Ampersand Duck has been to the Lifeline book fair in Canberra, and over-indulged, again. Her tale of woe is a delight to read, especially as she finds a wondrous book with an intriguing title: She Vomits Like a Lady. Surely a book that should be in everyone's library. It's certainly one I'm going to keep an eye out for.
Henry Rosenbloom, publisher at Scribe Publications, goes out on a limb on his weblog and attempts to describe how publishers think. Oddly enough, it comes across as perfectly reasonable. "It's a fact universally acknowledged that an unsolicited manuscript has a very low chance of being of a publishable standard; that's why it gets put, in the first instance, in what's known as 'the slush pile'. It's very hard to justify putting scarce editorial resources into assessing such manuscripts. And yet -- as numerous mistaken rejections by publishers around the world and throughout history have shown -- it's folly to treat them all as unworthy of consideration."
Ben Peek is in the midst of writing a new novel, Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld, which he describes as "my-red-sun-bushranger-inspired-revenge-narrative novel". As well as posting the opening of the novel he also ponders on a question that I guess gets asked at just about every literary festival: "A lot of people will tell you a lot of things about the practice [of] writing and they're mostly a yawn. I figure you find your way and do it, and whatever that is, you do it. Write drunk, write sober, write high, write straight, write naked, write clothed, write whenever, write however. It's the end product that matters. For myself, when I'm writing a piece, I find that having a pattern is what's important. All I need to do is sit down every day and write a bit of it and when I'm done, I'm done."
