Anthology II 2012 - Writers wanted!

Anthology II 2012

Holiday Season in Melbourne (Australia)

Brought to you by the Melbourne Writers’ Social Group

Sponsored by The Story Mint

Last year we developed a small book of short stories for Valentine’s Day. Some of those stories were sweet and others not so sweet. This year we are kicking off another anthology with all stories themed for the coming holiday season in Melbourne, Australia.

You are not ruled by any genre and you are certainly not limited to just the more merry times over December; feel free to use the horror genre, for example.
You are however limited by word count and time.
Word count for stories (fiction or non-fiction): 1500 words maximum.
There is no minimum. However we would prefer you try and aim for approximately 1500 words.
If you intend to submit a poem, then the word count is different: 500 words maximum.

Start submitting your story to the Writer’s Pad before the end of October so you can receive feedback and act on it before submissions close. Please also make sure it is at least your third draft.
The Story Mint website: http://www.thestorymint.com/writers-pad

For full details and conditions please visit: http://melbournewriters.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/anthology-ii-2012-writers-wanted/

Click here - writers wanted

No death for anyone!

In the not too distant future I will write a book on my theory behind life and death. Until then, there is one aspect of my thoughts I would like to talk about: why a body dies.

Evolution needs our body to die... although only if we want to evolve and then also only if we want to procreate.
So first, evolution. Without it we would all be single celled organism swimming in a puddle of muck. Without procreation we wouldn’t have evolution from the combining of two sexes to create a unique being that has been ever so slightly altered to better adapt to its environment than its parents.
Lastly, without death our parents and their parents, etc, would still be around (possibly at the age just before the body starts to break down, lets say 27), and taking up more space on this planet and eating our food.
Evolution therefore ‘decided’ that it would be best to kill off the parents once they had served their purpose; creating offspring that can keep up with the changing environment of the earth and become a more evolved being. This goes for all species on the planet.
Makes sense, yes?
But what if procreation slowed, as it is with humans in some countries. Or what if we developed ways to inhabit other planets, which could mean we wouldn’t have issues with lack of food or space. Couldn’t we then explain to our bodies that we don’t need to die. That we have gone far enough along in evolution that we can adapt our environment to suit us. Not too much, of course, although we are probably changing/adapting it too much right now. But maybe, eventually we could find a happy medium.
We could still have kids, the ones that actually want to, and they would continue evolution. It would take thousands of years before they would be that different to us, so it’s really no issue.
All we need then is to turn off the gene in our bodies that makes our bodies age.
This would also help with disease and cancer. When our bodies age, they don’t put as much effort into fixing things. Our bodies don’t really need to anymore. We’re old, we’re getting ready to die, so there’s no sense in eating additional food to supply the repair of our bodies. Maybe our bodies will put a little effort into repair, but it won’t bother too much.
You may as well go and get one of those box CRT TV’s and repair that, that’s how senseless it is.
But that’s the thing, our bodies don’t realise we have unlimited food (something we need to make happen in every country first, however), that we have medical procedures that can help us, that we can rest and not have to work every single day to hunt and gather if we need to repair. We don’t want a Band-Aid job, we want our bodies to heal fully and properly!

I believe bodies can be easily repaired by themselves. We just need to work out how.
Maybe it would involve putting the body in a state of chemical induced coma so the body doesn’t have to do anything else but heal... there would be more to it than that, of course. Somehow we need to tell our genes that we have the time and the energy to do all repairs. Maybe even grown back limbs and teeth that have fallen out?

Pain is another thing. Wouldn’t it be better if instead of pain our bodies gave us a better idea of what was wrong so we could then work out how to fix it.
Pain is very basic. A lot of the time it comes from something swelling in our bodies which then causes us pain and that stops us from doing that particular thing too much.
An example is, if we were hunting back in days when we were clueless of why pain happened, then twisted our ankle. It would then swell up so much that it looked like our foot swallowed a tennis ball.
That swelling is a reaction by our own bodies designed to create pain. Yes, our bodies want to make that ankle painful. This then stops us from using that leg. If we try and use it, it hurts.
Our body now gives itself a high-5 because what it set out to do worked; it doesn’t want you using that ankle anymore.
Now it has time to heal the ankle. And when the swelling goes down, that should approximately coincide with when the healing that it wishes to complete.

Book is to be published next year!

Well, it's getting closer to the time when my book will finally be published. Editing still takes up many hours of my day, but I can now see a very small light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
Suraya, CEO of he Story Mint, has set a date of June 2013. A long way away, I know, but it's a goal date, so we shall finalise as we get closer.

I then have a sequel to finish writing as well as two other novels to finish editing that are separate to the first. So much work to do and so little time.

On two other notes:
I scored a speaking part in the show named Mrs Biggs. A movie about Ronald Biggs, the train robber, and his family.
My part is where Ronald and his family are in Australia and there's an accident when the ambulance is going to a hospital.
I'm the ambulance driver.
I jump out and yell at the person driving the other car, then drive like a maniac (seriously was actually driving like a maniac as instructed by the director in a powerful 1960s ambulance with no power steering, no power assisted breaking and taking corners like I was indestructible).

Second is my part in a Britex commercial.
Narelle (my TV wife) and I battle it out with different vacuum cleaners to see who is the winner.
Already airing in their test city of Wollongong on WIN tv. Then will go national depending on consumer response. So if you live in Wollongong please go and hire out a Britex steam cleaner vac from coles and say you are doing it because of the commercial!! Then maybe we'll be called back for more commercials with Britex :)

Who reads now days?

I found it difficult to find any stats on Australia or even the UK, but the US, as stated by the National Endowment of the Arts posted in 2008, has it at 50.2% of adults reading literature.
I thought it would be closer to a third or quarter of the population, but half, that’s not bad.
I’m guessing the other English speaking countries such as Aust, NZ, Canada are the same with slight variances.
That’s around 150 million readers in the US, 30 million readers in the UK, 10 million in Australia, etc.
I hear that paper books are still leading above digital downloads. I wonder if it will eventually be around 50% each? Many say paper book will be lost to us entirely. I disagree, they will go the way of the radio, cinemas, theatre, etc. Just because there's a different way of getting your entertainment, it doesn't mean it will destroy the others.

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Further (and only slightly related) thoughts:
This brings me to another interesting statistic; first, have you read any of the highest selling books over the last 10 or so years? You know, Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, and more recently: Fifty Shades of Grey. Well, I found some stats on the third Harry Potter book as quoted in the New York Times: 900,000 books available for sale for the first print run in the US - and 275,000 for the rest of the English speaking countries.
If you remember how many readers there are and how popular Harry Potter books are/were, it doesn’t seem like many, does it? Just over a million people reading the first lot of books when we already established that there are around 200 million English speaking readers! 199 million went without reading Harry Potter!
Did they expect to sell only that many copies - so that’s less than 1% of the reading population in (for example) the US wanted to read Harry Potter? Nope, not so. There were many more print runs after that, and again after that.
According to Nielsen Bookscan (UK) they’re up to around 3 million copies sold in the UK for each of the Harry Potter books. Sorry no such stats available to me for the US, which is annoying, although we can estimate:
3 million copies sold in UK, 30 million readers. That’s 10% of the population of readers that bought/read harry potter. 1 in 10 people. Wow, that’s actually a lot! Although, that’s still 9 people out of 10 that didn’t think the third Harry Potter book was worth a read.
And if we estimate that it’s the same in the US (10%): 15 million Harry Potter books (the third in the series) sold.
That means 135 million said, nah, I’m not reading that.

Your thoughts?
I thought everyone had read Harry Potter (actually, I haven't, but I probably will some day).

Why did I bring this tidbit of information up? Well, if you’re an author and nine out of ten people don’t want to read your book, maybe you shouldn’t feel too down? It may be that you just haven’t found the millions of people that do want to read your book?
Hell, if it was 1 in 100 that wanted to read your book, then that’s still well over 1 million copies sold in the US alone.
And what about if there were 999 people that didn’t want to read your book but the 1,000th did (1 in 1,000), that’s crap loads over 100,000 books sold in the US. Still great sales for anyone!

More thoughts:
So, if you’re a reader and you find it hard to find a person that likes your favourite author, keep asking around, maybe by the 100th or 1,000th person you’ll find someone that does.

If you’re an author, then don’t be disgruntled when you get a rejection from a publisher or when the 5 friends you showed it to didn’t like the story, there’s still a chance that there are thousands or millions that will.

Last thoughts:
I’m very aware that statistics can be manipulated or abbreviated or spliced and will then give false data, so please don’t take any of this information as ‘gospel’. This is a blog, and blogs are for people that like to unload what’s in their brain and put it to paper... okay, the internet.
Enjoy, discuss, or call it nonsense. But you did read it, so you must have thought about it too?

Melbourne Earthquake - Write all about it

So you felt the earth shake rattle and roll too?
I was sitting in my warehouse office working away at my computer when it felt like a truck had hit the building.
I had some new work done, new rooms being built, so thought they were coming crashing down. I got my ass out of there and watched and waited for the timber to splinter and for it all to suddenly crumble and collapse. Crazy stuff.
I tried getting on the Govt website to check out the readings for the earthquake but the servers have crashed, I guess every man and his dog had the same idea.
Scary but funny.
Added note, we are getting close to the end of the Mayan calendar ;)

Lost backpack in taxi - bye bye laptop

It's now been 2 weeks since I left my backpack in a Melbourne taxi (Australia). During those 2 weeks I have contacted the police lost property (strangely closed on weekends), lost property for the taxi companies (Silvertop has one but Black Cabs does not), and filed a lost property report with the local police.
I have recently been told by the taxi company that there was no backpack in the back of the taxi, according to the driver. So either the next passenger has decided to keep my belongings or the taxi driver wanted a laptop for his kid.
The police have said that using cameras within the taxis costs too much money and would not be done for such a small thing as my stuff going missing. So that avenue was closed to me.

On that fateful day when I misplaced my backpack with one 7 inch screen laptop (very small), one writing book on Ernest Hemmingway, two novels - one of them Stephen Kings IT, a black umbrella, 2 flash drives and a iPhone battery pack, I was attending a writer's festival in Melbourne. My yellow day pass is also still inside.
I spent the day writing on my little laptop and listening to other published authors talk about their experiences with writing, editing and publishing. A good day actually. If you write and want to talk to some friendly people, go to the Melbourne Emerging Writer's Festival.

I have now bought a new backpack and a new laptop, although being a struggling artist I can't spend much, but at least now I have replacements. I endeavour to never take off that backpack again unless it is wrapped around my legs so I trip over it, and don't go anywhere without it.
My main issue is that I have lost the words that I have written over the last few weeks on that laptop. A pity really. There was some good stuff on there. Still, there is always hope, maybe someone will turn my backpack into the police one day? Maybe I'll get my hard work back from that laptop? Even if someone emailed me the files, that would be enough.
I didn't have any ID in there so if someone didn't think of turning it into the police then they probably would have just said, oh well, finders keepers. Although, taxi drivers are suppose to turn lost property into the nearest police station within 48 hours.

I don't know how women remember to take their handbag everywhere? Maybe it's a male thing to forget where they put things?

Backpack and therefore laptop gone on this day: Saturday night May 26 11.45pm. Back of taxi, Southbank.
The backpack has only one strap and so goes across the chest so would be recognisable.

Just tested my writing style with an automated tester

Hey has anyone tested a sample of their story to The Story Mint yet? If you have let me know what type of writer it thinks you are. I mostly fall into the Stephen King, Wilbur Smith, Maeve Binchy, area.
It can test a smaple of your work of 500 words, although if you sign up you can test 5,000 words.
www.thestorymint.com