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Virgule

Have you heard about Virgule?

Virgule is the Voiceworks blog, which has been up and running for about a month now. At this stage, Virgule is penned (…keyed?) by members of the Voiceworks team, but I believe in future they’ll be looking for guest bloggers to help with content. Having said that, there’s no shortage of brilliance up there at the moment.

There’s a pretty steady stream of material going up, all of it worth a read. Earlier this week Sam Cooney made a post about his favourite opening lines. Quite an entertaining read, and one that really made me consider the importance of my own first lines. It’s strange, I can really appreciate a great first line from someone else but I never really think about making my own first lines jump off the page. EdComm members regularly post about something interesting like this.

Virgule also helps writers keep abreast of what’s coming up, not just at Voiceworks (who are currently looking for EdComm members), but also other opportunities out there in the big wide world of Melbourne publishing.

Perhaps the most helpful posts that have been going up though, are the Friday Writing Exercise posts. The exercises are open enough to have fun, but provide some ideas for more structured writing, and help develop the skill of writing to a theme, which is an important part of competitions and publication.

So add Virgule to your Google Reader, keep up to date with what’s going on at Voiceworks and partake in some of their conveniently digestible posts in your lunchtime!

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KYD Picks A Winner

I woke up this morning, sat down with my coffee, started the routine internet reading catch-up before I start my day… and I ran into a fantastic review by Misha Adair on the Kill Your Darlings website.

Hang on, I thinks… Misha Adair? I know this man! 

Go read the review. It’s a fantastic, much-more-readerly review of The Ask than mine from last week. You’ll be seeing a lot more of this man’s name in future – he works his arse off and I’m really so so happy for him that a publication as fantastic as Kill Your Darlings has picked up his work.

A smile to my day.

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Torpedo pioneering for Australian journals

I’ve just been listening to a great interview between Estelle Tang and Chris Flynn.

Estelle Tang is creator of book blog 3000 Books, and online editor for literary journal Kill Your Darlings.

Chris Flynn is the great mind behind literary journal Torpedo. His writing appears everywhere. Really. Everywhere.

And now he’s being interviewed everywhere. One case of this is Estelle Tang’s interview (linked above) for Kill Your Darlings.

Prior to listening to this, I knew Chris Flynn was not an Aussie boy, so the accent wasn’t a shock. But my goodness, hasn’t Estelle Tang just got a beautiful voice!? I feel like Ursula the Sea Witch out of Disney’s The Little Mermaid… I want her voice!***

Chris Flynn is hot stuff right now – more than usual – because his love-child Torpedo is the first Australian literary journal to make the leap to being available exclusively on eReaders.

In their interview, Chris and Estelle discuss what this change means for publishers and writers, and why this move was the best for Torpedo.

Will this move be the big one for other journals to follow? Goodness knows we’ve got so many of them in Australia, particularly Melbourne, and all the reasons Chris Flynn outlines above are pretty great reasons for everyone to make this jump to eReaders. I know the next Sleepers Almanac will be published online, but I’m not sure if that means they’re going as far as cutting out the print copies altogether.

I’m a lover of my book collection. And other people’s book collections. I love the section of my bookshelf that has lit journals on it, all lined up in their groups and numbered accordingly. At the moment, money is a massive consideration for me, and while I can afford to buy a journal or two every now and then, I cannot afford an eReader.

I’m upset that Torpedo are abandoning people like myself, and really hope that if other journals follow suit, they keep their print copies in existence also.

*** NB: The sea witch out of Disney’s version, who harmlessly “spells” away Ariel’s lovely voice and keeps it. NOT the sea witch out of the Hans Christian Anderson version who cuts out her tongue. Not that one. No.

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Limp Writers

I know you’re reading this post because of the (possibly misleading) title. I dread to think of what this will do for my search engine results… “pen” and “limp” are begging for some beauties.

Anywho, this has nothing to do with the nocturnal concerns of other jot-fiends. At least,  not those nocturnal concerns.

This has to do with Little !ndependent Melbourne Publishing – or L!MP.

This website is run by the first- and second-year Creative Writing students at RMIT. We’re a driven bunch, and this is a part of that… L!MP is in its young days, meetings are currently being held in regards to branching out with it and trying to get it out in the world. So I’m doing my bit by sharing with you guys – check it out, check back, comment, pass it on. Help us get this bad boy up n thriving.

I’ve got a piece up there, which was posted here a long while ago, but the other pieces on the site are really amazing – I am learning with some freaking talented people.

You will hear more about L!MP in the future, I promise.

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Sticking to the Fed Square Book Market

If you live in Melbourne, and you haven’t discovered the Fed Square Book Market, get down there. It’s on Saturdays during the day in the Atrium (glassed-in bit next to the Ian Potter Centre).

If you live in Melbourne and you also haven’t discovered The Sticky Institute, get down there too. It’s in the underpass between Flinders St Station and the other side of Flinders St just near the end of Degraves St. They have bundles of cool zines, quite reasonably priced, unlike those places that purchase the zines then jack the prices riiiiiiiiiight up. There’s a really big range, always something interesting to have a look at. These guys have a prettyawesome book exchange too…

So, being a reasonably big fan of both these things, you can understand my excitement when I found that they’re teaming up for an event this Saturday coming.

If you don’t live in Melbourne, fuck it. Road trip.

Get down there, get your pencil going, get yo Bowie on!

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Popular Penguins

On the 15th March, Penguin announced the new list of 75 Popular Penguins that will be gracing shelves from July 2010 to celebrate Penguin’s 75th year publishing.

A few questionable choices… I think perhaps someone needs to tell the Penguin people that “popular” doesn’t mean “good”… But I guess all they’re claiming for this collection is that they’re “popular”. So a job well done! Having said that, on the whole, a pretty impressive selection…

You can check it out here.

What do you think? Which books should/should not have been chosen?

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DS Breaking into eReaders?

I’m absolutely flat out.

So I’m linking to something I found incredibly interesting, utterly horrifying, and somewhat amusing:

The prospect of Nintendo DS becoming an eReader.

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Officially A Twat

Quite unlike me to blog twice in the one day, but: after having multiple people tell me just how valuable a Twitter account is for blogging, I’ve now signed up for Twitter.

I’m a Twat.

If you want to follow me, my user name is “lgwabp” (Little Girl… etc, was too big, boo!), you can just hit the “follow me!” button I’ve put in my sidebar on this here fine blog…

This could very well be the beginning of the end…too much social networking in my life!

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