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AWMonline Writing Races are where a wide range of writers meet online to support and encourage each other to get our words onto the page! Racers will be launching into 2010 tonight from 8-9pm AEST. All subscribers are welcome – just head to our Forums area and say hi!

Did you have a rejuvenating festive season, finding lots of lovely writing time, or enjoying a break from the page to get out and live? I had three weeks off the grid, on the beach and then the Great Barrier Reef - no internet, no mobile, no techo-tentacles at all – and it has given me a fresh torquoise clear-headedness as I dive back into my writing projects.

Non-techno Tentacles

It also gave me time to reflect on my goals about being a member, and sometimes a leader, of various online communities. The incredible benefits of being able to find information and support anytime of day or night, no matter where I am, were brought home to me as I indulged in writerly thoughts far from any screen. Gone are the days when one needed a a head full of knowledge and a parlour full of colleagues to write successfully. Now we need skills more than knowledge – the writing skills of old, sure, but also research and networking skills different to anything known a generation ago, or even a decade.

Speakeasy 2010 will continue to focus on promoting these skills among writers, informing our reader/writers about developments in online communities and digital publishing, as well as providing current news on publishers, agents, competitions, festivals etc. So what’s been happening while I was off snorkelling? Lots!

Over at a Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, Joe Konrath has distilled five years of blogging wisdom into one great post about how to survive and thrive as a writer.

Many writers use online forums as a way to participte in a writing community. If this sounds like you, I recommend a quick look at the 3 tips outlined by the adventurous writer: learn the local netiquette, choose a forum group that requires a level of commitment that suits you, and remember forum communities are a two-way street (not a one-way self-promotional vehicle).

For those writers who made a NY resolution to get the hang of Twitter, check out the inkygirl writer’s guide, which has a comprehensive range of tips and info on planning and practicing effective engagement with the twitterverse: such as using #amwriting and #writegoal to find fellow writers online, tracking your retweeters with tweetmeme, or taking some time to consider an overall strategy for Twitter as part of building your personal brand online.

My 2010 goals for the AWMonline writing community are: to engage with industry experts to provide a range of training and resources for our members; and to work with our A-team of awesome volunteers to provide a totally clean and current database of industry contacts. With so many talented and dedicated writers of all stages and genres in our membership, I know 2010 will be another wonderful and even more inspiring year.

So, what are your writing goals for the year? And, bearing in mind that Konrath suggests we set achievable goals and reward ourselves when we reach them, what are some of the rewards you plan for yourself? Do you plan a simple celebratory meal with friends/family, or a trip to AussieCon4, or an e-reader? The possibilities are endless – and so are the opportunities!

Why is it that the more time passes between blogging, the harder it is to publish that new post? To paraphrase writing genius Aaron Sorkin, let’s overlook that I came late to the party, and celebrate the fact  that I turned up at all…

Time to catch up on recent events in the blogosphere:

They’ve started announcing the Book Bloggers Appreciation Week Awards. In particular, check out the nominations for Best Blog Tours – great leads for bloggers wishing to reach a broader audience.

And of course, you’ve all heard that Twitter has announced their new terms of service, summarised in their blog. They are eager to reassure people that, unlike Facebook, ownership of user content will remain with the user. You own your Tweets. But what rough beast slouches towards the Twitterverse? Targetted advertising, folks - it’s just over the horizon. Which is great, because I don’t know about you, but I’m sure sick of having to spend hours hunting down information about the latest miracle-celebrity-weightloss-facecream!

So have you tried the new Facebook Lite? It’s a clutter-busted version of Fb, with old school design to be easy on the download quota.

Like!

Mashable has a great short post on tips on writing for digital markets: take this quiz and let me know how your web content measures up!

• Know your objective: Do you adopt a different tone for articles, blog posts, tweets and status updates?
• Know your audience: Do you think about who will be reading your content, and target your information accordingly?
• Keep it short: Do you omit needless words?
• Make it scannable: Do you write in the F-shape, highlight your main points, and use comprehensible titles instead of in-jokes?

• Embrace constraints: Still feeling frustrated with only 140 characters, or do you enjoy the challenge of working within different physical and cultural constraints?

Give yourself a star for each yes answer. I’m about a three-star web writer. (Room for improvement is a good thing, right?)

And completely off the topic, whose September would be complete without sparing a smile for the pint-sized funkster phenomenon… so much talent it’s kinda disturbing!

I’ll leave you with a quote from NaNoWriMo guru Chris Baty, who attended a live forum at AWMonline this morning:

Once I discovered that there was a reasonably unhorrible book lurking in there all that time, I started wondering what ELSE was inside me. It’s funny what tackling an overly ambitious creative project can do to help people realize their potential.

Happy writing, folks, and I’ll see you real soon (no, I mean it!)…

With QWC’s big announcement at MWF about the new centre for excellence in digital publishing, the Australian Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book Australia), you just knew today’s post was going to be all about the digital, didn’t you?

Based in Brisbane, if: book Australia is only the third centre of excellence of its kind for digital literature established in the world, after the New York and London Institutes … if: book Australia will promote new forms of digital publishing and explore ways to boost connections between writers and audiences.

This morning, The Book Show’s Ramona Koval was in conversation with Bob Stein, Founder if:book. Generally, I am a huge fan of Ramona, but I have to say that she doesn’t do Australia proud in this interview… Perhaps if she’d been able to recall the name of the "thing that has the red light in supermarkets" (barcode scanner), we could have all seemed a bit more across the digital issues du jour. But I think the main friction stemmed from two very different timeframes of vision: Ramona seemed intent of protecting the interests of we, now, who love the book – the bound, traditional tree-book – and just what we think of those who wish to take them from us. Whereas Bob was envisioning the future, near and far.

I listened to that interview while perusing KCDC’s take on the new augmented reality apps available for the 3G iphone. My synapses had a total Gruen transfer moment: surrounded by the growing cybermall of digital technology available or relevant for storytellers, I suddenly became excited about multiplatform opportunities for creating and crafting stories for a wide-range of readers/users/communities, accessible through their preferred media. Excited like I get when I’m planning a scene for a story; dreamy and fidgeting and weirdly hyper, itching for a keyboard and a spare hour.

As a Gen-Xer, I had a childhood free of computers, and now am immersed in a career that depends on them, and a social and creative life that thrives on them. I am comfortable with the thought that in fifty to one hundred years, people are going to experience the publication and communication of ideas very differently. if:book Australia means that local cultural producers will have the chance to be instrumental in experimenting and engaging in new creative processes: cause for enthusiastic cheers, not threatened snarls.

In related digital news, today’s On Line Opinion (Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate)sees Mark Bahnisch discuss some of the myths that underpin both celebatory and catastrophic claims about social media. Mark argues that educators and organisations seeking to work in the digital media space must  review their ‘pop pschology’ assumptions about digital media and instead address crucial issues of privacy and corporate ownership from a sound basis of research.

Enter the brilliant Phoebe Connelly, who looks at the impact of corporate ownership of our digital playgrounds (AKA social media) through the lens of GeoCities’ demise. When the commercial success of a social media site is judged as wanting, the community has no control over the fate of the content they produced. Beyond corporate mercenaries, there’s also the concern of plain old link rot:

In a keynote address at a 2001 conference on preserving digital media, science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling observed, "Bits have no archival medium. We haven’t invented one yet. If you print something on acid-free paper with stable ink, and you put it in a dry, dark closet, you can read it in 200 years. We have no way to archive bits that we know will be readable in even 50 years."

He added, "Tape demagnetizes. CDs delaminate. Networks go down."

Point taken. But are authors responsible for printing books on sustainable materials? Secure digital archiving sounds more like an issue for information managers, not cultural producers. Bring on the super librarians!

All in all, a most interesting day on the intertubes, with many more to come. Have a great weekend, folks.

I love the interwebs, because people do stuff like this: create an extensive list of children’s authors in Australia with a guide to their blogs/websites. Handy dandy!

Have you seen the new blog by 2009 Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence Hinemoana Baker? Hinemoana has posted a poem, The Fossils, from her forthcoming collection. Make your day and spend a moment enjoying it.

Varuna has told us that the full information about the Publisher Fellowships is now up on their website.

The Marten Bequest Travelling scholarships are open. Here’s a pdf of the application form. See AWMonline for more details.

More reasons to love the tinterpants. Poison Doughnut calls it like it is on KFC’s trailor-trash neologisms.

Hey, I’m going to Tweet Camp – yeehah! Someone send me a care-package. Warm socks and chocolate, please.

Have a wonderful writing weekend. I will be running a stall with SF writer Trent Jamieson at my sons’ ‘Space’-themed school fete, handing out free pens and encouraging young writers – it’ll be a blast!

I’ll leave you on this inspiring note: "Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation." (Joseph Campbell in A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink).

The Melbourne Writers Festival program is now available – hoots balloon, get booking, peoples! I’ll be going down to do a brief presentation about the Australian Writer’s marketplace as part of The Whole Shebang, a professional development seminar for developing authors. I’ll be getting to as many other session as I can, including a fascinating one on digital publishing.

Speaking of publishing, Speakeasy is still at maximum outrage over the Productivity Commission’s recommendations to lift Parallel Importation Restrictions. Did you know that one in four folks in the town of Maryborough, Victoria, work in the printing industry? The recommendations, if implemented, will bring that town to its knees. Australia-wide, the printing industry stands to lose hundreds of jobs, and a good chunk of their $80 million industry. Have a read of the full report of the Commission, especially the attempts to quantify the ’cultural externality’ of literature – the exemplars given of books with intrinsic cultural value are The Old Testament and Mein Kampf! Here’s the link to the Australian Parliament House of Reps contact list - I wrote to the prime Minister, Minister for the Arts (Garrett MP), and my local representative, as well as my State representative. I encourage you to do the same. You can also join the Facebook group Australians for Australian Books.

On a lighter note, remember all the hoohah about the Hoffmonster? Check out the comments under that Speakeasy post for an astounding follow-up by a Speakeasy reader – it packs a pistol full of irony!

And just for something fun, how would you pimp the carts at your local library? See here for some prizewinning pimping. I’d do monster trucks, for sure.

… poets and novelists.

I want to see The Australian try this one: Hebrew language daily paper Haaretz commissioned one entire edition to poets and authors, both established and emerging, in place of the regular journalists. Instead of the functional quotidian fair, this became the news:

… 79-year-old author Yoram Kaniuk, whose novel “Adam Resurrected” was recently adapted for a movie starring Jeff Goldblum and Ayelet Zurer … went into the field to write about couples in the hospital cancer ward. The thing is, he’s a cancer patient, too. “A woman walking with a cane brings her partner a cup of coffee with a trembling hand. The looks they exchange are sexier than any performance by Madonna and cost a good deal less,” Kaniuk wrote. “I think about what would happen if I were to get better…how I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?”

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Tired of developing writers’ callous on your pointer finger? Developing a permanent claw from using teensy-weensy qwerty keyboards on your phone or PDA? Fear not, the PhonePoint Pen is on its way! We will soon be able to take notes by playing a weird form of charades: wave your motion-senstive smart phone in the air (like when you spelled out your name with a sparkler at New Year’s Eve parties when you were a kid, remember?) and, hey presto! A garbled message appears on your screen. Apparently, AI and fuzzy pattern matching will come to the rescue of those of us with less-than-perfect pencraft. Phew.

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Everything you wanted to know about copyright but didn’t know who to ask: CAL (Copyright Agency Limited) FAQs are some of the best around for authors looking for legal and related information about the ownership of their work.

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Treat yourself to this incredible film clip produced by Agust Jacobsson for musical group Sigur Ros featuring the Perlan special-needs theatre group. Not only is it nine minutes of heavenly music and visual, it ends with the best screen kiss EVER.

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Writing Race 8-9pm AEST tonight: AWMonline forums>Writing Race>Writing Race 16 June 2009 – all AWMonline subscribers welcome! See you there, Racers.

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Illustrators Australia are celebrating twenty years with an exhibition of illustration at Rooftop Gallery Northcote from 19-21 June. See some IA members’ iconic artworks, hear the free talks, and schmooze the wonderful illustrators’ community.

This Wired post Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature is a thought-provoking summary of issues in contemporary publishing.

From the oft-mooted:

Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

To the arguable:

The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

To the right-on!:

Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

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Artist Philipp Keel has a designed a KISS Taschen diary (the methodology, not the band). Keel astutely observes that ’there are three reasons why most people, although they have tried, won’t keep a diary. Not every day is very eventful, it actually takes a lot of discipline to write, and in retrospect, may find what they have written embarrassing.’

Now, as appealing as it may sound to be able to check your day as ‘pushy’ or ’spying’, but not both, and then follow the prompts to supply a naive comment, Speakeasy maintains that it does indeed take a lot of discipline to write. Check boxes and prompts are a fun way to inspire you to record and observe your life in different ways. But imagine if they published la belle femme bohème Anais Nin’s diaries as a tick-a-box:

Did I enjoy sex with someone shocking and/or inappropriate today?              Yes/No

Something is lost, would you agree?

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Wondering where Michael Campbell, formerly of Brisbane Writers Festival, has moved on to? According to the latest Bookseller + Publisher, he’s the new Sydney-based Editor at large for Scribe.

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Finally, has anyone noticed it’s a tad chilly ? Is anyone else learning how to operate a pen or keyboard while wearing gloves that transform fingers into woolly sausages? Writing a scene set during a record-breaking heatwave in Cloncurry, while juddering uncontrollably with cold in Lismore?

Fear not, dear bold and cold writers, for there are any number of specialised products targetting your winter needs while providing epic LOLs:

Snuggies:
https://www.getsnuggie.com/flare/next

Slankets:
http://www.theslanket.com/

The Lazypatch:
http://www.lazypatch.com/

And for bath-time, the Wearable Towel:
http://www.wearabletowel.com/

So no more excuses, although please promise me you won’t wear them to your book launch …

Happy (warm) writing this weekend!

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Need something to pick you up on a Friday afternoon? Have a look at the newly released program for the Byron Bay Writers Festival.  The Australian Writer’s Marketplace is very proud to sponsor and present a number of sessions and workshops, including Nuts & bolts: so you want to be a writer (Thursday 6th, 10am-4.30pm).

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The Google book settlement extravaganza continues:

"If You Are a Book Author, Book Publisher or Other Person Who Owns a Copyright in a Book or Other Writing, Your rights may be affected by a class action settlement regarding Google’s scanning and use of Books and other writings. Persons Outside the United States: This settlement may affect you because it covers U.S. copyright interests in books published outside the United States. If you hold such an interest in a book or other material in a book, this settlement will bind you unless you timely opt out."

If you think this means you, check out there website here, and get some advice. The big news is that the opt-out date has been extended from May 5, 2009 to Sep 4, 2009.

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Writing Racers Belinda Jeffrey and Christine Bongers both have book launches soon:

Join Belinda Jeffrey at Avid Reader for the launch of her debut book Brown Skin Blue (UQP). Special guest, Nick Earls, will be launching the book.
When: 6pm for 6.30pm start, Thursday 11 June
Where: Avid Reader, 193 Boundary St, West End, Brisbane
Bookings essential. Contact Krissy at Avid Reader at books@avidreader.com.au or 07 3846 3422.

Chris Bongers Booklaunch with special guest, actor and playwright Bille Brown.
Where: Riverbend Books
When: Monday June 22, 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM
Cost: : $10.00
QWC Members: $5.00
Reservations essential
Includes : includes a glass of wine and a selection of canapés
How to Book: Drop into Riverbend or call on 3899 8555

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The Emerging Writers Festival is in full swing. Speakeasy is especially excited about our Lisette stepping out on the festival stage tomorrow 12.30 at Melbourne Town Hall:

‘The Great State Divide: The interstate panelists will be set a challenge to discover the unique voice of their State. Is there one? And what does this say about the Australian voice? Are we really a nation of the bush or have we all moved the Australian voice to the suburbs? Where is our 21st Century spiritual consciousness? With Rachel Hennessy, Simmone Michelle-Welles, Lisette Ogg, Sean Riley and Jennifer Mills. Hosted by Dion Kagan.’

The observation that Australian voice has moved from the bush to the suburbs is one worthy of much debate. Can you think of examples among your favourite Australian authors which support or challenge this observation?

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Call My Agent!

Aspiring writers, remember to drop by AWMonline forums all next week for our Q&A with Agent Sydney, a successful Australian literary agent. Subscribers are welcome to post questions for Agent Sydney about how to find or approach an agent, and what makes an effective query letter. Please do not post actual query letters for feedback – this is a Q&A rather than a pitching session.  Agent Sydney will be answering your questions thoughout the week, so check back each day to see how the forum develops.