Aurealis has been promoting Australian speculative fiction and supporting Australian writers since 1990. Their latest endeavour is to seek to become a Science Fiction Writers of America qualifying market, one of the prerequisites for which is to pay writers 5 cents a word (soon to be 6 cents) for stories published in their magazine. In […]
Doctor, my Doctor – thank you Steven Moffatt, I was worried you were going to stuff it up, but it was a brilliant 50th anniversary present – a tear came to the eye of many a middle aged man at the appearance of a certain white haired figure, frail with a cane but still with […]
News of the bus misadventure high in the Canutes caused me to reflect on an incident from my school days. Those of a certain age will remember the tightening of the local school curriculum, when a scientific fine tooth comb was drawn through the hippy length hair of what in those days passed for the […]
The real reason to write fiction, after all, isn’t to make money, nor to show the human heart in conflict with itself, nor to give a picture of one’s time, nor to call attention to the plight of any oppressed classes, but to show off. You want to be able to say to visitors, “Sit […]
Hello David, Congratulations! Your story ‘Avoiding Gagarin’ has been accepted for publication … That makes me a very happy old builder. Second acceptance for the month … year … century … Details to follow …
Dear David Stevens, Thank you for sending us “Good Boy”. We love it and would like to publish it … No, thank you!! Big smile! The things that get us through the day.
The world does not need this blog. It is not about huge successes, it is about dreams and memories and scratching away. It is about little things, like rejection slips and kid’s nightmares. Still, I have to be professional. It does not do to encourage further rejection by blogging about how many times a particular […]
In my comfortable childhood, how I longed for nuclear war(1). My friends and I, we were prepared. We didn’t have a bomb shelter, but we would make one in “The Darkies” (2) at fairly short notice. We didn’t have supplies, but we knew where to get them, at the very last minute. I convinced my […]
The world of rejection slips is probably more impersonal than it ever was, now that form letters have been replaced by form e mails. As a person who is able to work out what people were thinking by the way they placed a stamp on an envelope, (I have a story about that somewhere), I […]
I’ve been blogging in a few places under a nom de guerre, which was all lots of fun, but the years pass by and the things I meant to do remain undone, and I realised blogging had become another distraction, or worse, an ersatz alternative to writing fiction, a trick that allows me to think, […]
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