Showing all posts about writing
Koenji’s Manuscript Writing Cafe, for writers on deadlines
19 April 2022
If you’re a writer with a deadline you simply cannot afford to miss, then the Manuscript Writing Cafe, in Koenji, a district in the Japanese capital Tokyo, is the place for you. Upon arrival writers inform management of their writing goal for the day, be it a five-thousand word article, a couple of chapters of a novel, or a few blog posts.
Everyone in the cafe is working on a manuscript with an imminent deadline. This unique sense of tension like studying for an exam in a library will really stimulate your creative work!
Every hour a staff member will come along and check on your progress, and gently prod you if necessary. But here’s the thing, you will not be allowed to leave the cafe until you’ve finished what you set out to do. I’m not sure exactly how strictly that dictate is enforced, but not being able to go home might be pretty good motivation to meet your deadline.
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#IndieApril and ways to support writers everywhere
7 April 2022
While there may not be a whole lot of Australian government support for authors in this part of the world, as book readers there are things we can do. Jake Uniacke posted a few #IndieApril suggestions on Twitter, but these are ideas that can be acted upon at anytime of the year.
- Review their work. Goodreads, Amazon, and Google are good places to start.
- Share their work. Spread the word on your social media channels, Twitter, Facebook, BookTok, and Bookstagram.
- Buy their books. Through the author’s website if possible, or an indie bookshop, any bookshop really.
- Interact with their content. Instagram stories, Twitter polls, and Q&A sessions, are a few suggestions.
Joe Walters, writing for Independent Book Review, also offers a number of suggestions.
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Government support for Australian writers declines
7 April 2022
The Australian federal budget was handed down last week, but there was little in it for writers. Funding for the arts sector is being reduced by almost twenty-percent, with the RISE Fund, which was established to support the sector during the pandemic, scheduled to be phased out.
Unlike the performing arts, which benefit from a dedicated funding stream inside the Australia Council, literature has enjoys very little federal support. In 2020-21, the Australia Council gave out just $4.7 million in grant funding to literature – 2.4% of the total funding pool last year. In contrast, the major performing arts organisations received $120 million.
The funding situation serves to draw attention to just how little writers earn. Sydney based author Charlotte Wood, speaking at a recent parliamentary hearing, set things out in pretty blunt terms:
Wood told a House of Representatives inquiry into Australia’s cultural sector that “writers themselves are in absolutely dire economic difficulty”. She cited figures that literary writers’ annual income from their books was just $4,000 a year.
Four thousand dollars a year? What is anyone meant to conclude from that? Writing is indeed poorly looked upon in Australia.
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Australian literature, writing
Unforgettable descriptions of food in literature
4 April 2022
Some meal time reading for sure… twelve of the most unforgettable descriptions of food in literature, curated by Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. The writing of Haruki Murakami, Nora Ephron, Marcel Proust, and late American writer and illustrator Louise Fitzhugh, among others, is featured.
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Melbourne Writers Festival slims down to four days for 2022
28 March 2022
The Melbourne Writers Festival runs this year from Thursday 8 to Sunday 11 September 2022. This represents a change in format for the festival which has in the past run for at least ten days. The 2021 event for instance ran from Friday 3 September to Wednesday 15 September 2021.
This year’s event will see “a concentrated program that would feature about 250 Australian and international writers in 120 events“, says artistic director Michaela McGuire.
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Sydney Writers Festival program 2022
26 March 2022
The program for the 2022 Sydney Writers’ Festival was unveiled on Thursday, and refreshingly for the lockdown-fatigued is choke full of face-to-face, in person events. Spread across venues including Sydney Town Hall, City Recital Hall, and Carriageworks, the festival opens on Monday 16 May, and concludes on Sunday 22 May 2022.
In addition, numerous other “neighbourhood” events, will be held in other areas, both in and out of Sydney, hosted at places including the State Library of NSW, WestWords Parramatta, Ashfield Town Hall, Chatswood Library on The Concourse, Penrith City Library, and Wollongong Art Gallery. Top up your Opal card, you could be covering a bit of ground.
The opening night address takes place at Sydney Town Hall on the evening of Tuesday 17 May, and features Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jackie Huggins, and Nardi Simpson.
Nearly four hundred Australian and international authors and writers, along with actors, sports people, academics, and many others, are scheduled to participate in proceedings, including Emily Bitto, winner of the 2015 Stella Prize, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Mick Elliott, former Australian footballer Adam Goodes, Muireann Irish, Bri Lee, Charlotte McConaghy, J.P. Pomare, Teela Reid, Yumi Stynes, and Murong Xuecun, also known as Hao Qun.
The theme of this year’s festival, explains artistic director Michael Williams is change my mind. How perfectly apt, because what is writing, if not transformative?
Change my mind with a stanza or a couplet, a jarring dissonance, a beautiful echo or a rhyme. Change it with a flight of fancy, an intricate, imagined world, a compelling character I’ll never meet but never forget. Turn it upside down with searing rhetoric, impeccable research, the knock-out argument that has me questioning everything I know and all that I believe.
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The Tolkien Estate, a repository of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work
23 March 2022
The Tolkien Estate looks to be the ultimate resource of the work and life of British author, poet, and academic J. R. R. Tolkien, writer of The Lord of the Rings, and other works. It’s incredible to think — given the depth and scope of his writing output — that Tolkien worked mainly as a teacher at Oxford University, instead of a full time author.
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J. R. R. Tolkien, literature, writing
Virtual Literary Speed Dating 2022
21 March 2022
The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is hosting several virtual literary speed dating events this year for its members. Prospective authors will be given three minutes to pitch their completed manuscript to local literary agents and publishers, at online events in May, and then again a few months later.
Canberra based Australian author Shelley Burr is a literary speed dating success story, having found a publisher for her debut novel Wake, at an event in December 2020. Here’s speed dating that’s worth participating in.
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2022 Australian Book Design Awards longlist
18 March 2022
Especially for those who enjoy judging books by their covers, the 2022 Australian Book Design Awards longlist has been announced. There are over one hundred and sixty titles vying for recognition across twenty categories, plus the Deb Brash Emerging Designer of the Year award.
Fiction titles are essentially separated into four groups, children’s, young adult, commercial, and literary. The Other Side of Beautiful, by South Australian author Kim Lock, The Younger Wife, by Melbourne novelist Sally Hepworth, are among candidates in the commercial fiction category, while In Moonland, by Miles Allinson, is one of the nominations in the literary fiction segment.
Over four-hundred-and-ninety titles were considered in this year’s award, before the longlist was unveiled. The shortlist will be made public in early April, with the winners in each category being named on Friday 3 June 2022, in Melbourne.
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Michael Williams steps down as Sydney Writers’ Festival artistic director
18 March 2022
After two years as artistic director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Michael Williams has decided to step down. Williams who is Melbourne based, and has a young family residing there, always saw his tenure in the role as temporary, something occasioned by COVID, and the challenges the pandemic posed to events such as the festival.
“I was brought on, to quote The Godfather, as a wartime consigliere, to see the festival through the COVID period, and it was only ever a kind of interim posting. It was going to be the one year. Then, quite apart from anything else, last year’s was so much fun, it was such a wonderful job and wonderful organisation that I couldn’t resist doing a matched pair.”
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