Speakeasy

Now, here at AWM, we use computers all the time. However, we are in no position to recommend computers to people, or even know what they’re called other than ‘computers’. (I can tell the difference between a Mac and a PC, and that’s about it.)

So yes, like most of the known universe, we do most of our writing on the ‘puter. But when you’re on the bus, and that perfect short story idea just bubbles up out of nowhere, you don’t really whip out your PC and start typing, do you? Or, I guess you could if you had a laptop or something. But mostly you just carry around a notebook, right?

Perfect for recording little sentence fragments, conversations you overhear, words and phrases that stick in your mind, even songs you think might be good to write with, a good notebook is a nerdy but necessary accessory for most of us. And like all good accessories, prettier is better. Here’s some of our favourites:

Moleskine - not so much pretty, but classic and classy. Comes in a billion different sizes and shapes, too.

Paperchase - I found their website a bit annoying at first, but they’ve got some funky covers, and lots of different sizes. Sold in Australia mostly through Borders.

Galison - Order online. These are pretty.

Ex Libris Anonymous - These are great; the company takes old books, rips the pages out, and re-binds them as notebooks. They look super-cool.

Field Notes - Not pretty, but very nifty-looking.

Brass-etched Steampunk Notebooks - No idea if you can buy these from him, but I’m sure I don’t need to explain why they’re awesome. And yes, I know it’s a do-it-yourself guide. I’d just prefer to buy than make…

Via Alley - Neat little things.

Kikki.K - Cute. Their stores also stock Moleskine.

And if you have the time to hand-sew your own, this 100s and 1000s notebook looks neat!

And there’s heaps more. It’s worth shopping around for a notebook you like, rather than grabbing any old thing out of the newsagents. Like so many things in life, aren’t you more likely to spend time with your notebook if it’s good-looking?

Well, now you can make a living from it too… Check out Jobs.Problogger, a jobs board where companies and jobbing bloggers can meet… There seems to be a lot of opportunities on there though it might not start off as the most lucrative of career choices with ’salaries’ ranging from just US$4 per blog (1 a day required), to $100 a month, to a percentage of ad sales for your blog page….

But if you’ve got a passion for er, tomatoes or tea (currently listed) there could be the perfect opportunity for you…

The longlist for the Miles Franklin Award has just been released. And the nominees are:

Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller
Love Without Hope by Rodney Hall
Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital
Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare
Sorry by Gail Jones
The Fern Tattoo by David Brooks
The Memory Room by Christopher Koch
The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll
The Widow and her Hero by Tom Keneally

The shortlist will be announced on 17 April, and the winner (who receives $42,000) on 19 June.

Just in case anyone out there was considering writing reviews for a living, this article from the Guardian has one or two reasons to tread carefully. It asks reviewers and critics - theatre, book, restaurant, music - what’s happened when artists haven’t been all that happy with their reviews. The answers are interesting, to say the least!

This has been out for a couple of weeks now, but Dymocks have announced their Top101 Booklovers’ Best as voted by their customers.

The list is largely pretty predictable but does contain a healthy mix of classics (The Lord of the Rings at No. 2, The Catcher in the Rye at No. 66), and contemporary (The Time Traveller’s Wife, No. 11, Bridget Jones’s Diary, No. 67), homegrown (Marcus Zusak, Matthew Reilly) and international (Joseph Heller, Khaled Hosseini) talent.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice tops the list, with the highest placed Australian writer being Bryce Courtney at No. 8 with The Power of One.

Read more at The Courier Mail.

Just came across this very interesting site from by the BBC. The WritersRoom ’identifies and champions new writing talent in film, television, radio and theatre.’ To do this, they seem to survey theatre companies, writing competitions and events, as well as accept unsolicited scripts. According to the success stories on the site, Writersroom has placed new talent on shows like Eastenders, Waking the Dead, and even Doctor Who, and sorted out a couple of theatre residencies and writer-in-residence programs. The website also has links to training and development courses, free script templates, examples of successful scripts that have come through the program, and interviews with a bunch of TV writers.

Ain’t that fab? What a great idea - an organisation with as much clout as the BBC actively scouring the crop of wannabe writers in the UK, picking out the best ones, and actually giving them jobs. It just seems really exciting, doesn’t it?

Of course, the BBC was probably getting a tonne of unsolicited scripts every week anyway, and developing a single website, and a single point of contact for all those unsolicited scripts, totally makes sense. A one-stop-shop telling writers exactly what to do and exactly where to go? We’re fond of that sort of thing, here at AWM.

Do you know what the best news is? The Beeb is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world, and they want fresh talent.

And they take submissions from overseas writers.

…to an old article someone recommended to me. Just dug it up out of my inbox. Discusses the self-publishing boom from a business perspective, and looks at booksellers’ interaction with self-published stuff.

At The Guardian.

Reminiscent of the halcyon days of late 2005, when the James Frey and JT Leroy hoax stories broke within a few weeks of each other, two new hoaxes have come to light in the past few days, and we just couldn’t resist adding them to the blog.

Firstly, the story of a woman in America who claimed to run drugs for the infamous LA Bloods was denounced in the New York Times when the faux-author’s sister saw a NY Times article about the supposed gangbanger, rang the publisher and dobbed her in. Seltzer claims her book was based on the true stories of several people she knows, to which we respond, ‘that makes it NOT A MEMOIR.’

Second, 71-year-old Misha Defonseca has admitted that her 1997 Holocaust memoir, in which she claimed her parents were abducted by Nazis and she was raised by wolves, is fake. She now claims that her parents were Belgian resistance fighters who were killed by Nazis, and that the book contains her ‘emotional truth’. In a interesting bit of additional info, we found out she was awarded millions in damages a few years ago, from a lawsuit against her publisher for breach of contract. The breach involved marketing the book in America, but one has to wonder if the publisher has grounds to demand their $22.5 million back?

Anyway, these two come after a spate of falsies: James Frey, JT Leroy, and Norma Khouri in the memoir crowd, Kaavya Viswanathan in fiction. I’m sure there’s been others lately… The LA Times has a pretty good round-up of memorable literary hoaxes, and The Guardian’s published an older, more ‘literary’ set.

You have to wonder why people bother these days. With the internet, the massive circulation of information, the proliferation of interviews and photographs, the determination of hackers and investigatory websites like the Smoking Gun, and the bunches of folks with too much time on their hands and unlimited Broadband, wouldn’t you expect to get caught?

Also, why it’s pretty pointless to blame the publishers.

We came across this great article at website Agent Query at the end of last week. It’s packed full of everything you need to know about writing good, effective query letters, from the hook and synopsis to your bio and more.

Well worth a read.