I got a nice little gift in the mail this morning. My contributor’s copy of Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing #1.

There’s my name on the cover, fourth one down. Of course, that’s alphabetical, not in order of importance or anything like that. I do love to see my name on the cover of books though, I’m kinda vain like that. This is an anthology of blog writing, put together by Miscellaneous Press. As they describe it:

Inside Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing you will find reflections on love, loss, literature, and how our lives are being affected by the shifting methods of communication in this digital age.

My piece is something I wrote about how ebooks are going to become mainstream in the future. There’s lots of interesting stuff in there, so give it a go. You can pre-order your copy here.

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It’s my turn to host the Australian Spec Fic blog carnival for this month, so following is a round up of all kinds of interesting spec fic related interwebby goodness. If I’ve missed anything, add a link in the comments or email me and I’ll update the post.

First off, Eneit Press interviews Gillian Polack as part of Women In Horror Month.

That segues nicely to Gillian Polak’s own LiveJournal entries which include some thoughts on characters and Good books and equal opportunity neglect. A cryptic title, but a very interesting post.

Here, Graham Storr annouces the release of TimeSplash. A novel with a single word title containing two capital letters? The man is clearly a genius.

Throughout the last few weeks a bunch of very savvy folk have been putting together snapshot interviews of Australian spec fic writers. Links to all 90 or so 2010 Snapshots have now been collated into one place for your perusing pleasure.

Horrorscope, the Australian Dark Fiction Weblog has been busy. Here’s a review of the Horror Stories of Robert E Howard. Here’s a review of The World Is Dead, a review of Zombie: An Anthology Of The Undead and Horns, by Joe Hill.

Also from Horrorscope, a rundown of the 2009 Bram Stoker Award nominees and the 2009 Australian Shadows Awards finalists. Not only that, there’s the Table of Contents for Midnight Echo #4. Midnight Echo # 5 is now open to submissions.

At Delimiter Kim Falconer talks about ebooks.

Here’s a review of the new “superhero” movie, Kick Ass, over at The Furnace.

The fabtastic convention that is Continuum happened at the end of February. This time it was Continuum 6: Future Tense. You can read my report of the con here. One of the guests of honour was the truly inspiring Mark Pesce. Mark wrote a short story for Continuum, called Both Your Houses. You can find that story here.

Brisvegas resident Joanna Penn posts here about lessons learnt from Doctor Who. And who couldn’t learn a thing or two from the good Doctor?

Talking of Doctor Who, here’s a photo by Cat Sparks of Trudi Canavan’s pantry. Why would I post that here? Look at the photo and try to contain the awesome.

And talking of Joanna Penn (my segue skills are unrivalled!) she was kind enough to interview me for a podcast on March 4th. We cover a lot in the half-hour podcast, including writing about supernatural themes, playing with religious mythology, writing fight scenes and more. And it even comes with a warning!

And talking of podcasts (yeah, I know, you’re blown away by my skills) those legendary ladies of the genre Alisa, Tansy and Alex have started a new spec fic podcast via Twelfth Planet Press called Galactic Suburbia. The first episode has just been posted with hopefully many more to follow.

On the publishing front, Tehani Wesley has announced her new project, FableCroft Publishing, and has put a call out for strongly Australian spec fic for a reprint anthology and Liz Grzyb has released the ToC for Scary Kisses, which is now available for pre-order via Ticonderoga Publications.

This one isn’t Australian, but it’s a bit of positive reinforcement for fantasy writers everywhere. On March 5th, Publishers Weekly announced that Harper Teen paid seven figures for a debut YA trilogy based around a retelling of the Greek tragedies.

The Outlandish Voices podcast (where new and established writers read their stories for the masses) has moved to a better hosting arrangement at Podbean, so you can rate and comment on the stories now.

And what’s a blog carnival without a bit of self-pimpage? I wrote a review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy here and the Bitten By Books website wrote glowing reviews of both my books, which is always nice. Here’s their review of RealmShift and here’s their review of MageSign.

Lastly, I updated a couple of new links on my Markets For Writers page. Let me know if you’d like to see other links on there.

And don’t forget to leave a comment with anything else relevant (or completely irrelevant, I don’t mind) that I might have missed.

EDIT: Very important post I missed from Cat Sparks’ LiveJournal regarding Dudcon III and the Ditmars.

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From March 7th to 13th it’s Read An Ebook Week. The movement has a website here. Ebooks are becoming more mainstream by the month and the launch of the iPad has certainly helped that along. Even though the iPad is far from what it claims to be and little more than an iPhone that you can’t get in your pocket.

Regardless, the ebook is on the up and up. Let me state again, as I have here many times before, I’m a bibliophile. I love books. I love the papery weight of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. I love loafing back on the couch with an actual book. I especially love seeing my own work in books. But I’m also a huge fan of ebooks. The two are not mutually exclusive. Ebooks give you the chance to explore new work, new authors, books you may never have spent money on before, because you can fit loads of them on a small device and pay a lot less than you would for a regular book.

To celebrate Read An Ebook Week, my novels RealmShift and MageSign are available from Smashwords at half price. They were only US$2.89 anyway, but now you can get them both for US$1.45 each. That’s two for the price of one. To get the discount you need to use the coupon code RAE50 at the checkout. You can find the books here. Scroll down for various titles.

Read an ebook this week. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.

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I was interviewed recently by Joanna Penn, of The Creative Penn website, for a podcast. Joanna blogs, podcasts and video blogs on all aspects writing, publishing and promotion. In this podcast she asks me about all kinds of things, from the nature of writing with religious mythology and the trouble it can cause, to the nature of blasphemy and offence, to writing fight scenes, indie authorship and more. It’s surprising how much stuff we cover in the podcast, which is only a bit over half an hour.

I love the fact that the post introducing the podcast carries a warning!

This fantastic podcast roams over some interesting topics so I hope you enjoy it!

Warning: There is some questionable language and talk of horror, violence and religion so please don’t listen if you might be offended.

Yeah, that’s my kinda podcast. Talk about author branding.

So, head over to this post and download the podcast if you’re interested to have a listen. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

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I’ll be hosting the Australian Spec Fic blog carnival in March, posting up a loads of stuff on March 15th. If you have any posts you think are relevant, please let me have the links. It can be anything spec fic related, about writing, books, movies, TV or anything you can find even a vague relevance for.

You can leave links in the comments section here or you can use this fancy Google document form thing that collates everything into a neat spreadsheet for us. Spread the word and hit me up with links to include.

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There’s been a bit of a shit fight (to say the least) lately between Amazon and MacMillan. It basically centres around an argument about ebook pricing and who controls what. Rather than me just repeat all that’s been said already, go and read:

NY Times article on why Amazon pulled MacMillan titles.

Cory Doctorow’s thoughts via Boing Boing.

This post by L E Modesitt Jr which looks at the situation from an author’s point of view, and has some interesting discussion in the comments.

And here, John Scalzi’s call for author support.

The fight will continue. The face of publishing is changing and there’s going to be a lot of wrangling. I’m going to watch, but I can’t be bothered to comment. I’m nobody, so my opinion will be ignored anyway. I’ll wait and see how it all plays out and then make the best of it. This is one of those situations where the big boys are playing. The rest of us can weigh in when the dust settles a bit.

But in the meantime, it’s authors that are hurting. Especially new and midlist authors, whose sales and income are being drastically hit by all this. It’s from this angle that I’m posting now. My good friend and great author, David B Coe, has a new edition out today, via Tor. So he’s a direct victim of all this right now.

The Horsemen’s Gambit, Book II of Blood of the Southlands, is being re-issued in paperback today. If you’re a fan of David’s work and you want to get hold of this but usually shop at Amazon, there are other options. Pick up the book from any of the places listed below and show Amazon that you won’t stand for them fucking with authors.

Buy The Horsemen’s Gambit:

Direct from MacMillan.

Barnes & Noble.

Borders.

Books-A-Million.

I’m a massive fan of Amazon, but I don’t like the way they’re dealing with this at all. It’s always worth remembering that there are many more stores out there than Amazon if you want to get your books online.

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Meh.

I’m tempted to leave this post at that, just a single word. But if I’m honest there is more to this iPad thing than that. Fundamentally, Apple have gone to great lengths and enormous fanfare to release what is essentially a big iPhone without the phone or the camera. Sure, it’s a swish looking thing – Apple products always are. And the interface would be awesome, just like the iPhone, because Apple know how to meld man (or woman) and machine.

But is this iPad really anything spectacular? The thing that annoyed me the most watching a news program last night was the closing comments on the brief coverage of the iPad launch:

“The new iPad will allow people to read books electronically.”

They made this sound like it was a new thing. Like we’d never read an ebook before. Seriously, Apple are masters at convincing people that the emperor is wearing a fine ermine robe. I read ebooks regularly on my iPhone. The Kindle is going gangbusters in the US and has recently rolled out internationally. My books sell better in ebook formats than print formats by several orders of magnitude. And so on and so on.

So now, due to the massive media arse licking that Steve Jobs always seems to elicit, there will be thousands of people thinking that Apple has made ebooks a reality at last. Good grief, they’ll cry, are we living in the future? (Well, it is 2010, but still no flying fucking cars).

To be optimistic about it, regardless of how annoying it is, the iPad being touted as the new thing in publishing is good for writers. It’s not the new thing in publishing by a long way. We’ve been hammering out the pioneer trail through digital books and all associated stuff for several years now. But, Apple does attract its fanboys and fangirls. The latest Apple device is the must have gadget every time. The marketing behind it is terrifying.

When I heard that Stephen Fry had endorsed the iPad with talk of how great it was to use I felt the Earth shift on its axis. When Fry, the God-Emperor of Twitter, and Jobs, the Witch-King of Technology, combine forces, the future of humanity is theirs to toy with.

Steve Jobs, mind-controlling the masses

But, this can only be a good thing. Publishing is going digital. It’s a simple as that. You might remember this post I made back in August. It’s just a matter of how it will happen. Print books will still exist – Print On Demand technology will be the new vanguard of print – and speciality editions will still be popular with bibliophiles like me. It’s just a case of what becomes the standard for digital publishing.

The Kindle and its e-ink brethren tried to lead the way taking electronic reading from a computer screen to a hand held electronic book. As similar as possible to paper in every way. Then handheld devices like the iPhone shattered the calm of the library.

Sure, a Kindle is a great ebook reader, but an iPhone is a great ebook reader, and a phone and, most importantly, a web portal. The iPad has taken that concept and made it bigger. Too big, in my opinion, but we’ll see if new physical sizes emerge – remember the iPod gave birth to the iPod Nano. I’d like to see an iPad Nano, halfway in size between an iPhone and the current iPad.

Anyway, the point is this. The iPad has full internet activity and a brilliant user interface. You can go straight to your news media source, read the top stories, click on a picture to see the video, listen to the latest single from Current Pop Sensation And The Plagiarists and so on. It’s an interactive media source along with being an ebook reader. That’s where the allure lies. Remember the post I linked above where I talked about convergence. That’s what is needed.

For me the iPhone offers that convergence and the iPad is just an iPhone that won’t fit in my pocket. And it doesn’t have a phone or a camera. And, true to Apple form, there’s no USB connectivity, no expandable memory card ports, no access to the workings of it and a truly shite battery life. But it’s the latest thing from Apple, it’s slick and you feel all Star Trek when you use it. People will buy it. When they do, due to very clever and aggressive action from Apple with regard to getting publishers on side, they’ll suddenly see ebooks as the future. Not because ebooks are the future, not because we’ve been saying that and making them the future for the last few years, but because Steve Jobs said so. All hail the Techno Messiah. It’s a little bit sickening, but what the fuck. More people will be buying ebooks. For writers, embracing the digital publishing revolution, that’s no bad thing. It’s also going to shake up the podcasting and vodcasting world, so watch out for explosions on that front as well.

I won’t be getting an iPad. Not least because it sounds like an electronic monthly item for women, but mainly because it doesn’t really offer anything new yet. It just offers what’s already there in a bigger format. But it won’t be long before the iPad and competitive examples are as ubiquitous as the iPod. Think back to 1995 and going to buy the latest album on CD. Could you imagine having your entire music collection in digital form on something smaller than a pack of gum in your pocket back then? Now it’s the norm. It won’t be long before commuter trains are filled with people holding flat shiny screens, flicking their finger across them now and then to ellicit an electronic swoosh as they turn the “page”. And that’s only the beginning.

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My short story “Trial Not Required” has just been published in M-Brane SF magazine. It’s in issue 13 and starts on page 13, which is kinda cool. The PDF edition of the mag is out now and the print edition should be available in the next couple of days.

The publisher, Chris Fletcher, asked for a little afterword about the story to include in the issue. This is what wrote:

“Trial Not Required” is a story born of a single absurd concept that occurred to me one night – wouldn’t it be strange if there was a big artificial ape that was once cutting edge technology but was now old-fashioned and a bit of a freak. And what if that ape started to question its role and the role of those that made it…?

You can find out all about it here. I hope you like it.

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The Australian speculative fiction blog carnival is off to a galloping start for 2010. You can find the January collected posts at Egoboo WA.

There’s loads of stuff there, including a few bits by yours truly. Things about Continuum, Natcon, feminism in spec fic and the furore surrounding it, reviews, fiction, interviews, publishing news, giveaways. By Odin’s Mighty Bollocks, it’ll take you till next month just to get through it all.

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My indie publisher Blade Red Press has announced the Table of Contents for the Dark Pages Anthology. The book is due out in the first half of this year. Now that the stories are chosen it’s just a matter of the authors and editors polishing things up and then I’ll do all the production stuff. You should be able to buy the book from Amazon in a couple of months if all goes well.

Here’s the ToC:

The Stain of the Psychopomp King by Lucien E G Spelman
Heart Of Ice by Martin Livings
Neptune’s Garden by Lisa A Koosis
Dust by Naomi Bell
To Die For by S D Matley
The Franchise by Joe L Murr
Clip Notes by Marty Young
Blood on Green by Victoria Anisman-Reiner
Cargo by Aaron Polson
Nepenthe by Felicity Dowker
Yellow Water Pike by Derek Rutherford
Surveying The Land by B D Wilson
Nightwork by Robert Neilson
Hand And Cradle by Trent Roman

Seriously, these are great stories. It’s going to be a brilliant collection.

Official announcement here.

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