Archive for the ‘ Books ’ Category
I’m in the kitchen at the café, scraping the detritus of some asshole customer’s food into the bin and the radio starts playing that song I can’t stand. I suddenly can’t tell what I hate more: the fact that I just stuck my finger into a pile of half-eaten and probably now disease-carrying scrambled eggs, [ READ MORE ]
We were lying in the fields on an overcast Saturday, 28 degrees, the sugar of iced lollies dribbling down our hands and hoping the sun would bless us for long enough to darken our transparent skin. Beautiful people surrounded us on all sides: impossibly thin; impossibly well dressed in that garage-sale chic kind of way; [ READ MORE ]
I figure a lot of people could save a lot of time if they weren’t rebuilding the wheel each time they wanted to get something rolling. For example, I have been contracted to build on the existing bookshop relationships for Breakdown Press and the process involved harvesting email and phone contacts of Australian bookshops. It was [ READ MORE ]
In comments on my recent post about claims that YA literature is ‘intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books’, Linnet Hunter raised some interesting questions about the perception of YA literature in Australia I was going to reply with a comment, but I was compelled to delve deeper into the subject. Reviewing Space The first [ READ MORE ]
I am currently trying to get my shit together, and the likelihood of it ever happening is feeling increasingly elusive as I try to plan and work at the same time. Meanwhile I’m reading The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis1, which isn’t helping. He’s going on about the ‘prosperity scandal’ and the mythologies that have [ READ MORE ]
I often read claims like this: So is YA taking over the grown-ups’ table? It’s a revealing question, steeped in the kind of condescension that assumes books aimed at young people are intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books, speculative or otherwise, that are ostensibly for adult readers. It’s also drenched in fear because, [ READ MORE ]
I’m really glad to be working on a book that’s not government funded. A stack of money has been poured into this and we need to earn the money back to pay off the debt. This just came to mind when I was talking to a guy who put out a bunch of comics with a [ READ MORE ]