Monthly Archives: November 2013
Review: “Ink Black Magic” by Tansy Rayner Roberts
New from Fablecroft, Ink Black Magic is both an entertaining fantasy romp in the Pratchett mode, and an absolutely fascinating book for anyone who is interested in the art of writing and popular fiction. As a tale in its own right, Ink Black Magic is a light, quick-moving comedy which riffs off familiar territory and […]
Launching In A Small Town
Well, now. That was interesting. (Signing a book for Mayor Barry Jarvis) I don’t know how many other writer-types live out in the boonies, but if this post helps anybody, so much the better. I wasn’t wholly convinced that a small town without a book store (other than the newsagent) was a great place […]
Path Of Night Rolling Onward
Okay. So Path Of Night is the first book in a series, out through small press. My goal is to keep the series ticking over with a book every six months to a year (or thereabouts given a bit of time once the Masters degree is done) to raise a profile out there in author-land, […]
Review: The Rook – Daniel O’Malley
The RookBy Daniel O’MalleyFrom Harper Collins Publishers The Rook is a debut novel from Australian writer Daniel O’Malley, and a remarkably assured and enjoyable debut it is. The back cover calls it a ‘supernatural detective thriller’, and mentions an ‘adept use of humour’, and for once the cover notes are actually pretty damned close to […]
Learning From The Mistakes Of Others
There seems to be some kind of time-honoured tradition which insists that those who would become writers (or artists, or musicians, I guess) have to learn their trade by studying The Great Predecessors. And so we read Shakespeare and Byron, Joyce and Hemingway and Woolf and so forth, and we sweat and we strain and […]
Review: Man Of Steel
I rarely bother to attend the cinema any more. We have only one cinemaplex in Launceston, and it shows nothing but the shiniest and latest and crappiest and Hollywoodest movies. Of course, sometimes I wouldn’t mind seeing those — but since it costs me well over a hundred dollars to do so with my […]
Review: Memoirs Of A Geisha — Arthur Golden (1997)
People just love this book, don’t they? I guess I can understand some of that. There’s a good deal to appreciate in the literary side of the work. Golden has done a marvellous job of evoking the characters, and creating a setting that has tremendous verisimilitude for the reader. And yet, the book left me […]
I Don’t Like NaNoWriMo
That’s “National Novel Writing Month” for those of you not plagued by FB buddies who are all desperately churning out wordage. It’s a thing that started a handful of years ago. People of all walks of life are supposed to sit down and churn out fifty thousand words over November. I’m not convinced, myself. I’m […]
The Last Bastion 
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