerouac’s On the Road, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, to modern … Continue reading
I love reading the kind of book where you start and then it’s like entering a tunnel. Everything on all sides just disappears – the people around you, the sounds, sights, all that stress, all those niggling guilts about what … Continue reading
The Sunday regular blog: grammar and such… There is nothing that so marks a piece of writing as unprofessional as a feral apostrophe. And yet writing “it’s” when you mean “its” is an easy typo, and one that you can’t … Continue reading
The usual Sunday post on grammar and style… Let’s get the easy one out of the way first. Whose and who’s. Simple. Who’s means who is. Always. Just like it’s always means it is. No exceptions. You can’t say “Who … Continue reading
The usual Sunday grammar or style tip… I have just been through my copyedit of “The Shadow of Tyr“. And I bless my wonderful copy editor who has the eyesight of an eagle after a mouse when it comes to … Continue reading
Ben Peek wrote an article for Strange Horizons about the Australian Aurealis Awards and the short fiction that was short-listed this year. The article has earned him a lot of flak, especially on his live journal and that of fellow … Continue reading
When I started down the road to being a published author, there were times I wanted it so bad it was a physical ache. I would carefully calculate exactly how long before I could expect to hear back from the … Continue reading
Yesterday I was preparing material for a total revamp of my website, and as I ran through a slew of past reviews, I was amazed to see how many compared aspects of my writing to other writers, all much better … Continue reading
There are two things I dislike about being a writer. The first is that I enjoy reading less. The second is that I don’t have much time to read anyway. And that’s tough for someone who started reading so young … Continue reading
I just got my royalty statements from HarperCollins Oz this week, and while chatting with another HC Voyager author on the same day, we both remarked that the third book of our trilogies had sold a whole lot better than … Continue reading
