Inside a dog

Just a note that a new website for kids and books has gone live: the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library Victoria has launched Inside a dog. As well as the usual stuff about books it also features a writer-in-residence – Nick Earls – who is blogging for the site.
And in case you’re wondering: it’s [...]

Wednesday

(Warning: mother post)
On Wednesdays, my son and I have a well-worn routine. He gets up at some point between 5.30 and 7.30. He comes into my bed and gives me a cuddle and before long says ‘I’m hungry, it’s brekky time.’ Sometimes I ignore him and pretend I am asleep, trying to get a couple [...]

Meanjin novella competition

I should have mentioned this before as the closing date is at the end of June but anyway: Meanjin are holding a novella competition. Entries are to be between 12,000 and 20,000 words on the themes of ‘love’ or ‘desire’.
What do you win? $1500 and consideration for publication in Meanjin.

Writers and football. Heaven.

A confession: I am a sports lover. Another confession: I love very good sports writing. I’m not talking about the everyday write-ups you get on the back pages. I talking about writers making poetry about football. So you can imagine my delight when I saw that Gunter Grass has had a go at football for [...]

Why I don’t like films made from books and a list of good ones

I am not a huge fan of the flicks and I am very resistant to film versions of books, especially ones that I love. I read books, build up a picture in my head of how it all works, what it all looks like, and then some film blows it all out of the water [...]

Beazley podcast from Sydney Uni

If you’re interested, we have podcast the lecture Kim Beazley gave last night at Sydney Uni.

Ramona the brave

Judy Blume, Anne Holm, Ian Serraillier and Beverly Cleary. These were some of my favourite things when I was a child. And now Cleary is turning 90 and she’s being interviewed by NPR. My, don’t I feel old.

Lit still matters, doesn’t it?

Today in the Australian John Coetzee is reported as taking aim at Australian universities for equipping graduates to write books or play music but failing to teach them the history of their discipline.
Should we be worried that the graduating students are equipped to write novels and stories and plays for today’s literary market but not [...]

Bringing the bloggers to the publishers

Probably old hat but today I came across Blogburst. It’s is a syndication service that feeds blog posts from its stable to mainstream media. How does it work? You submit your blog, it goes through an editorial process and if successful your posts will be fed to the mainstream media outlets that have signed up [...]

We’re all catalogers now

When I started designing websites it was all about space. That’s how I thought about it anyway. I had a set of information that I had to present logically but I had to factor in how people were going to move around that information. The easiest way for me to think about it was to [...]