The CBCA Shortlist 2013

The theme this year is "Read Across The Universe".

And here it is, this year's short list. Congratulations to those on the list. 

Here is a link to this year's Notables:

http://cbca.org.au/Notables2013.htm

Sorry, but I couldn't get those copied and pasted and some of them were on the short list anyway. I am very pleased to say that Ford Street's anthology Trust Me Too, in which I have a story, got a Notable in the Younger Readers category, though I personally would have put it under Older Readers. It's very disappointing that two of the Ford Street titles entered, Ships In The Field and In The Beech Forest, both reviewed on this blog, didn't even get a Notable. In The Beech Forest is illustrated by Den Scheer, a young woman who is going to become very well known, and one day she will mention in an interview that her first book didn't get into the Crichton Awards for new illustrators. Well, Animalia did make it to the short list but didn't win; the book that did is long forgotten, while Graeme Base continues to rake in the sales, for this and others that have been published since then. Sorry, judges, I know you worked hard and read hundreds of books, but IMO, you got it wrong in this! Perhaps, as I have heard, it was a matter of one vote - and I don't think the Crichtons have a Notable section.  There were some wonderful books that missed out, but that happens in every competition.

I will have to buy at least the Older and Younger Reader books for my library. We have Sea Hearts and Friday Brown in the Older Readers and Pennies For Hitler and After in the Youngers. I've read Sea Hearts, of course, am still reading Friday Brown,  and have After on my iPad. That's a beautiful book, like all the others in that series that began with Once, and our students have been borrowing all of them enthusiastically, from Year 7 students who read the others in primary school, to Year 10 boys who read and loved Once for English Literature Circles in my Year 8 class.

Some of the short listed folk are friends (hi Doug!) or Twitter buddies (hi Vikki, Margo!). And Vikki came to my school once, with the State Library's Teen Booktalkers. She gave a very interesting talk about how she put together her first novel, All I Ever Wanted, and it helped that she has art talent as well as writing!

Interesting to note that three of the five Eve Pownall non fiction books were published by a non-publisher - Art gallery, museum, National Library. Alas, very few regular publishers are buying non-fiction for children these days; it's very hard to sell these books in bookshops, which have no idea how to present them in such a way that buyers will find anything in particular. Allen and Unwin tried, very hard, twice, with True Stories and the It's True! series. They were wonderful books and my school is trying, right now, to get as many of them as possible for our literacy program, but they're out of print, although you can still get some of the books, such as my own Your Cat Could Be A Spy, as POD. I wrote the only non-fiction book for Ford Street, on commission, but it hasn't earned back its advance due to some stuff-ups that happened between distributor and bookshops and then, once it did get to the bookshops, it was put in the adult section. Yet kids LOVE non-fiction. Only recently, two Grade 6 children visiting my school made my day when they approached me to say how much they had enjoyed Crime Time. 

I will have to get students, perhaps book clubbers, to help me read the short listed books and perhaps blog about them or interview the authors.

Book of the Year: Older Readers

These books are for mature readers

Grant, Neil  The Ink Bridge Allen & Unwin 9781742376691

Lanagan, Margo  Sea Hearts Allen & Unwin 9781742375052

MacLeod, Doug   The Shiny Guys  Penguin Group 9780143565307

Touchell, Dianne  Creepy & Maud  Fremantle Press 9781921888953

Wakefield, Vikki  Friday Brown Text Publishing 9781921922701

Zail, Suzy  The Wrong Boy  Black Dog Books, Walker Books Australia 9781742031651

Book of the Year: Younger Readers

French, Jackie  Pennies for Hitler Angus & Robertson, HarperCollins 9780732292096

French, Simon  Other Brother Walker Books Australia 9781921720833

Gleitzman, Morris After Viking Books, Penguin Group (Australia) 9780670075447

Hartnett, Sonya Children of the King Viking Books, Penguin Group (Australia) 9780670076130

Herrick, Steven Pookie Aleera is Not my Boyfriend University of Queensland Press 9780702249280

Millard, Glenda Ill. Stephen Michael King The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk HarperCollins

9780733329838

Book of the Year: Early Childhood

Allen, Emma Ill. Freya Blackwood	The Terrible Suitcase	Scholastic Press, Omnibus Books	9.78186E+12
Cox, Tania Ill. Karen Blair	With Nan	Windy Hollow Books	9.78192E+12
DeGennaro, Sue	The Pros & Cons of Being a Frog	Scholastic Press, Scholastic Australia	9.78174E+12
Dubosarsky, Ursula Ill. Andrew Joyner	Too Many Elephants in This House	Viking Books, Penguin Group (Australia)	9.78067E+12
Harris, Christine Ill. Ann James	It's a Miroocool!	Little Hare Books, Hardie Grant Egmont	9.78192E+12
Walker, Anna	Peggy	Scholastic Press, Scholastic Australia	9.78174E+12
Intended for children in the pre-reading to early reading stages.

Picture Book Short List 2013 (arranged by illustrator)
Author	Title	Publisher	ISBN
Brooks, Ron Text: Julie Hunt	The Coat	Allen & Unwin	9.78174E+12
Goodman, Vivienne Text: Margaret Wild	Tanglewood	Omnibus Books Scholastic Press	9.78186E+12
Gordon, Gus	Herman and Rosie	Viking Books, Penguin Group (Australia)	9.78067E+12
Lester, Alison	Sophie Scott Goes South	Viking Books, Penguin Group (Australia)	9.78067E+12
Mullins, Patricia Text: Glenda Millard	Lightning Jack	Scholastic Press, Scholastic Australia	9.78174E+12
Wilson, Mark Text: Jackie French	A Day to Remember	Angus & Robertson, Harper Collins	9.78073E+12
Intended for an audience ranging from birth to 18 years range (Some books may be for mature readers).

Top

Eve Pownall Award for Information Books Short List 2013
Author	Title	Publisher	ISBN
Cheng, Christopher & Jackson, Mark	Python	Walker Books, Australia	9.78192E+12
Kerin, Jackie Ill. Gouldthorpe, Peter	Lyrebird! A True Story	Museum Victoria	9.78192E+12
Murray, Kirsty	Topsy-turvy World: How Australian Animals Puzzled Early Explorers	National Library of Australia	9.78064E+12
Queensland Art Gallery	Portrait of Spain for Kids	Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art	9.78192E+12
Weidenbach, Kristin Ill. Ide, Timothy	Tom the Outback Mailman	Lothian Children’s Books, Hachette Australia	9.78073E+12

Crichton Short List 2012

Illustrator	Title	Publisher
Acton, Sara	Ben & Duck	Scholastic Press, Scholastic Australia
Battersby Katherine	Squish Rabbit	University of Queensland Press
Bowen, Dean Written by Jennifer Castles	A Song for Lorkie	Allen & Unwin
Goh, Heidi	York's Universe	Windy Hollow Books
Okalyi, Sandy Written by Doug MacLeod	Mozzie and Midgie	Working Title Press
Streich, Michel	Grumpy Little King	Allen & Unwin

So, anyone got any thoughts on this list? Please do share!

Free Peggy Bright Books Sampler

Here's the link to a post I did on the ASIM blog yesterday, which gives yet another link to the PBB web site: http://andromedaspaceways.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/light-touch-paper-stand-clear-free.html

If you want to know why Light Touch Paper Stand Clear is on this year's Ditmars list or even if you just want a free sample before deciding whether to invest time in reading it, you can download it in PDF, mobi or ePub.

Fascinating Stuff About The Language!

If you want to know some interesting mediaeval origins of words like "boozing" and "fed-up" and "cadging", wander over to the History Girls web site for this post: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/boozing-with-old-codger-by-karen.html

I love word origins. I do an assignment on Shakespeare with my Year 8 classes - just an introduction - and start with "words and expressions first heard in Shakespeare". It's lovely to hear them gasp when they see how many there are, words they use every day without knowing they came from the plays of a man they assumed had nothing to offer them.  I never let them see the grin on my face, of course. One of our other English teachers makes his Year 9 students look up word meanings and origins. Some hate it, others find it fascinating, but I bet they're all very popular at Trivia nights afterwards! And can spell the words.

I remember an ESL class I was teaching one day. A student asked, quite seriously, if the word "pornography" was about pictures. And I said that all too often it was, but that the word itself had a base "grapho" meaning, "I write".

And immediately, this African boy, who had been in the country for about a year, made an association: "Graffiti!" he exclaimed.

I do love those, "Ah ha!" moments.

About My Ebooks - Working?

I see that I have had a nice number of hits on my ebook links, especially for my story sampler. If you've visited that area of the web site since my ebooks went up and clicked into the download, have you had any problems with it? Please comment below and let me know - did it open okay or did you have trouble? Nobody has said anything, so I assumed it was okay, but to be sure I asked an overseas friend with an iBook shelf to open it and she said she got the message "file unsupported". Mind you, I got a similar message first go and next try it worked fine, but I need to know, so I can fiddle again if necessary.

Also, Austin and Isabelle, did your PDF files open okay?

Saturday Morning And Yet Another List About to Hit

The other night I went to the Westgarth Cinema in Northcote, to see the opening night of Return To Nim's Island, loosely based on Wendy Orr's novel Nim At Sea. It was a charming film and the author was there signing. Wendy is a Twitter buddy and a fellow Ford Street writer. The place was filled with local children's and YA writers; I had a long conversation with Elizabeth Honey and briefly ran into Gabrielle Wang and another Twitter buddy, Mel Selemidis, both of whom had brought their own children. I ended up sitting with my friend and publisher Paul Collins and his children's writer partner Meredith Costain and joked that it was a bit like a party at his place: you couldn't throw a stone without hitting a children's writer!

Afterwards, I asked him if he had entered In The Beech Forest for this year's CBCA awards. He said he had, along with Ships In The Field which has done well. Mostly, he doesn't enter. Ford Street is a small press which he runs from home and it costs to enter, more than he can afford, and when he was entering he didn't even see on the CBCA short list books which had been on the short list for the Premier's Award.

But these two were special. I am keeping my fingers crossed that at least Den Scheer, the artist of In the Beech Forest, will be up for a Crichton Award, the one for new book illustrators. She deserves it.

Anyway, the list will be up at noon on Tuesday and I will pop it up here soon after that. I wonder how any I have on my shelves in the library? How many I have read? The thing is, I've read so much overseas stuff that some great local books may have slipped past me.

I invite my Aussie readers to speculate between now and Tuesday. Any thoughts on this?

High Interest Low Reading Level?

Today I'm putting on my teacher and librarian hat. Probably I should post this on my other blog, and maybe I will copy it on at some stage, but that one gets only a few hits a week and this is where most of my readers lurk.

And, as always, I'm frustrated by what gets published for kids. I am trying to sort out my messy living room and have unearthed some books I brought home to read for my students before starting Literature Circles in class. I teach English and run the library in a school where there are some wonderful kids and some very good readers, but also some who are not so good at reading. And while there's plenty for the former, there's very little written for the latter.

These two books, which I won't name here, are thin. The print is large. The story is simple - but the words aren't. "Patented". "Leisure". "Clawing". "Finale". Long sentences scattered among the short ones. They look simple, but I have students who are in their teens and reading at early primary school level. We're working on fixing that, but meanwhile, we need books that are on teenage themes and children's reading level, to help us fix it.

I really think many publishers just don't get it. They think if it's thin it's suitable. That's when they're making an effort, mind you. I remember bringing up this matter at a SCBWI conference where they were showing off very cute stuff for Grade 3 children. When I put up my hand and asked,"What are you publishing for teens who are reading at Grade 2or 3 level?" I got a shrug and an admission that they weren't, and had no plans to do so any time in the near future. They were publishing for primary children who were reading at the right level.

I asked a publisher some time later and the reply I got was,"Oh, we know there's a need, there just isn't a market." Really? That's news to me.

There has been great stuff published in the past. We have been collecting it lovingly from our library shelves; it's generally out of print. I'm still wading through web sites and finding the occasional gem. There just isn't enough. And what is there is mostly just a little too hard for teenagers who are reading at the levels some of ours are at.

I have had to write some stories myself, just to have something to take to class. These days I'm too exhausted to write anything in this area that would be publishable by a real publisher. It's stopgap stuff in which I use words from the word lists and write my students into the stories. They enjoy it, but it's only a small thing, not usable outside my school's classrooms.

We need something better and we need it published by big publishing houses - now!

Meanwhile, I will have to go to our literacy library and see what I can find for use in my Literature Circles classes. It won't be exciting stuff, but they'll be able to read it. Not a way to get kids excited about reading.

New Downloads

I have bought a novel called The King's Daughter by Barbara Kyle, who posted on a blog I follow, and won an ebook copy of At Drake's Command by David Wesley Hill, an adventure about Drake's second world circumnavigation as seen from the viewpoint of a young assistant cook on his ship - I think it's YA, but the author tells me his agent couldn't sell it as such because the hero is twenty and has a job. Looks like these publishers haven't come across much Australian YA fiction!

From Project Gutenberg I picked up some Jules Verne which I should have read long ago, From The Earth To The Moon, which I wanted because of an idea I have for a Steampunk anthology being put out by Ticonderoga Press. Never done Steampunk before, though I love it, and this is Steampunk ROMANCE! Oh, well, have to give it a go.

I also picked up Verne's In Search Of The Castaways, which I saw as a Disney movie when I was still at primary school - a recorder band excursion - yes, I played the recorder! Not very well, but I haul it out now and then, along with my ocarina. 

Great Raven Author Interviews Now Active

I have spent the evening putting together a CBB ebook of the interviews that were originally on Ebook Glue and parked the ePub version for you in Dropbox. All you need to do is follow the link and download, by opening the page on the side of this web site. If you want PDF, just ask. I intend to do another one when I have gathered some more - and there are some lovely folk out there waiting patiently to receive their interview questions from me. Now I'm on term break, I can do that.

There are some great interviewees already!  I speak of people such as Marianne De Pierres, Gabrielle Wang, Justin D'Ath, Juliet Marillier, Charlie Higson, Stephanie Campisi, Mark Walden... Go on, check it out, you know you want to!

And if you really couldn't be bothered to scroll down the page for the link, here it is:

http://db.tt/OGYJ3PUI

The Ditmars - What I've Read

As other people, such as Sean Wright the Blogonaut, are commenting on this year's Ditmars short list, I thought I might talk about those titles I have read. Sean has read a LOT more than I have, even though I bought some, but just didn't get around to reading them.

However, for what it's worth, here's my thoughts on what I have read:

Best Novel:

Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan, published by Allen And Unwin

A wonderful novel about selkies, with powerful characters, where you can sympathise with the anti-heroine, Miskaella. It's also short listed for the Stella Awards for women's writing and an Aurealis.  I have reviewed it here.

Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth, published by Random House Australia.

An amazingly wonderful historical fantasy, centred around the fairy tale Rapunzel, intertwined with the story of the author of the French version, a young woman who lived in the seventeenth century, and the story of the witch who imprisoned the Rapunzel character.  Alas, I never got around to reviewing this one, but trust me, it's a fabulous read. It, too, is on the Aurealis short list.

It's a hard choice between these two and I'm betting that the prize ends up going to one of the small-press publications, which, oddly, more fans might have read.

If you haven't read either of these, by all means get them now, but you may not have the time to give them that they deserve if all you want is to make a decision about the Ditmars. I have read them and even I had a struggle as to which I should vote for!

Best Novella/Novelette:

Um, I have only read Flight 404 by Simon Petrie, published by Peggy Bright Books. And that was because I proofread it (yes! You can blame me if there are any typos left, but there were, as far as I could see, about two minor typos in the entire manuscript.)

It's a good piece of hard science fiction, which is a relief for anyone who has had enough of the sort of fantasy you read in fat fantasy trilogies. At the same time, it's about people, and the transgender heroine has a lot to think about while trying to find out what happened to her sister's spacecraft. As far as I'm concerned, I don't care how great the story is and how good the science is if I don't care about the characters as well.

I hope some of you downloaded it during the short period when it was available free on Amazon? If you didn't, it's still available on the PBB web site in ebook form for about the price of a cup of coffee, or you can get it in paperback.

Best Short Story:

Sorry,again I have only read one of the stories on a fairly short list, and that's Joanne Anderton's "The Bone Chime Song", which was published in Light Touch Paper Stand Clear, Peggy Bright Books, in which I also had a story. A nice, haunting piece of horror fiction with characters you can care about. This is one reason why I can't read horror fiction: if it's well written, nasty things happen to characters you care about. It seems to have been the favourite of most reviewers of the anthology.

Best Collected Work:

Gulp! Again, only one of the short listed books! And that's because I had a story in it.  Sorry! she squeaked. I haven't reviewed the book, as I had a personal interest, but you can find a series of guest posts by most of the authors, the editors and the cover artist on this blog in July 2012, starting with the last day of June (it was June American time).

Personally, I'd go and read the book first. Again, it's something you can download from the Peggy Bright Books web site or buy as a paperback. It's a wonderful anthology, with hand-picked authors  - take a quick look at my guest posts to see who they are - and one of the stories, Joanne Anderton's "The Bone Chime Song", is on the short list, so you can kill two birds with one stone. ;-)

The theme was the title. I interpreted it as "Beginnings" but others came up with other ideas.

I will leave you to choose your own favourite artist and fan writer, though I think both the ASIM 56 cover, with that silly birthday cake on it, and Les Peterson's cover for LTP, both of which collections I own, were great, and I love both Sean Wright's blog and Tansy Rayner Roberts' delightful writing on media SF themes.

Again, pick your own William Atheling critic - I have only read some of the Tansy Rayner Roberts stuff.

Why have I read so little? Well, I tend to spend most of my time reading YA fiction, due to my job as a teacher-librarian and my work as a YA book blogger. And you know what? When the Children's Book Council short list comes out next week, I bet I won't have read too many of those either, because I keep being sent overseas stuff to read and review. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the wonderful picture book In The Beech Forest by Gary Crew and young artist Den Scheer will be on it. She is going to be the next Shaun Tan, I just know it!

But I'll worry about that next week and probably have to go shopping for books I don't have in the library, after the holidays.

What do I think should have been on the short list that wasn't? Plenty, but off the top of my head, I am sorry that there was nothing from Mythic Resonance, the one and only anthology put out by the now-sadly defunct Specusphere web site. I think it's at least as good as Light Touch Paper. Still, Satima Flavell, who edited my story in that, "Brothers", says her story "La Belle Dame" has been short listed for a Tin Duck, the WA awards; by now, the winners of that have been announced, but I don't know yet what they are. Still, it deserved its short listing and personally, I think it deserved a Ditmar listing too.

It would have been nice, too, to have a short listing for ASIM 56 itself, not just for the cover. It was the tenth anniversary issue of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and all the stories were carefully chosen for quality, and the art was great too. Still - some of those stories are on the Aurealis list and who knows? Perhaps more will be short listed for a Chronos Award. Fingers crossed!

Remaking My Ebooks

Right now, I'm copying and pasting the interviews that were in my Ebook Glue ebook into something I can park on Dropbox when ready. Then I will be able to put in a link for you. I still can't seem to work out how to put PDF there and I'm not sure I can; yesterday I tried posting an experimental PDF from Pages and it wasn't offered as an option on the "share". It WAS offered in CBB, but nothing happened. And, of course, CBB doesn't do Mobi at all. So you Kindle users or people without an ereader will just gave to keep requesting from me(email under "Contact Me"). At least till I find an app that will let me do these things, but will they go to Dropbox? No idea!

But it has been kind of fun going through all my old interviews. I've pulled up 13 so far, a baker's dozen of interviews with YA writers and children's writers and two wonderful CBCA judges and one that was strictly speaking a guest post, from Mary Victoria, but hey, she does interview her character, the World Tree!

It will be up soonish. I need a cover. I've gone through Wikimedia Commons but so far found nothing to suit me, so I will take my own photo, of my own books, as a cover. I've written an introduction.

When it's up, if you want to read the interviews without going to all the trouble of ploughing through my archives, you can simply head to the side of the page and download, or you can ask me for a PDF.

And I can have the ebook available for my students, especially those who did some of them!

Thanks to those who took up my offer and clicked into the sampler yesterday - I hope you enjoy the stories and if you want some more, there are the ASIM ones as well. Help yourselves!

Or I  could also offer an online version of some of them in my Pages section, if you're happy to just read it here, or links to the posts. What do you think? 

The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth. Sydney, Random House Australia, 2013

There must be something in the air here in Australia. There are all these women writing amazing fiction with fairy tale themes. I can think of four without any trouble: Sophie Masson, author of several YA novels based on such folk tales as Tattercoats, Sleeping Beauty and, most recently,"Aschenputtel", the German version of “Cinderella”. Juliet Marillier, author of the Sevenwaters series that began with Daughter Of The Forest(“The Wild Swans”) and Heart's Blood(“Beauty And The Beast”). Margo Lanagan, with Tender Morsels (“Snow White And Rose Red”) and, of course, Sea Hearts, which is on the Stella short list, two sections of the Aurealises and the Ditmars. In the last year there has been the Specusphere anthology, Mythic Resonance, which had folk tale-inspired stories both by women and men.

And there's now Kate Forsyth, best known for her children's books, who has written two novels in a row on fairy tale themes. Bitter Greens (on both the Aurealis and Ditmars list this year)  was about the young woman who wrote a version of the Rapunzel story back in the seventeenth century, intertwined with the Rapunzel tale itself. That one was historical fantasy; The Wild Girl is straight historical fiction centred around those collectors of tales, the Brothers Grimm, as seen by the girl next door, Dortchen Wild, who would eventually marry one of them and told them about a quarter of the stories in their collection. But the fairy tales are there anyway, again intertwined with the main story, though not in exactly the same way as in Bitter Greens. There are quotes from the stories Dortchen Wild told Wilhelm Grimm, caerfully connected with whatever is happening in that part of the novel.

Dortchen Wild, daughter of an apothecary and no mean herbalist herself, falls in love with Wilhelm Grimm when she is just twelve and he a few years older. He is the big brother of her best friend Lotte, kind and handsome and probably doesn't know she exists, except as someone who knows many of the folk tales he and his brother Jakob are collecting.

But the years go by. Napoleon invades. The small German country of Hesse become the kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Napoleon's extravagant and heedless younger brother, Jerome. The Grimms and Dortchen's family have a lot more to worry about than a romance that might or might not happen. And Dortchen has been abused horribly by her father, one of the nastier characters I have come across in fiction recently.

This is a wonderful piece of historical fiction. It is based on an idea expressed by Valerie Paradiz in Clever Maids:The Secret History Of The Grimm Fairy Tales, that the Grimm brothers got their stories, not from illiterate peasants and old grannies at the spinning wheel, but from middle class, educated young women of their acquaintance, starting with the girl next door.

As with  all good historical fiction, history has been interpreted. There will always be some things we don't know, and when that happens, the author has to pull together the facts we do know and come to a conclusion. This has been done very well, so that I read it and thought,"Yes, this could really be how it happened." The author has taken only a few minor bits of license, which she mentions in her afterword, but she has done it intelligently. She has researched the period and the people thoroughly and made it all believable. It's strange, reading it, to imagine that all this was going on while the Regency was happening in England and Jane Austen was writing gentle, witty romances.

I hadn’t realised that the first edition of the Grimm stories was a flop. Live and learn!

 Another thing: I always thought the Grimm stories were nastier and more violent than their counterparts in other countries, but this isn't always the case. While reading The Wild Girl I was comparing Grimm stories with those of Perrault and others. “Sleeping Beauty” in Grimm ends with the princess and her prince wandering off happily into the sunset; the French Perrault story doesn't and with the princess awakening. She has a monster for a mother-in-law - literally! One who tries to eat her and her children. “Aschenputtel” has some gruesome bits, but at least Grimm's Cinderella isn't a murderer like her Italian counterpart, Cenerentola, whom I discovered on Sur La Lune Fairy Tales. The story of “Little Red Riding Hood” is nastier in the French version.

Whether you love fairy tales or historical fiction or romance, there is something for you in The Wild Girl.

Available now in all good bookshops in Australia or you can buy it online here. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can get it in the iBooks store.

Ditmars Open Now!

The Ditmar Awards, Australia's answer to the Hugos, have opened for voting. You do have to be a member of the Natcon to vote, but you don't have to go there - a supporting membership should be enough.

Here's the link to the web site:

 http://conflux.org.au/2013/03/27/ditmar-awards-voting-now-open/

And here is the list itself:

Best Novel
————————————————————————
* Sea Hearts, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)
* Bitter Greens, Kate Forsyth (Random House Australia)
* Suited (The Veiled Worlds 2), Jo Anderton (Angry Robot)
* Salvage, Jason Nahrung (Twelfth Planet Press)
* Perfections, Kirstyn McDermott (Xoum)
* The Corpse-Rat King, Lee Battersby (Angry Robot)

Best Novella or Novelette
————————————————————————
* “Flight 404”, Simon Petrie, in Flight 404/The Hunt for Red Leicester
(Peggy Bright Books)
* “Significant Dust”, Margo Lanagan, in Cracklescape (Twelfth Planet
Press)
* “Sky”, Kaaron Warren, in Through Splintered Walls (Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Short Story
————————————————————————
* “Sanaa’s Army”, Joanne Anderton, in Bloodstones (Ticonderoga
Publications)
* “The Wisdom of Ants”, Thoraiya Dyer, in Clarkesworld 75
* “The Bone Chime Song”, Joanne Anderton, in Light Touch Paper Stand
Clear (Peggy Bright Books)
* “Oracle’s Tower”, Faith Mudge, in To Spin a Darker Stair (FableCroft
Publishing)

Best Collected Work
————————————————————————
* Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan, edited by Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth
Planet Press)
* Epilogue, edited by Tehani Wessely (FableCroft Publishing)
* Through Splintered Walls by Kaaron Warren, edited by Alisa Krasnostein
(Twelfth Planet Press)
* Light Touch Paper Stand Clear, edited by Edwina Harvey and Simon
Petrie (Peggy Bright Books)
* Midnight and Moonshine by Lisa L. Hannett and Angela Slatter, edited
by Russell B. Farr (Ticonderoga Publications)
* The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011, edited by Liz
Grzyb and Talie Helene (Ticonderoga Publications)

Best Artwork
————————————————————————
* Cover art, Nick Stathopoulos, for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight
Magazine 56 (ASIM Collective)
* Cover art, Kathleen Jennings, for Midnight and Moonshine (Ticonderoga
Publications)
* Illustrations, Adam Browne, for Pyrotechnicon (Coeur de Lion
Publishing)
* Cover art and illustrations, Kathleen Jennings, for To Spin a Darker
Stair (FableCroft Publishing)
* Cover art, Les Petersen, for Light Touch Paper Stand Clear (Peggy
Bright Books)

Best Fan Writer
————————————————————————
* Alex Pierce, for body of work including reviews in Australian
Speculative Fiction in Focus
* Tansy Rayner Roberts, for body of work including reviews in Not If You
Were The Last Short Story On Earth
* Grant Watson, for body of work including the “Who50” series in The
Angriest
* Sean Wright, for body of work including reviews in Adventures of a
Bookonaut

Best Fan Artist
————————————————————————
* Kathleen Jennings, for body of work including “The Dalek Game” and
“The Tamsyn Webb Sketchbook”

Best Fan Publication in Any Medium
————————————————————————
* The Writer and the Critic, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond
* Galactic Suburbia, Alisa Krasnostein, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Alex
Pierce
* Antipodean SF, Ion Newcombe
* The Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
* Snapshot 2012, Alisa Krasnostein, Kathryn Linge, David McDonald, Helen Merrick, Ian Mond, Jason Nahrung et. al.
* Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus, Alisa Krasnostein, Tehani
Wessely, et. al.
* Galactic Chat, Alisa Krasnostein, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Sean Wright

Best New Talent
————————————————————————
* David McDonald
* Faith Mudge
* Steve Cameron
* Stacey Larner

William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review
————————————————————————
* Alisa Krasnostein, Kathryn Linge, David McDonald, and Tehani Wessely, for review of Mira Grant’s Newsflesh, in ASIF
* Tansy Rayner Roberts, for “Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy.
Let’s Unpack That.”, in tor.com
* David McDonald, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Tehani Wessely, for the “New Who in Conversation” series
* Liz Grzyb and Talie Helene, for “The Year in Review”, in The Year’s
Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011
* Rjurik Davidson, for “An Illusion in the Game for Survival”, a review
of Reamde by Neal Stephenson, in The Age

I see that the wonderful Sea Hearts and Bitter Greens are both on the Best Novel list - they were both in the Aurealis Awards. And Light Touch Paper Stand Clear has a short listing in the best collection, which is a thrill for me, as I was honoured by having a story in it. And one of the stories, by Joanne Anderton, is also on the short list.

Well, it was a fabulous collection and I am so proud of Edwina and Simon for the work they did on it and the great choices they made in the stories! I also must congratulate Simon Petrie whose novella Flight 404 is on the list. I proofread that. Maybe the free downloads Peggy Bright Books did of this helped. If you want to read it now, it's not expensive and is able to be bought on the Peggy Bright Books web site.

I must also congratulate my book blog and teacher colleague Sean Wright, the Blogonaut, for having his web site up there. Here is a link to Sean's web site, with his most recent post:

http://bookonaut.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/ditmars-2013-best-novel-comments.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Bookonaut+(Adventures+of+a+Bookonaut)

Even if you can't vote, it's worth checking out.

Congratulations to everyone on the list!

My ASIM Stories Back Up!

If you take a look at the side of this page, at Pages, you'll notice I have reinstalled my ASIM stories, as   Sue's Andromeda Spaceways Stories, right below Sampler Of Sue Bursztynski Stories 2012 , which are the ones eligible for the Chronos Awards. If you live in Australia, you have till Monday to read and nominate them. They're all stories I'm proud of, but with so much published by Aussie press, big and small, some things get missed, alas. If you're outside Australia, why not download them anyway? They're free.  In any case,  both these pages will stay up and may occasionally be added to.

Just be aware that the files are ePub only, as that's what Creative Book Builder does, as well as PDF. No Mobi at this stage, alas, but PDF can be opened on a Kindle, it just doesn't have a cover. If you want PDF, feel free to contact me at sbursztynski@gmail.com and I'll send it to you. Thanks, miki and Austin, for requesting your PDFs, which I hope you will enjoy!

Ebooks Back Up - and the Chronos Awards!

Ebook Glue has gone to a paying model. It's not that I mind paying - they don't charge much - but I don't like placing my card details online any more than I can help. If I could do it with an iTunes card, I would. 

So, sorry, goodbye Ebook Glue, which was a fabulous site to use and good luck to the person who runs it. But it means that any links I put there have been wiped, along with all the other free ebooks created there. If you downloaded one, it will still work, but if you go to the site, you'll find the page is nonexistent. I have left the interviews link up on Pages for the moment, till I can rustle up another ebook, using my Creative Book Builder app.

I had no idea how to make a link for a CBB file till I had tea and chips with a technological friend last night. Bart had a fiddle on his iPhone, by way of experiment, and discovered that you can upload your CBB files  to Dropbox, email a link  to yourself (or anyone else) and then I simply needed to copy and paste the link here. A little long-way-round, but it works, so thank you, Bart!

For the time being, if anyone wants a PDF file, they will have to request it, because I couldn't get my PDF files up there, not sure why, since I saw other PDF files in my folder. But I'll work it out. I *think* you can put PDF on Kindle, but CBB doesn't do Mobi, alas. So for the time being, anything you download from here will be strictly ePub (another thing I will miss about Ebook Glue, which gave you both options).

I will be putting the ASIM  stories back in the next day or two - probably two, because I am about to get myself ready and go collecting donations for the Royal Children's Hospital, which will take me all day, then spend time with my family.

Meanwhile, I have put back the Sunshine College anthology - I am so proud of our students! - and, more importantly for me, all my stories that were published last year. I did this too late for the Ditmar Awards, but there are still a few days left till the Chronos Awards nominations close - Monday, in fact. Probably still too late even for that, but if you're reading this, why not download the book and, if you love them, and live in Australia, how about nominating one for the Chronos Awards? And if you don't live in Australia, why not download the ebook anyway? Perhaps if you like it, you might check out some of my other stuff. Even if you have read the stories, I have added an afterword to each, explaining what was behind them.

Here are the stories:

Brothers, first published in Mythic Resonance and edited by the lovely Satima Flavell, who has already nominated it for a Chronos. Snow White and the Seven Tolkienesque Dwarves. I wondered what would happen if Snow White had been less passive and the cutesy dwarfs were more like Tolkien's Dwarves.

Midwinter Night: A story first published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #54, edited by Simon Petrie. Set in the universe of my novel Wolfborn, it is seen from the viewpoint of Yvonne, a cousin of Eglantine, the wife of the werewolf knight, Geraint. In this we learn just why Eglantine was so terrified when she found out her husband was a werewolf. It doesn't matter if you've read the novel or not - the story stands alone. 

Five Ways To Start A War, published last year by Peggy Bright Books, in the anthology Light Touch Paper Stand Clear, edited by Edwina Harvey and Simon Petrie. This anthology is itself on the Ditmars list, by the way, along with one of the stories, The Bone Chime Song. My story is about how the Trojan War started, from five different viewpoints - and if you're expecting a Greek tragedy, you'll be disappointed. I was in an extremely silly mood when I wrote it.

So, given that some of you may prefer to click straight into the link, here are the links to the ebooks that I have put back. Download and enjoy!

Sunshine College Best Writing Anthology

http://db.tt/Osd7VgtK

My Chronos-eligible stories for 2013

http://db.tt/nul4k5Tz

Various Awards Happening At The Moment

I am delighted to say that Margo Lanagan's Sea Hearts aka  The Brides Of Rollrock Island outside Australia, has been short listed for the Stella Award for Aussie women's writing. I reviewed it on this web site soon after it came out and still love it. Fingers crossed that it wins!

The Aurealis Awards short list is out, announced here. Alas, you can't vote for this, as it's judged, but Margo's novel is there too, along with Kate Forsyth's Bitter Greens and one of Juliet Marillier's wonderful Sevenwaters novels, which are set in Ireland and began with an adaptation of "The Wild Swans" fairy tale. I can only say I am glad I don't have to judge among these three! There are two Andromeda Spaceways stories there - neither of them,alas, mine - sniff!

There's one more, which you can still nominate, between now and April 1. It's the Chronos Awards for Victorian spec fic writing, the eligibles listed here. This is our answer to the West Australian Tin Ducks. Anyone can nominate a book or short story or even a blog, under "fan writer". The details are here.

I wouldn't be human if I didn't ask you to nominate something of mine. In the past year I sold three eligible short stories, to ASIM, Light Touch Paper Stand Clear and Mythic Resonance. All of them are available as ebooks and well worth reading, even if you choose someone else's story, but remember it has to be someone living in Victoria. Or you can nominate this blog, as body of work, for "best fan writer".

Or you can just go to one of the above links and nominate whoever you like. :-) 

About That Ebook I Was Going To Give You...

Yesterday I put up a post, which I have temporarily withdrawn, about celebrating my hundred thousandth hit on this blog with a little ebook of my published ASIM stories. Only problem is that it didn't work. Well, it did, but despite my careful following of the instructions about refining my choice of posts to include, I got not only the stories but ALL the posts that made up a previous ebook, the anthology of Sunshine College student writing.

 Now, that's a great ebook and if you want to read some wonderful stuff written by teenagers at my school, there's a link on the side of this page to it. But I didn't want that. I wanted three stories I had sold to Andromeda Spaceways some years ago to be available to anyone who wanted to read them.

So, I am going to email the lovely folk at Ebook Glue to see if they can make sense of it and meanwhile, if you don't mind taking a litte extra trouble, email me - the address is up there under "Contact Me" - or put a comment below, with your email address,  and I will send you the Creative Book Builder version, which has a prettier cover. No Kindle option, I'm afraid, but PDF and ePub are both available. The stories are "Bytepals" - a very silly story about teenagers, chatrooms and vampires, which made it into the first Best Of ASIM fantasy anthology, "Choices" in which the sorceress Nimue, Merlin's apprentice, tries to stop Camelot from falling and "Of Loaves, Fishes And Mars Bars" in which a family has had a really cheap looking cup for generations and start to suspect it might be much, much more than it seems - that one got an Honorable Mention in the annual Best Fantasy And Horror anthology edited by Kelly Link and Ellen Datlow. I still get that book out and preen every now and then. One day, who knows, something I wrote might actually be in there, but hey, someone in that publication liked my story enough to at least mention it was worth reading! And they read a LOT of stories.

Why not get in touch and ask for it? It's FREE, guys!

Celebrating My 100,000 Hits With a Free Ebook!

Today my blog reached 100,000 hits and beyond. I wondered how to celebrate. I have, to be honest, become a little tired of book giveaways; hardly anyone ever enters, no matter how well promoted the giveaway is! It's a disappointment. That doesn't mean I will never do another one, but right now - no.

However, I have decided to do a sort-of-giveaway. I have put together some of my stories originally published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, as an ebook. I couldn't find the file of my first one - I think I may have typed it on a previous computer and somehow it's just not there any more. I will retype it from the published version - later. The most recent is really too recent, having been in ASIM #54, which is still in print, and unless it somehow made it on to the Ditmar short list, I think I will leave it for now. I should have done this while the Ditmar nominations were still open - too late, alas!

So, from now on, you'll find a permanent link on the side of this page - well, as long as Ebook Glue is around, and it's a fairly new web site.

I had to do it in Ebook Glue to be able to put a link on to the page, so it will have a plain cover and the title "Creativity Rocks!", which is the title of the blog I set up especially for the purpose of turning posts into ebook for my students' work, but if you want something a little fancier, email me and I'll send you the version I created on Creative Book Builder. But that version is only on ePub; this one will give you a choice of ePub or Mobi. And I've added an afterword to each one, talking about how I came up with the idea for the story, only on the Ebook Glue version.

Here are the stories:

Bytepals, published in ASIM #8, edited by former ASIM  co-op member Sally Beasley. Have you ever wondered why kids on the Internet always look glazed-eyed and sit around in the dark? It's set in the Wolfborn universe, sort of, but in our world and in modern times. Australia has had werewolves since convict times and nobody travels to Armorique, where there are - erk! - vampires! Vampires are not allowed in Australia, even cute ones with dark, curly hair who were born that way....

Choices, from ASIM #12, edited by Edwina Harvey, who is now a freelance editor specialising in speculative fiction, but willing to edit anything, including doctoral theses (she's currently doing just that, but I KNOW she'd rather edit a novel, especially a YA novel). King Arthur's wizard, Merlin, has retired, leaving his apprentice, Nimue, in charge. Nimue can see Camelot's end coming and wants to prevent it. Can she change history? Read it and find out!

Of Loaves, Fishes And Mars Bars, published in ASIM #29, edited by Dirk Flinthart, himself a fabulous writer who is doing very well these days. Elanor, named after a character from Tolkien, is a member of a family that has had a cheap-looking metal cup for generations. When she becomes an Arthurian scholar, she has a sneaking suspicion the cup may be a bit more than it seems....

Go on, owners of ebook readers, go and get my mini-ebook - you know you want to! Help me celebrate my 100,000th hit!

Here's a link, in case you're too lazy to click into the link under Pages:

https://ebookglue.com/share/https://ebookglue.com/share/jEio7cCDLmrEsimUSKJXHU


SINCE WRITING THE ABOVE: I have been having trouble with the Ebook Glue site. If you click into the link under Pages, you'll get the three stories, but also my school's anthology. So I emailed the owner of Ebook Glue, who kindly fixed it up for me and offered to ebook other stuff for me, but also said the site is going to paid.

Anyway, I can't give you a link to that right now, unless it has been fixed at the web site level - will check it out and report back. Meanwhile, anyone who wants a copy in either mobi or ePub can contact me at sbursztynski@gmail.com, or comment here with their own email. I have sent off a PDF to miki, which I got from my own app, and can also do ePub on that.

I am planning to whip up an ebook of my eligibles for the Chronos Awards - of which more later. There are only a few more days to nominate.

And Some More Great Reviews For Wolfborn!

It's nice to be getting lovely reviews for your book two years after publication. It has only recently come out in the US, but once a book is out, a publisher simply doesn't have time to continue the promotion though they will co-operate if you can arrange your own promo. So I have been approaching blogs about reviewing it and have had some that didn't bother to reply, even though my inquiry was personalised and chosen for appropriateness- heavens, I reply, even if to say no, unless it's clearly been sent to a hundred blogs at once or is laughably inappropriate, showing the author hasn't read my policy - and some said yes. I've had five reviews out of it, but only two in the US, where my publishers could have sent a copy, so I reached into my stash and paid my own postage. However, promo is always good! And most recently, I am very pleased to have got in touch with Sherre of Beckoned By Books, Cassie of Knows Prose and Hollie of Music, Books And Tea.

As they have all posted their reviews on Amazon, on the same page, I'm giving you the link to that, here although their web sites are all well worth a visit if you love books and reading, especially YA.

The reviews are on the Kindle page, though you can also buy it in iBooks and, of course, order it in print.

Interesting Web Site Added

You may notice that on the side of the page I have a set of links to "interesting websites" which is sort of a blog roll, though it includes some sites that aren't blogs. I have just added my nephew Max Bursztynski's blog, Film According To Mr Cinema.

Max is fifteen going on thirty-five. And he writes well. He loves books, but also movies, since he has a dream of becoming an animator one day. He has already put some of his little animations on YouTube. But this site has reviews of movies he loves, both new and old, only a handful so far, but he's only been doing this for a very short time.



I'm hoping to get him to start reviewing some of the wonderful old Ray Harryhausen films he adores. After all, one of these days, he'll be doing his own...

If you enjoy movies, why not wander over and take a look and add a comment?

Ford Street At Bologna

This morning, my lovely publisher, Paul Collins of Ford Street Publishing, got the email below and shared it with his writers:

"Dear Paul,

Here in Munich, the spring is on hold as winter seems to be returning again but, as every year, the White Ravens are ready to "soar into the sky". My colleagues and I are delighted to inform you that we have selected the short story anthology

            Trust Me Too edited by yourself with an introduction by Judith Ridge  

as one of the titles for The White Ravens 2013, our annual selection of outstanding international books for children and young adults, which will be presented at our stand at the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The books for this year's exhibition, 250 titles from more than 40 countries, have been selected from the thousands of books that our library received as review copies from publishers, authors, illustrators, and organisations from all over the world within the last year.

The exhibition is accompanied by a printed catalogue containing bibliographical data and short reviews for each of the selected books. You will receive a copy of the catalogue (which is also available at www.ijb.de) either in Bologna or by mail after the fair.

With best wishes,

Claudia(Soeffner)"

Trust Me Too is the second of two anthologies put out by Ford Street Publishing over the last few years - this one came out only last year. I'm in both. Actually, the first one, Trust Me!, could be said to be the book that started Ford Street Publishing. Paul Collins takes on freelance editing work as well as writing himself. At one point he was commissioned to do an anthology for an education publisher which made things difficult for him. Finally, he returned the fee and decided to publish this himself. It was so very successful that last year he did a follow-up anthology. I have stories in both - historical fiction, both times set in the 1960s.

I'm in the top row, left of Isobelle Carmody

These guys are taking our anthology to Bologna, where, every year around this time, publishers from around the world gather to show off the children's books they have published in the last year, in hopes of selling foreign, or foreign language, rights. Ford Street is really too small a publishing company to be able to do this, but with luck, White Ravens will let other countries know that we have some wonderful writers here in Australia, and who knows? There may be overseas editions of Trust Me Too. Fingers crossed - and congratulations, Paul! You deserve all the good things that might flow from this.

Happy Birthday, Douglas Adams!

This morning I turned on Google to find a decoration centred around The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I thought it might be a date of the first publication or even the first broadcast of the radio series, but no - the radio show was first broadcast on March 8th 1978 and the book first came out in October the next year.

I learned that March 11 was Douglas Adams' birthday. If he had still been alive, he would have turned 61 today.

You know, I can remember when I first read it. I was studying librarianship at the time. It was such an exhausting course, a postgraduate diploma which required pretty much all my time during the day - and we all used to say that if the RMIT library had been open at five thirty in the morning we would have been there. Socialising? What was that? They were trying to fit what should have been a two year course into one year.

But what's the point of being a librarian if you can't fit in some time to read for pleasure? I couldn't bear to be without a book. And this one, the first, took me into another world, made me laugh till I cried. Those were the days when people were throwing quotes at each other. The librarianship students were no exception. We had very little free time, but in between classes we would go out for coffee to a place with the unlikely name of the Druids Duck Inn. We would complain about the lecturers and grumble about the exhausting workload... and we'd discuss the latest book to grab our imagination, giggle and quote from it. We thought the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything was hilarious.

Of course, I ended up reading the lot, and listening to the radio series - oddly enough, not the original series, for quite some time. I think the one playing on the radio when I was listening was from the record, with some different cast members, and was closer to the TV series that came out later.

The thing is, Douglas Adams was always reworking it. The original radio series, for example, had Trillian and Zaphod eaten by the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast Of Traal. So they're all legitimate versions .
I have enjoyed all versions. The whole thing is deliciously silly, and I love silly. There's enough sad stuff happening in the world and far too many dystopian books these days for my taste.

This book came to me at a time when I really needed something funny - and, in the end, it became a classic. It would be interesting to know what he would have been writing if he was still around.

Happy birthday, Douglas, even if you didn't live to enjoy it. 

Fannish Stuff I Found In The iBook Store

The other day I was looking under "Terry Pratchett" in the iBook store and found a sort of bio by Craig Cabell, who has written a wide variety of books but seems to be a passionate spec fic fan and weaves this into his Terry Pratchett book, Terry Pratchett: The Spirit Of Fantasy. It has a bio component, but also a critique of his work(this author prefers the early books, which is interesting, because Terry doesn't and if I hadn't skipped ahead to read Mort I might never have read past The Colour Of Magic) in which he compares the work with other books and even films and TV shows.

 I thought it very good value for $1.99 and went back to see what else he's done and found a book about the Dr Who actors for the same price! I'm reading the introduction, the only bit that's about the show in general rather than the actors who played the Doctor,and found that the first draft of the first episode was written by an Aussie and contained a lot of information about the Doctor and Susan that was cut out for the purposes of keeping it mysterious, which I think is wise, even if Craig Cabell doesn't. It gave them a lot more flexibility and let the show develop. Still, there was something interesting that links to much later episodes in David Tennant's time. And no, I won't tell you what it is!

I assume it's available in paperback, but ebook will do me for now. There's something magical about going to the store and seeing something you want and just downloading it. I love technology!

Children's Magazines - A Market Guide

I have discovered a wonderful market guide for anyone interested in writing for children's magazines. It's not a company or a publication like, as it might be, Writer's Digest. It's all put together by a teacher and children's writer called Dr Evelyn Christensen. The list of links includes details about who it's for(early childhood, teens, etc. and sometimes whether only kids can write for it, which is handy for teachers with creative students), whether or not it pays, genre. She does say that sometimes the magazine doesn't tell you if it pays and you need to find out yourself. But where she can, she tells you.

And she keeps it up to date, too. Each month she writes to the SCBWI list on LinkedIn to say the new edition is out, and she also publishes useful  articles on the site.

You may never have considered writing magazine articles or short stories for children. Maybe you think of markets only in term of book publishers or adult magazines. All I can say is, I have had a wonderful relationship with the NSW School Magazine over the years. It pays well, if not as well as journalism, but then newspapers keep your rights, while the NSW School Magazine doesn't care what you do with your piece after they've published it and will even pass along to you any offers for reprint they get. And lots of kids read and love magazines and may just remember your name when there's a book with your name on the cover. And I found I learned a lot from it, which stood me in good stead later.

Or you may just decide that writing for children's magazines is your thing - there are plenty of markets out there, especially now there's an Internet - and do only that. Why not?

So here's the link: http://evelynchristensen.com/mags.html 

Good writing!

Peggy Bright Books Giveaway!

Last year, Peggy Bright Books published the wonderful speculative fiction anthology Light Touch Paper Stand Clear, in which I have a story, "Five Ways To Start A War", which tells you how the Trojan War REALLY began. If you were following this blog at the time, you may remember a lot of guest posts from the authors and editors in late June and through July. It has had some great reviews since then(preen, preen! My story got a lot of positive feedback!). I should add that one of those guest posts, the one by Thoraiya Dyer, is one of the most popular on my blog.

If you'd like a free e-copy, Edwina Harvey, one of the two editors, tells me they are having a 48 hour free download from Amazon. Yes, you have to have access to Kindle, but there's a Kindle app for iPad, if you don't have a Kindle reader - I have one myself.

This is a great example of what small press is doing in Australia at the moment. There are some new writers in it and some veterans who have novels published by big press. And I, personally, love short story anthologies which give me a sample of the work of writers I may not have discovered yet.

So, here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/Light-Touch-Paper-Stand-ebook/dp/B00AQBE036

Go and spoil yourself!

Ebook Creation For Dummies(Like Me)

In previous posts I waxed lyrical about the possibilities of creating ebooks with my class. I came back to work with some great ideas. Kids love the idea of seeing their names on or in a book as much as the rest of us. It's certainly something that never palls for me. And, all going well, perhaps the kids could do their own ebooks.

But when I came back and checked out the kids' school iPads I found that so much was blocked on the school system that my ideas fizzled out. They have Pages and Keynote on their little computers, but can't email their work to their teachers. They're supposed to have access to the App Store, but most can't download from it. And some don't have it on their iPads anyway.I am told that they should be able to do it - the IT teacher was on leave the first four weeks of school and needs to get up to date before he can help there. So they can't even download iBooks(the school gave them the Kindle app) although some can - one girl with her own Apple ID downloaded iBooks and is now happily discovering Beatrix Potter and other classics on Gutenberg. Others find the Apple ID is the school's - they can't log in. Talk about messy! Thank goodness for kidblog.org, which enabled me to set up a class blog from which I hopefully can copy and paste posts into my Blogger class blog and from there to - thank heaven! - Ebook Glue! 

But last night I looked for web sites which offered free ebook making. I found one that seemed similar to Ebook Glue and tested it out, only to find that you had to pay $5 for your crude ebook!

Then I found another one which looked promising: in return for putting up with a few ads, you get free access to ebook creation. It was designed for class use. If it worked, my students, especially those with learning issues, could make their own ebooks. I tested it out. But I don't think it was designed for iPads. I couldn't turn the book's pages. It doesn't download, it's only for online reading. And they can't even share their online ebooks because you have to have access to email or social networks - all blocked! 

Back to Ebook Glue, but no ebooks made by the students. Sigh!

Flight 404 By Simon Petrie - Kindle Giveaway

A while back, I did the proofreading for Simon Petrie's novella Flight 404, which was published by Peggy Bright Books. It's a hard science fiction piece set in deep space, something we don't get to read too often these days, especially in Australia, where the big publishers tend to prefer fat fantasy trilogies. Fortunately, there's a vibrant small press culture here to publish stuff the big ones don't dare try out - and Simon Petrie knows his science, which he does for a living.

Here's the blurb, as written on Amazon:

"Flight 404 is a novella blending elements of SF, murder mystery, and transgender fiction.

To solve the mystery of the vanished spacecraft, the Bougainvillaea, investigator/pilot Charmain Mertz must return to the conservative world of her boyhood."

Yes, it has a transgender heroine, hence the androgynous image on the cover beautifully done by artist Lewis Morley.

Anyway, if you have a Kindle or, as I now have, a Kindle app on your iPad, you can have the novella free on Amazon for the next three days, till March 4th Pacific time, so yes, if you live in the US you can have it March 4 your time, which is about fifteen hours after March 4 is over in Australia.

If you decide you like that, there's another novella, The Hunt For Red Leicester, which is not free, but not expensive, and which you can get on the Peggy Bright Books web site as part of the Gordon Mamon Casebook, a collection of humorous stories set on a space elevator hotel. And that is the massive sum of $2.50, through PayPal. You can have both books in mobi, PDF or ePub format if you buy them on this web site.

The double novella collection, which is in paperback, has had some great reviews, and shows the range of talents of the author, who can write both serious (404) and silly humour (Red Leicester)