Sort by category: Interviews
A couple of months ago I teamed up with Angela Meyer (of LiteraryMinded) to brainstorm a new video series based around author interviews.
When thinking about the right platform, I did the rounds of what people were doing with author interviews around the web. I found most videos fell into one of two buckets:
1. Video recordings of festival appearances
2. Face to camera QA sessions filmed in a dark room
Both methods have their pros and cons, but overall most of the videos I looked at were recordings of other events and hence the delivery of the material leveraged first the set up of the event and second the video format.
One of the main opportunities to ‘see’ an author comes at festivals, which are financed by people who read books. For those of us switching over to electronic formats, festivals are often inaccessible – both by geography and by area of interest (ie going to a festival to see the one author you like) – and hence the opportunity to visually interact with authors (even in a one way format) become limited.
I feel also that an author’s public persona can be quite under-serviced by festivals, and by the quality of online QA videos. Many writers shine on stage, but many don’t, particularly when in a group or when forced… Read more
A few words from me over at Spineless Wonders – a new independent publishing imprint dedicated to the short form.
One of the biggest challenges facing writers in 2011 is choice.
Almost as loud as the voice that asks are we going to write today? are new accompanying (and irritating) voices asking who are we writing for?, what format should we write in?, which word processor?, what genre is this?, how should we publish? and finally: do we have the right font to start with?
This saturation of choice can be debilitating at any stage of writing, as it often feels that it’s no longer as simple as deciding to bunker down and ‘just write’ (as if that were easy to begin with!).
Increasingly, the craft of writing is linked to the business of writing, with new pathways to success and collaboration open to writers able to diversify away from ‘just writing’ and instead acquire skills such as HTML coding, search engine optimisation, video editing and social media. Skills that no writer would have likely ever heard of prior to a few decades ago.
At times this new state seems daunting. The expansion of choice can add a new layer of weighty, and potentially useless, overhead to the more primal task of getting words to the page.
But understanding the landscape, checking your compass (choose the more appropriate metaphor), can be just as… Read more
I first bumped into Dan Simpson a couple of years ago when we were both well out of uni and looking for a way to give our writing lives a kick start.
Not long after, we formed a writer’s group and, over the next two years, routinely dragged our sorry-arsed drafts out of drawers and into the light for some healthy thrashing.
Dan is an interesting writer, dappling in many fields (more recently speculative fiction) with a gift for landscape fiction and possessing remarkable drive when it comes to hitting the desk and getting on with the ugly task of writing. While on average I would knock out four stories a year, Dan would be close to twelve – and all whilst balancing family and work commitments.
So enough introduction. Here’s Dan Simpson’s WIP… Read more
The book trailer for Mo Hayder's novel Gone is one of my all time favourites. In fact, I liked it so much I put it on my last book trailer roundup. The man behind the production is Paul Murphy, from one-man Sydney outfit Book Tease.
It turns out Paul’s obsession with book trailers started way before mine, BY in fact (Before Youtube). I recently had the chance to pick his brain on how to make a book trailer and the past, present and future of the short format industry.
How did you get into making book trailers?
[PM] There’s something oddly circular about how it all happened. About eight years ago, I was working in the marketing department of a large Australian publisher, and one of my responsibilities was managing “book videos” (as I think we were calling them at the time).
It was a pretty doomed project – there was no Youtube or Facebook, and we’d have to convince bookstores to install these giant old TVs just so they could play them (of course, almost every bookstore has an LCD screen in their front window nowadays). But it did give me an insight into the potential of the form.
I could have filmed the Gone trailer as a straightforward film trailer, but it wouldn’t have had the same impact. To be watching these grainy figures from far away, and listening to this crackly audio, your mind still has to piece it together as you
Today kicks off the first edition of a new #wip series on unpublished writers. The aim of this series is to explore the writing process for those still working on their first novel. Exploring success, failure and all that comes between. The first unpublished novelist up is Karen Cunningham.
I should start with a correction, Karen Cunningham is technically published. A graphic designer by day, Karen produced a picture book for kids, Jenny Spaghetti, under the pen name Karen Margaret in 2001. What started as a whim to tell a story, escalated into a full time distraction as upon finishing Karen turned her enthusiasm towards a young adult manuscript.
Karen says whilst she remains proud of Jenny Spaghetti, she soon became aware that there was more to learn, and further to grow, especially when contemplating a full-length manuscript.
“I’ve been to many workshops at writers’ festivals, and also completed online courses through the Australian College of Journalism and Writing for Success. The courses gave me the ability to work to a deadline, which I really need, otherwise I just tend to put it off all the time.”
Karen,… Read more
Longlisted for the 2010 Miles Franklin award, Patrick Allington’s debut novel Figurehead blends history and fiction to explore the turbulent rise and fall of Cambodia’s infamous Khmer Rouge regime. Allington delivers his thoughts on what it means to feel ‘finished’ and the challenges of taking on the big H in fiction.
It is all too easy to pigeonhole novels that draw from history. Blurbs pine over the phrase ‘based on a true story’ and yet rarely are we encouraged to consider what is lost and gained in the process of putting the story back into history.
In his debut novel, Figurehead, Patrick Allington explores the complex and brutal set of events surrounding the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the late 1970s. Rather than stick rigidly to the tracts of recorded history, Allington courts fact and fiction in delivering his absurdist take on the period, using the inconsistencies and misgivings of his characters to give readers a glimpse into the conflicted history of a brutal regime.
“I don’t want to pass myself off as some sort of Cambodia scholar,” says Allington. “I’m sure actual scholars would have no problem telling you the… Read more
Winner of the 2009 Age Book of The Year, Steven Amsterdam's debut novel Things We Didn't See Coming launched in the US this month following critical acclaim in Australia. Amsterdam sends us his thoughts from his New York promotional tour on what's new, old and still the same for a debut novelist.
Things We Didn’t See Coming (TWDSC) spans 30 years and 9 stories, a sort of post-apocalyptic ‘coming of age’ narrative set in the not-too-distant future. Eschewing familiar caustic visions of depopulated futures, the narrative of TWDSC covers multiple ends and beginnings (including the ‘failed’ Y2K apocalypse) with less focus on death, and more on the relationships between survivors as they etch out their own unique visions of a troubled future.
Each story in the collection can be read in isolation, but together they span a grand narrative, expertly paced and consistent in tone despite the variety of environments and characters covered; from disease ridden badlands to flooded forests and lavish mansions, all populated with an eclectic cast of characters.
“The stories, once I realised I was writing a longer narrative, were kept in the same tone, ” says Amsterdam. “Some consistency was added in the editorial process. This included fleshing out enough to make sure the reader felt there was some overall narrative to adhere to.”
Top Shelf Fiction
Backed by the independent Melbourne-based Sleepers Publishing, Amsterdam’s original take on the genre has earned him praise at home in Australia and now abroad with the February… Read more
15 minutes with Linda Jaivin
Last night I had the chance to sit down with my fellow Emerging Writer's Festival bloggers and talk with novelist and translator Linda Jaivin, currently in town for the racy Dirty Words event on June 1.
Among many topics covered – Chinese Kung Fu, the art of bluffing your way through an interview, Renaissance art and French New Wave cinema – I was particularly interested in Linda’s vast catalogue of book reviews. As Linda is both a successful novelist and a critic, I wanted to find out how her position as an author influenced her approach to critquing other authors’ work.
I’ll admit that I have a pretty ignorant view of what a book review actually sets out to achieve. As a pure summary of a text, it seems a paradox that a book of 100,000 words can be explained in 150. If that were possible, all books are in dire need of more ruthless editors. And if reviews are pure opinion, how does that wash when books are such personal objects of affection? I was keen to get a more informed perspective from Linda, who has been reviewing books since before I was born.
Linda explained her approach to a review was less about like/dislike and whether to recommend a purchase, and more about giving the reader an understanding of the work itself, leaving it up to them whether they should read it or not.
She said her… Read more