New On My iBookshelf

I really should cut down on reading all those history-and-literature-based blogs. :-) I keep coming across interesting comments and stopping to go to Project Gutenberg or the iBook store to download yet more stuff.

In the last few days I have downloaded some classics. I do have Pride And Prejudice and Wuthering Heights somewhere on my print shelves, but where? So I downloaded both from PG, because I felt like a reread. I probably have a copy of Culpeper's Herbal somewhere in my overcrowded study too, but it's handy to have it available at my elbow when I'm working on my latest piece of fiction. So that was downloaded as well, though not from Project Gutenberg, because for some reason that one wasn't there. It was in iBooks for about $4, though, so I bought it. There's an introduction by Dr Johnson and the author himself has a letter to hs wife, which must have been written shortly before his death in 1654.

I discovered Escape Publishing, an ebook small press which seems to be entirely a romance themed list - fantasy, SF, YA, thrillers - any genre as long as it has romance in it. I bought Rayessa And The Space Pirates by my friend Donna Hanson, which cost me the massive sum of 99c and a thriller, which cost more, but looks like fun, though I am already noticing that the youthful university academic is called "Professor" though it's set here in Australia and in this country that term is only used for the head of department. She might conceivably have gained her PhD by her mid-twenties, if she'd had accelerated education, but Professor? Highly unlikely - and the murder victim is also a Professor in the same department! Never mind. It's a list worth checking out. I'm looking into it as a potential market.

I believe they have a pile of books for 99c right now, but if nothing else, get Rayessa.

And I've been having a ball with my ebook apps! One is good for even novel-length books, though there are limits - I can't work out a way to do italics, for example. Even if you have them in the original MS they disappear when you paste them. And while you can insert video, audio, pictures, you can't do it on the same page. This limits its use for school, where we ave kids with reading difficulties, including one bright, articulate dyslexic who deserves better than a picture book aimed at younger kids. There's another app which does allow picture and  text on the same page, even voice, which makes it good for an all-in-one talking book, but the amount of text on the page is very limited.

Still, I've used both. With the first-mentioned I have turned my WIP into an ebook I can just read, while keeping the MS in my Pages folder for later. With the second I have been showing other teachers some possible options for our kids with reading difficulties. And the art teacher can prepare her booklets as ebooks for the younger students, who will hopefully have ther iPads soonish. Saves photocopying and can be changed easily.

I have all these things sitting on my virtual shelf - nice!

Author Interview Page Added

If you scroll down through the permanent pages on the right side of this blog, you will find a new one. It's a link to my Ebook Glue-generated ebook of the interviews on this blog. It's available in ePub or mobi. This will update itself as more interviews come up, but there's room for twenty-five before anything drops off the end.

Over the years, my students and I have invited some wonderful writers on to this web site and their responses to questions asked have always been even better than hoped. I am currently waiting on an interview with Michelle Heeter, author of Riggs Crossing and am preparing some for the delightful Geoffrey McSkimming. Meanwhile, why not click through and give yourself a fascinating ebook of interviews with the likes of Marianne De Pierres, Juliet Marillier, Gabrielle Wang, Charlie Higson and Justin D'Ath and more?

Some More Playing Around With Ebooks

Having had fun with Ebook Glue, I thought I'd check the App Store for something I could use to make at least basic ebooks that don't have to be blog posts. I thought that if I can cobble together some of my own stuff, eg already-published short stories, I can also use it at school with my classes and maybe my book club, many of whom are writers, so we can share written stuff. Our Year 7 and 8 students this year will have iPads.

So off I went to the App Store and found a number of ebook apps. I ended up downloading two, because the first one I bought wasn't much use for anything but picture books. If I ever want to share family albums with friends and relatives I might go back to that one, but it won't take much text.

The other one, Creative Book Builder, seems to be working much better for my needs. You can't put the book up on-line as you can Ebook Glue books, but you can email them and I think you can park it in Dropbox.

It's fairly basic and I'm still working out how to use it. It doesn't seem to reproduce italics from a Pages document, either, and there isn't a toolbar to let you fix that. Maybe I'll figure that out eventually, because there seem to be some "import" options. BUT - I not only did a couple of short story collections, I pasted my whole current novel manuscript into it, chapter by chapter, so I can now read it as an ebook while I try to get out of my current state of writer's block. I can't edit the ebook, of course, but right now, all I want is to reread it and see what the problem is. I will also be able to email it to any beta readers I trust. ;-) The app only has ePub and PDF, not mobi, though, so any beta readers with a Kindle are out of luck there.

For anyone who's interested, the app is not that expensive and worth checking out. 

English Fairy Tales - Just Downloaded From Project Gutenberg

I love Project Gutenberg! There are so many classics, so much useful stuff. I already have some Andrew Lang, but on the Sur La Lune Fairytales site I found Joseph Jacobs, who collected English, Celtic and other folk tales in the nineteenth century and while you could read them on the web site, complete with notes, I opted to get at least one of the books on Gutenberg. I started with the English Fairy Tales book. Even the introduction is charming. He argues that while there aren't too many fairies in them, you aren't going to get children asking their nurse or grandmother for "another folk-tale/ nursery tale."

I have browsed through some of them, as well as the Celtic ones on Sur La Lune and found versions of Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, the Pied Piper, Cinderella, The Juniper Tree and Clever Else. I keep thinking,"hang on, I've read this somewhere!" And of course, I have. There are a lot of stories that just keep turning up over and over, in countries unconnected with each other.

There are evil stepmothers everywhere and heroes and heroines who break their promises to supernatural beings and live happily ever after. Serve them right for trusting humans!

It's all handy for the writing. I'm off to have breakfast and do some writing. There are some good stories to be played with out there!

Second ebook?

Let's try out Sean Wright's suggestion of choosing specific posts. Hopefully, if this works, you can follow this link and download some author interviews done on this web site, including some by my lovely students and a couple with book awards judges Tehani Wessely and Miffy Farquharson. Enjoy!

....I have updated since the above and it has added the Marianne De Pierres interview. Go get it!

Ebook Glue Test - the Blogonaut Rules

I got this from Sean Wright's Bookonaut web site. He found a free site where you could turn the last 25 posts on your blog into an ebook. I have experimented with mine. If it works, it opens up a lot of possibilities!

If you want to see my blog as an ebook, try this link: Great Raven ebook . You get the choice of mobi or ePub.

There are other things you can do with it, choosing specific posts - and Sean explains it all here. Sean wants to use it for entering this year's Ditmar Awards. Some folk like to use their blogs to publish their fiction - the possibilities are endless, as long as you have a blog.

I have a new year 8 class who will have iPads. This would be a great activity to do with them, if I can get them blogging. They can use it for story writing or just posting. Kids LOVE the idea of being published! Maybe a book club activity? Some of them are writers and poets...

Thank you, Sean!

What I've Downloaded

Ah, the joys of having immediate access to iBooks! I read or hear about a book and if it's on iBooks I can go straight there and download it! Just this morning, I finally downloaded Anita Heiss's memoir, Am I Black Enough For You? Just started reading it, but it's a delight so far. I might check out her chick lit novels later. For some time I knew her only as a bigwig in the Australian Society of Authors, of which I'm a member, but we've been following each other on Twitter and I feel I know her, even if we've never met.

The other day I bought David Levithan's Every Day, a fantasy novel in which the hero, A, finds (him)self in a different body and different life every day, sometimes male, sometimes female, and read it in a couple of hours. A very strange theme, if not unusual. The entity A falls in love with a girl who has a horrible boyfriend and what then? I don't think it's his best book, but interesting. A does tell the girl, Rhiannon, what it has been like from babyhood onwards, but surely he/she/it was born in their  own body? Who is occupying it now? We do find out that there are other entities out there with the same situation, but only meet one. The book ends with questions unanswered. It could lead to a sequel, but this author tends to write stand-alone books.

I have bought Angela Carter's American Ghosts And Old World Wonders, as I already have a print copy of The Bloody Chamber. I've read so far her thoughts on Cinderella and boy, does she make some good points on the nasty ideas in this story! And this is without even mentioning the gruesome Italian version in which the heroine murders her first stepmother, only to find herself with an even worse one.

From Project Gutenberg I've downloaded an early translation of Beowulf which has a handy blurb about the characters and a very nice glossary before the poem begins. One of these days I'm going to have a go at the Old English version. I did bits from it in second year uni, when we had units on both Old and Middle English, but the fourth year OE unit was mostly religious poetry. It did feature Beowulf, but I was doing my thesis on Middle English Arthurian romances and Malory was on the menu for fourth year ME, so I reluctantly gave up my OE, as I couldn't do both. I have also found something called Early English Meals And Manners, which is a compilation of early books on cooking and etiquette, something I can use in my research - I do write mediaeval fantasy, after all. I was looking for Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, but it wasn't available, so I picked up one of his SF pieces instead, Time Fuze.

I have picked up Harry Harrison's The Ethical Engineer, his second Deathworld book, Rebecca Stead's Liar And Spy, which I heard about at the CYL's last Booktalkers and downloaded while they were talking about it. I wanted to read Marianne De Pierres'  Shine Light, the third in her Night Creatures trilogy and ended up buying the whole trilogy as I had donated my first two to the school library. I have a feeling RH tried to deliver my review copy by courier and I couldn't get in touch with the courier company while at work, so will have to ask again. I know the kids will want to read it and someone has borrowed the second book for the holidays.

I got Scarlet by A.C. Gaughen because there was a discussion about it on a blog I was following, but found myself a little disappointed with it due to some jarring anachronisms. I don't mind the odd anachronism as long as the author admits to it and explains why, but I just don't think this author had done her research well enough. There were some interesting ideas in it and goodness knows, there are a LOT of Robin Hood novels out there, all different,so I guess this one just isn't my favourite. That would have to be Parke Godwin's Sherwood, in case you're wondering, but there are other terrific ones.

I picked up Volume 6 of the Paston Letters from PG, because I am reading two books, Helen Castor's She-Wolves, about strong English queens from Matilda to Margaret of Anjou, and Sarah Gristwood's   book about the women behind the Wars Of The Roses, Blood Sisters, alternating chapters. I'm into the
Margaret chapter in She Wolves so have caught up. Helen Castor has also done a book about the Pastons, Blood And Roses, which I have somewhere on my reference shelves.

Lots of good stuff to read over the holidays if I can resist downloading still more!

A Find, A Veritable Find!

I LOVE the Internet and ebooks! I have found, at last...

But first, for my friend Stephanie Campisi, a Haiku with unicorns in it, based on Wolfborn:

Golden sky above,
My friend's horse a unicorn,
Armand, you are shamed!

Okay, I can see a real Haiku poet sneering, but it has the five/seven/five thing and it does feature nature as required, so hope you like it, Steph! You really did like that scene, didn't you? (g)

If you haven't read the book yet, it's in Chapter 9, set in the Faerie Otherworld, and has the kind of silliness both Steph and I enjoy. I do silly. I can't help it. 

Now, speaking of Faerie, I have at last acquired an e-copy of Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth Of Elves, Fauns And Fairies, written back in the 17th century and a classic, a must for writers of the kind of folklore fiction I write. This edition has an introduction by Adrew Lang, who did all those coloured "Fairy Books" (I have the Blue one on my virtual shelves, courtesy of Project Gutenberg). It's said that Robert Kirk never died but was carried off by the Fairies. Well, I'm still reading the intro because Andrew Lang was a big name in folklore himself, and am having a ball. And you know how it is when you read something and, to paraphrase Helene Hanff,author of 84 Charing Cross Road, you find something interesting and say, "Hold on a minute!" and go check it out? Of course, she was writing a long time ago, when you had to go look it up in the library, but I bet she would have loved the Internet, which was just starting when she died. 

So, there were references to a book by Sir Walter Scott, on witchcraft and demonology, and like Ms Hanff, I said,"Hold it right there!" and went to find it with my good friend Mr Gutenberg and there it was. The intro to that one told me things I hadn't known, such as that he spent the last years of his life paying off a massive debt that wasn't his fault. Poor Walter!

But his book is there now, on my virtual shelves.

And I have the famous Secret Commonwealth! It was one of the books Melissa Marr used in her research for the Wicked Lovely series. Se really did some good research for those, some of them books I already had, such as The Fairy Faith In Celtic Countries, but this was one that had eluded me till now. And for $2.99 I now have access to it. There is an online edition, but I'd rather do it as an ebook, much easier to handle, and you can flip the pages.

Research is so much easier since the Internet!

PS What do you mean you haven't read 84 Charing Cross Road? It's a must-read for anyone who is passionate about books and reading.