Failure is something many writers come up against time and again, so I was interested to read this response from young Australian artist Gemma Jones:

“That a knock-back stings, but it doesn’t really injure you. That I sometimes live in fear of failing, and when the crunch comes it is disappointing, but it turns out I’m still standing. And, in the end, you forget about your losses and your failures – so sometimes I just choose to fast-track the forgetting bit. Coming to a deadend can also mean that you have a chance to pick a new adventure.”

From The Economist, a marvellous essay on books and publishing. Here are a few quotes:

‘… to see technology purely as a threat to books risks missing a key point. Books are not just “tree flakes encased in dead cow”, as a scholar once wryly put it. They are a technology in their own right, one developed and used for the refinement and advancement of thought. And this technology is a powerful, long-lived and adaptable one.’

‘The growth rate of e-books has recently slowed in many markets, including America and Britain. Publishers now expect most of their sales to remain in print books for decades to come—some say for ever.

There are a number of reasons. One is that, as Russell Grandinetti, who oversees Amazon’s Kindle business, puts it, the print book is “a really competitive technology”: it is portable, hard to break, has high-resolution pages and a “long battery life”.’

‘Books will evolve online and off, and the definition of what counts as one will expand; the sense of the book as a fundamental channel of culture, flowing from past to future, will endure.’ 

Neat review of The Children’s Pond by Karen Chisholm on the AustCrimeFiction blog: www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-childrens-pond-tina-shaw

A little bit of bragging …

New Zealand Fiction – Week ending 19 July 2014

1 The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton (VUP) ISBN 9780864739889
2 The Children’s Pond – Tina Shaw (Pointer Press)
3 The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton (VUP) 9780864739124
4 Heartland – Jenny Pattrick (Black Swan)
5 Tenderness: Stories – Sarah Quigley (Vintage)
6 Purgatory – Rosetta Allan (Penguin)
7 Landscape with Solitary Figure – Shonagh Koea (Vintage)
8 Chocolate Cake for Breakfast – Danielle Hawkins (Arena)
9 Carnival Sky – Owen Marshall (Vintage) 
10 Where the Rekohu Bone Sings – Tina Makereti (Vintage) 

I’ve recently started work on my next project and got to thinking about how messy and convoluted it sometimes seems to be when writing the first draft of a novel … am reminded all over again of how the first draft can be an adventurous place to visit. Often I don’t know what I’m going to write until I’ve written it, and often I’ll only write a page or two … but when I get into the flow, it’s magic.

The ebook version of my novel The Children’s Pond is now available from mebooks.co.nz and here at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LX954M6