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The Lessons, published by 4th Estate/HarperCollins Publishers, is the latest novel by Kent, England, based Australian author John Purcell, and follows on from his earlier books, The Girl On The Page, and The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy.

The first few sentences of the synopsis for The Lessons suggests it is partly a lost-love story:

1961: When teens Daisy and Harry meet, it feels so right they promise to love each other forever, but in 1960s England everything is stacked against them: class, education, expectations. When Daisy is sent by her parents to live with her glamorous, bohemian Aunt Jane, a novelist working on her second book, she is confronted by adult truths and suffers a loss of innocence that flings her far from the one good thing in her life, Harry.

1983: Jane Curtis, now a famous novelist, is at a prestigious book event in New York, being interviewed about her life and work, including a novel about the traumatic coming of age of a young woman. But she won’t answer the interviewer’s probing questions. What is she trying to hide?

We see that Aunt Jane has become an established author, but what has become of Daisy and Harry, the apparently star-crossed lovers? Has her fame stemmed from appropriating their story? Who knows, but there’s a hint here she knows more than she’s letting on. Maybe.

The Lessons will be on bookshelves from 13 April 2022, and Purcell will be travelling to Australia to promote the title. The book launch takes place at Readings Emporium, in Melbourne, on Thursday 28 April 2022.

Tim Graham, senior lecturer in digital media at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Digital Media Research Centre, has detected a significant surge in Twitter bots, being automated accounts on the social networking service, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine last month. It seems the purpose of many of these bots is to boost, or amplify, other Twitter accounts that are disseminating propaganda supporting the Russian invasion.

The massive spike around February 24, the day of the invasion, indicated some were probably bots, but was not conclusive. Next, Dr Graham deployed a specialised software called Botometer, which uses a machine-learning algorithm to distinguish bot accounts from human ones by looking at the features of a profile, including friends, social network structure, language, and sentiment. The model gives accounts a score from zero to one, with one showing it’s certain the account is a bot. “When we ran this model and checked the result, there was clearly this huge spike of accounts which had almost a perfect bot score,” Dr Graham said.

Twitter remains unconvinced by Graham’s work though, suggesting aspects of his research may be flawed, and asserting they have more information at their disposal in assessing whether or not accounts are automated or genuine.

Sydney based Australian author Andrew Pippos, whose debut 2020 novel Lucky’s was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award, writing for the State Library of NSW’s Openbook magazine, an excerpt from an upcoming new book of his, I believe.

My father enjoyed telling people he’d never read a book in his life, as if this were a detail you might remember about him, as if it were some great stroke of luck, like never being issued with a speeding ticket.

The Best Australian Yarn is another generous local literary award currently accepting submissions for short stories of between 1500 – 2500 words.

Short stories have the power to transport us to another world, they educate and entertain us, and can make the everyday seem extraordinary.

A collaboration between The West Australian and the Minderoo Foundation, entries for The Best Australian Yarn are open until Tuesday 31 May 2022, to Australians everywhere aged twelve or over.

A total of A$50,000 in prize money is on offer. The overall winner will be awarded A$30,000, the West Australian winner A$4,000, Regional Australia winner $3,000, the Youth winner will received $2,000 and mentoring opportunities, while the nine shortlisted entrants will received A$1,000 each.

In addition, the winner of the Readers’ Choice award, as determined by a public vote, will receive A$2,000. The longlist, consisting of fifty works, will be announced in August 2022.

Entries are open for the biennial Barbara Jefferis Award, to commemorate the life of the late Australian author, who died in 2004. The literary prize was established in 2007 through a bequest from Jefferis’ husband John Hinde, an Australian broadcaster and film critic, who died in 2006.

The Barbara Jefferis Award is offered biennially for “the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”.

With a prize A$50,000 for the winner, and a further A$5,000 shared among those named on the shortlist, the award is one of the richest in Australian literature. Entries close on Monday 9 May 2022, with the shortlist scheduled to be announced in August.

On the subject of books being adapted to film, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Los Angeles based author Taylor Jenkins Reid, is set to be made into a movie, produced by Netflix.

The book, which has recently spent 54 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller Paperback list, four years after publishing, and has turned into a TikTok book phenomenon, follows reclusive Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo, who chooses an unknown reporter, Monique Grant, to tell her life story. Evelyn recounts her time in the Golden Age of Hollywood, her rise to fame, and her seven marriages — revealing stunning secrets and lies. But through it all one question remains: Why has she chosen Monique for her final confession?

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is on my sprawling TBR list, here’s hoping I’m able to finish reading it before the film arrives.

American computer scientist Stephen E. Wilhite who invented the GIF, being Graphics Interchange Format, in 1987, has died aged seventy-four.

Although GIFs are synonymous with animated internet memes these days, that wasn’t the reason Wilhite created the format. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s as a way to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in color at a time when internet speeds were glacial compared to what they are today.

GIFs weren’t just used for animations, they were also an image format, similar to the more familiar JPEG or PNG formats in use today. Hunt around on Oblong Obsession and you’ll find one or two. You can’t go passed a classic. Thank you Mr Wilhite.

If you’re regularly figuring out daily word puzzle Wordle in two or three attempts, it might mean you’re possessed of above average intelligence, but not necessarily, says Karl Quinn, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald.

So, the next time some smug colleague or housemate comes over all Einstein-like just because they nailed that day’s Wordle, feel free to tell them to pull their head, with its averagely sized brain, in. As Loren Mowszowski says, “People who are good at Wordle can be chuffed about their language and problem-solving skills but I don’t think they can lay claim to being ‘smarter’, per se.”

Then again, it doesn’t mean they’re not either.

I’ve cracked a couple of Wordle games in two or three attempts. In the case of two lines I put it down to luck. For instance if the letters A, T, C, and H show green on the first line, an element of luck is necessary, given there are still numerous words formed by these letters. Batch. Catch (if it’s a dual letter word). Latch. Match. Watch.

It must be the dream of every author: to have their book made into a film. But with so many novels and manuscripts in circulation, what are the chances of this happening? Remote, to say the least, I would think. Not that long odds dissuade some writers, particularly first time, or aspiring authors.

I’ve heard literary agents say some budding novelists, when submitting a manuscript, have gone so far as to append a list of actors they’d like to see play the characters in their story, when their novel is inevitably — you understand — adapted for the big screen. This before the manuscript has even found a publisher, let alone anything else.

The exuberant hopes of first time authors aside though, even a genuine, bona fida, movie option on a novel is still no guarantee an author will one day be proudly striding the red carpet at the premiere of their book turned film. In fact, according to American steampunk fiction author Gail Carriger, there’s a mere one percent chance any optioned book will become a film.

Sobering or what? Only one in one hundred novels that have been optioned will end up as a big screen production. One way of looking at an option is to see it as a film producer taking a temporary hold on the film rights of a novel, while they try to find interest, and funding, for a potential movie. In the end — and the process may be protracted — they might not succeed.

While their novel may languish in development hell, there is one small consolation, the author will receive an option payment of some sort, hopefully one that’s relatively generous.

CODA, trailer, directed by American filmmaker Sian Heder, has been named winner of the Best Picture in the 2022 Oscars. A full list of winners can be seen here.

Meanwhile Zack Snyder has taken out both of the inaugural “people’s choice” awards. He won the #OscarsFanFavorite poll for Army of the Dead, and #OscarsCheerMoment for Justice League.