And I’m going to celebrate with Foster Trescot. Foster’s Five Minute Interview will kick off NaNoWriMo. (In this part of the world anyway!)

Today I received a copy of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace 2007/08 from my favourite bookshop in the world, Gleebooks. (When you order you get a personal email to thank you and tell you it’s in the mail!)
Here it is:   
So, I’m very happily flicking through it, through the lists of magazines, journals, newspapers, literary agents, […]

1. Who are you?
Roger Morris. Oh shit. I’m supposed to spend at least one minute answering this? My name* alone is not enough then? You want something a bit more profound, philosophical, existential, at the very least, insightful? Something a bit more revealing perhaps? The local paper (Crouch End and Muswell Hill Times) described me […]

More news of unfathomable animal abuse from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization (PETA) and this time it’s abuse of turkeys at ConAgra Foods, Inc., one of North America’s largest packaged foods companies.
Between April and July, 2006, PETA undercover investigators worked as “live hangers”—the people who receive live birds and shackle them […]

There are 82 of Ed but 0 of me in the US of A.
How many have your name?
I think I’ll tag some people with this one:
Jai Clare
Steve Kane
Roger Morris
Katrina Denza
Myfanwy Collins
Debra Broughton
  

My friend, Angel, sent me a link to a Guardian piece in which Brian Aldiss, author of Brothers of the Head (”the 1977 novel about conjoined twins who are exploited as a pop act [which] has now been made into a film”) looks at “the question of where creative ideas emerge from.”
Aldiss writes:
It’s all wrapped […]

A great novelist is essentially tolerant, that is, displays a real apprehension of persons other than the author as having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves.
- Iris Murdoch
(I have no idea where this comes from. I’ve scribbled it on some paper and […]

Interesting piece in The Age about Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.
Novelist Kate Grenville has upset historians by claiming her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River is a new form of history writing.
…begins the report by Jane Sullivan. While researching the story, Grenville came across “dispatch from Governor Arthur Phillip, written a few months after the First […]

Another great book review by Apostolos Vasilakis over at Greekworks.com. This time it’s a review of George Pelecanos’s The Night Gardener. Vasilakis begins the review with a quote from Petros Markaris, the Greek crime writer (Deadline in Athens) who was the subject of Vasilakis’s previous reviews. The quote:
[The] detective novel becomes more and more social….It’s […]

Just spied an article in The Journal News on Doris Lessing’s upcoming novel The Cleft.
She told The Journal News that:
I saw a science magazine which said that the basic human type is female and that men came along afterward,” she explains. “You have an original community of females, on a seashore, very conventional. Then, one […]