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Less than three weeks after winning the unpublished manuscript award in the 2023 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards, former Melbourne based social worker and screenwriter Mick Cummins has been offered a publishing deal by Affirm Press for his novel One Divine Night:

We’re elated to announce that Affirm Press has acquired world rights to One Divine Night by Mick Cummins, who recently won the prestigious Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award, in a deal brokered by Jane Novak Literary Agency. One Divine Nightis a gritty and compelling novel exploring homelessness, independence and the ties that bind. The story follows protagonist Aaron Peters as he becomes estranged from his family, addicted to heroin, and ends up living on the streets of Melbourne but yearning for a different life.

It is anticipated One Divine Night will be in bookshops by late 2023.

Puffin, an imprint of book publisher Penguin, has altered a selection of words in some of the children’s books written by late British author Roald Dahl:

In 1964 novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which has been adapted twice as films in 1971 and 2005, starring Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp respectively, for example, the phrase “enormously fat” has been edited to just “enormous.” The same phrase in 1970 book “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” adapted as an animated film by Wes Anderson with a voice cast of George Clooney and Meryl Streep in 2009, has also been edited to “enormous.”

The removal of the word “fat” is one of a number of such changes.

A sentence accompanying the copyright notice in the most recent prints of Dahl’s books, alerted readers to the amendments, according to Ed Cumming, Genevieve Holl-Allen, and Benedict Smith, writing for British newspaper The Telegraph:

The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.

This is a thorny issue. Times have changed, and language, and use of words, once considered commonplace, have the previously unrealised, or unacknowledged potential, to offend some people. But — and say what you will about Dahl — changing words written by someone who is no longer alive, when they clearly have no say in the matter, is also problematic. The question posed by the practice is obvious. Once we start amending someone else’s previously published work — especially that of a deceased person — where do we stop?

It’s best we don’t start, and instead educate people, says Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America:

Better than playing around with these texts is to offer introductory context that prepares people for what they are about to read, and helps them understand the setting in which it was written.

It’s well worth taking the time to read through the entire of Nossel’s Twitter thread on the subject.

American author James Patterson recently told GQ Magazine he is working on no fewer than thirty-one manuscripts simultaneously. That’s impressive. Patterson’s output comes down to two things, one being his daily routine:

“I do what I do seven days a week. I’ll usually get up at 5:30 and work for an hour. Then, frequently, I will go out and hit a golf ball. They let me onto most of the courses I belong to very early, which is nice. If I come at 6:00, they say, “Go ahead.” I’ll go around for an hour, an hour and a half. Then I’m back here by 8:00, and then I’ll work till 6:00. I’ll take a couple breaks if I need them, which I usually do. And obviously, what that [day] results in is more books than my publisher wants. That’s why I started doing non-fiction, because they said, “Okay, yeah, we can handle one or two non-fiction.”

The other is team work. Even though Patterson is directly involved with each work in progress, he has a bevy of writers assisting him. It seems like the more books you write, the more you sell. And the more books you sell, the more money you make. And the more money you make, the more assistants can you employ to help write even more books.

Australian author Alice Boer-Endacott, writing for the Australian Young Adult Literature Alliance (#LoveOzYA) blog:

However, despite the growing mainstream appreciation of fantasy (and science fiction) texts, especially within YA, Will [Kostakis] notes, “it’s as if we’re conditioned to see something as less worthy just because it is unabashedly fun. The implications of this? We talk less about fantasy books’ craft, we omit some of our finest YA writers from awards conversations, they’re not studied in schools … That last bit is very important in the Australian landscape, where sales are (unfortunately) quite small.” This final point was echoed by an industry insider with whom I had a passing conversation on this subject (they declined to be named). They told me, “the success of YA texts are dependent on whether or not schools pick up class sets, and they are much less inclined to do that with fantasy.”

Some Australian publishers explicitly state they will not accept science fiction and fantasy manuscripts. Some Australian authors meanwhile have reported local agents and publishers will only accept literary fiction manuscripts, and nothing else. Scoring any publishing deal is difficult, but the odds are especially stacked against sci-fi and fantasy writers in Australia.

Yagoona is a suburb in the southwest of Sydney, located about twenty kilometres from the city’s CBD. An Aboriginal word meaning “now” or “today”, Yagoona was accorded a unique claim to fame in 1971, when it became host to the first McDonald’s hamburger restaurant in Australia.

At this stage I could not tell you whether said hamburger restaurant features in any way in Funny Ethnics (published by Affirm Press in February 2023), the debut novel of Sydney based Australian author Shirley Le, which is also set in Yagoona.

It is possible though, as the story follows the fortunes, and misfortunes, of Sylvia Nguyen, a second generation Vietnamese-Australian, from childhood through to adulthood. Surely it is not unreasonable to assume Sylvia would have hung out at her local Macca’s with friends after school, as was a rite of passage for many Australian teenagers.

But even if Sylvia spent all her school days in the Yagoona McDonald’s, it seems doubtful she would have had much interest in the restaurant’s significance in Australian fast food history. That’s because Sylvia had lofty goals. She aspired to move out of her childhood home, leave Yagoona and Western Sydney behind, and move into a share house, in a world far removed in Sydney’s inner west.

But hardships run in tandem with the dreams. The city is not always welcoming of immigrants. Racism is rife. Sylvia struggles to balance her Vietnamese heritage with her Australian identity.

Whether Sylvia’s experiences mirror Le’s, also a second generation Vietnamese-Australian, is another matter though. The question of how much of her life goes into her writing is something Le says she is often asked. Speaking to Stephen Pham of Liminal magazine in 2018 however, Le said she considered herself a writer of literary fiction rather than autobiography. And in Funny Ethnics, Le seems more interested in taking the ordinary, the apparent hum-drum of day-to-day life, and transforming it into something extraordinary.

While Funny Ethnics is Le’s first novel, her name will be familiar to anyone with an interest in Australian literature. A member of Western Sydney literacy movement Sweatshop, Le’s short stories and essays have been published locally in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, SBS Voices, and The Lifted Brow, among others. Le was also the inaugural recipient of the Affirm Press Mentorship for Sweatshop Writers, together with Arab-Australian human rights activist Sara Saleh.

Elon Musk’s arrival at Twitter last October sparked a stampede for the doors, as members worried about where Musk might take the platform. But surprisingly, departures have been matched by arrivals, says Sarah Perez, writing for Techcrunch:

Worldwide mobile app installs are up by 3.7 million in January compared with September 2022. Notably, Twitter installs didn’t decline in November. Instead, it gained new downloads even as some of its users seemingly left for other apps. In other words, any Twitter exodus may have been offset by new Twitter arrivals. Active user data would tell a better story here, but Twitter is no longer a publicly traded company and it’s not clear that Musk is analyzing user data as Twitter had before, which would allow for a direct comparison. But his claims of a burst of November signups could be directionally true, as the month saw higher app installs than October.

There’s also the point that long term Twitter members, despite their disillusionment with the present direction of the platform, have a lot invested in the microblogging service.

Many have spent years, decades possibly, establishing a profile on Twitter, and wouldn’t be in any hurry to leave. Despite the uptake in alternatives, such as Mastodon, there’s still, I think, the hope among some Twitter members that things will eventually return to normal, or some semblance of normal.

After spending fourteen years writing a novel — between working and bringing up a family — American lawyer turned writer Lloyd Devereux Richards, published his novel Stone Maidens through Amazon, in 2012.

And then next to nothing happened. Until Richard’s daughter, Marguerite, posted a short clip about the novel on TikTok. Then things started happening. The clip went viral. Sales surged. Stone Maidens sold out after a short stint as the number one on Amazon’s bestseller list, such was interest.

Last week Marguerite posted a 16-second TikTok video that briefly recounted her father’s journey as an author. She explained that her father worked tirelessly on his book while raising three children, and “he’s so happy even though sales aren’t great”. The clip ended with a simple call to arms: “I’d love for him to get some sales.”

It’s not the first time something like this happened after a book concept took off on TikTok. Numerous authors whose manuscripts have been rejected by publishers, have seen their work printed after being embraced by Tiktok users. The Atlas Six, by Olivie Blake, which I mentioned a few days ago, is another example.

Finding a publishing deal through TikTok seems like a lottery to me, but it’s probably worth posting your book idea there, on a “be in it to win it” basis.

Life’s too short to stick with, say, a movie or a book, that isn’t appealing, so ditch them, says Josh Gondelman, writing for Self magazine:

This is not, by the way, a criticism of the slow burn. It’s simply a permission slip to ditch the no burn. Gratification doesn’t have to be immediate, but it should be… eventual. With all the world’s art at our fingertips, there’s no reason to settle for something that leaves us cold. Unless, of course, you’re simply trying to bludgeon yourself into numbness with some kind of dull programming marathon. We all have to get to sleep somehow.

Yes, sleep. I often read books later in the evening, because, you know, I’m writing about books during the day, so I have to read later on. But if I find myself constantly nodding off while reading a novel, that’s pretty much an indication to stop and move onto something else.

Here’s a selection of recent or upcoming Australian published books to add to your TBR list, that have caught my eye this week.

• The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams — follow up to 2020’s The Dictionary of Lost Words — a story about twin sisters working in the bindery at Oxford University Press during World War I.
• The Wakes by Dianne Yarwood. Funerals, failing marriages, and a catering business, are the ties that bind five people, to greater or lesser degrees, in Yarwood’s fiction debut.
• Gigorou by Sasha Kutabah Sarago. The beauty assistant, model, and magazine editor recounts her journey to reconcile her conflict with beauty.
• The Messiah’s Bride by Megan Norris. The harrowing story of Stefanie Hinrichs, a survivor of an Australian doomsday cult, who was forced to become the child bride of the cult’s leader.
• A Country of Eternal Light, by Paul Dalgarno. A dead woman travels back and forth through time, and around the globe, as she seeks meaning in life and death.

There are ways to begin a writing career, and there are ways to begin a writing career. Your first novel being the subject of a manuscript bidding contest, and then making the shortlist of a major literary award once published, would probably rate as a pretty good start in the eyes of most pundits.

This is what happened to Sydney based Australian journalist and author Tracey Lien, and her novel All That’s Left Unsaid, published in September 2022 by HarperCollins Australia. So intense was enthusiasm for Lien’s manuscript, it was reported no fewer than nine publishing houses slugged it out for the publishing rights.

Frantic auctions for manuscripts are not uncommon, but they’re not exactly every day occurrences either. In 2021, American author Olivie Blake also found herself, and the manuscript of her book The Atlas Six — which she had already self-published — at the centre of a lucrative bidding contest that was sparked on TikTok.

But Lien’s story continues. Soon after being published, All That’s Left Unsaid was shortlisted in the debut fiction category of the 2023 Indie Book Awards. Needless to say, this is a novel that packs a punch. Ky Tran, a young woman is forced to return to Australia after her younger brother, Denny, is murdered in a busy restaurant, in the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta.

Despite the presence of numerous bystanders though, no one seems to know anything about how Denny died. With local police seemingly uninterested in the case, Ky sets about contacting, and talking to, each of the witnesses present when Denny was killed. But All That’s Left Unsaid is more than a murder story.

Lien’s novel lifts the lid on a troubled area of Sydney — also home to a large refugee population — during a difficult chapter in its history. The streets were awash with drugs and violence. Cabramatta is also where Australia’s first political assassination took place, when John Newman, a New South Wales State parliamentarian was killed outside his home in 1994.

Emma Finn, of London based literary agency C&W Agency described Lien’s manuscript as “electrifying and compulsive”, at the time the publishing rights were acquired. One can only wonder what might be next for Lien, and All That’s Left Unsaid. Blake’s novel The Atlas Six is in the process of being adapted for TV, and given interest thus far in Lien’s debut, a screen adaptation hardly seems like a surprise. Time will tell.

The winners of the Indie Book Awards will be announced on Monday 20 March 2023.