Archive for the ‘Writing/Publishing’ Category
The future of publishing?
I had the pleasure a week or so ago of accompanying one of my authors Olly Newland on a visit to the interest.co.nz offices. The Auckland-based e-publishing business seems like a success story by any measure. Its nearly ubiquitous host, journalist Bernard Hickey provokes ALL sorts of comment — good and bad — on a […]
The escape of exnzpat, Part 3
Lincoln In my dream I saw a man. It was me. And I remember this… “…I can feel the walls closing in on me: banks, brokers, lenders, wives, children, and dogs — especially dogs! Where was Lincoln? “That Bad Dog!” There… there he was on the dining room floor. The floor I spent hours sanding […]
An apology? … Oh, that’s all right then.
Here’s how Bob Jones’s publishers handled incorrect information asserted as fact … … which is a bit different to how Gareth Morgan handled ‘a mistake in the book that must be corrected’ in the first edition of his After The Panic. I occasionally ask readers to clarify any matters of fact that may be inadvertently […]
I had to laugh …
One of my key research tools as a writer is a very flexible archiving system called DEVONThink … which its brilliant creators describe as an Information Manager with Built-in Artificial Intelligence I’ve been using it for five years (almost to the day: I bought my first version on 9 August 2005) and the artificial intelligence […]
On cycles — Joseph Amato
Also spotted in the Howick Library today, in the prelims of a lovely book on writing A Broom of One’s Own by Nancy Peacock … That line, “… the small into the big and the big back into the small …” Nice. – P
The escape of exnzpat, Part 2
Conversation with an Angel “Lincoln?” I asked again. A sharp bark reverberated through me. “It is you! It’s really you; but how?” I called out delightedly. And then… Something more: Lincoln was not alone!
Good writing
This is a very good article/profile by Miranda Sawyer from The Observer (via NZ Herald) of this complex artist M.I.A. Worth reading. I personally like this kind of semi-gonzo journalism: While Maya is talking, I think: she’s nothing like I expected. She’s gentler, more smiley, more discursive. Still, it would be easy to pull out […]
The rush to certainty …
A WHOLE lot of wisdom in one bite-sized blog post from Dave Pell, internet superhero: That’s an apt description of the new national pastime: Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and making determinations and judgments without a full set of facts. When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for […]
Yet another good graphic …
The latest in my series of graphics that communicate … This one from a brief article, ‘The Mental Anchor of Money Mistakes’ by Carl Richards in the New York Times:
Lying, my dear boy, just compounds the crime …
A while ago I posted a few thoughts: Potshots from behind a mask of anonymity are, by definition, cheap, saying in part… Internet anonymity has also clearly been abused by what I call cardboard cut-outs and glove puppets who pop up in online communities to anonymously denigrate their “enemies” without declaring their allegiances (or building […]
The escape of exnzpat, Part 1
Conversation with a madman It is important, I think, to explain more fully the circumstance that has brought me to this strange and terrible place, which up until a year ago, was an unremarkable life. There are gaps in my memory – of this you know – but more – there are gaps in the […]
Helen Thomas interview
Helen Thomas is the 89 year old White House correspondent who ‘retired’ over her comments that ‘Jews should get the hell out of Palestine’, leave the ‘occupied’ land, and ‘go home’ to Poland, Germany and America. (Yikes! Jon Stewart had a take you can see here via Huffington Post.) But this interview in Vice magazine […]
What a book!
Well. I’ve just spent much of the holiday weekend devouring this book: Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House (Mark Halperin and John Heilemann) The review extracts on the jacket promised me ‘Absolutely gripping’ and ‘Fantastically detailed …incendiary’ and ‘Sleazy, personal, intrusive, shocking — and compulsive.” All true. If you’re interested in […]
Get it off your chest, I say. It’s better.
From an interesting article about the soon-to-be-released first volume of Mark Twain’s full autobiography — which he instructed not to be published for 100 years after his death (which is now): “There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn’t such […]
