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A new specialty bookstore opens up in Melbourne – Embiggen Books (and they are stocking Twelfth Planet Press already).

6 mistakes people make in their cover letters.

Oh my goodness yes. And frankly, there is nothing more irritating than someone who can’t follow the guidelines or thinks that they are a precious little snowflake. Tip for nothing – the best way to be viewed, appreciated and invited along next time as a professional is to BE a professional. As an editor, *I* know what I am looking for and I conveyed that in my submission guidelines. And every body else played by the rules. And now, 5 years along in this gig, when someone walzes up to me and announces right off the bat that they either a) can’t read guidelines or b) don’t want to play by the rules, I actually thank them for saving me the time of discovering for myself that they are a pain in the arse to edit –> quick rejection.

Announcing the Stella:

FED UP with women being overlooked for literary prizes, sisters are doing it for themselves and establishing Australia’s answer to Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction, which is open to women only.

..

”Women are much less likely to win literary awards, to write reviews of books, or have their books reviewed. This, despite the fact they write about half the books published,” Cunningham said.

She pointed out that in 2009 and 2011 the Miles Franklin Award had all-male shortlists and that since the Miles Franklin began in 1957, a woman has won 13 times. In the past 10 years, women have won the Franklin twice.

The late Miles Franklin was born Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, but she knew better than to stick with her given name (as did her contemporary Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, who chose the pseudonym Henry Handel Richardson).

Over at a Conversational Life,Tehani Wessely is asking professionals about their experiences of publishing in Indie Press. Trent Jamieson says:
Big fish start small, and that goes for writers, and publishers too. And as a reader, I know my reading life would be all the poorer without our wonderful indie publishers
If you live in Melbs, please go to this because I can’t make it -
On Sunday, September 25th, WoL host and co-curator MICHAELA McGUIRE will bring together for the first time ever on stage: star of hit channel 7 series Winners and Losers VIRGINIA GAY, comedienne and actress CELIA PACQUOLA, journalist and political dynamite MAXINE MCKEW, opinion writer, essayist, and co-author of The Great Feminist Denial MONICA DUX, award-winning playwright LALLY KATZ, and doyenne of Australian journalism and knockout businesswoman ITA BUTTROSE. These fine females will each be penning ‘A Letter To The Life I Could Have Lived.’

How to be a dangerous woman (in fiction + life)

Strength in and of itself is not strategic, and it’s not necessarily powerful, and I wonder if we tend to forget that.

A strategic woman, a powerful woman, is a brilliantly disruptive woman.

She’s dangerous.

I admire women who are dangerous.

and

The conversation is framed in a way that underscores and reinforces the idea that men are men and women are….not.

It also denies the fact that women have always been strong, birthed babies and held dying children and endured oppression and fought for the rights of others (and sometimes even themselves) and waited for husbands and sons to come back from wars and managed households and worked in factories and lived in the streets and nursed the sick and dying and worked the fields and kept families together and survived domestic violence and sexual violence and started businesses and reinvented themselves and carried water for miles and so on and so on: they saw work that needed to be done and they did it, and they continue to do it.

But that kind of female strength isn’t glamorous or even all that visible or acknowledged. These are not the tasks that win prizes or promotions or partnerships.

and for Tansy (after our conversation on Sunday morning)

A powerful man falls into the category of powerful men.

A powerful woman creates (still!) her own category.

She is by her very nature a challenger and a rebel.

She has to defy the ingrained gender norms which encourage a woman to be good…but not great.

To be bright…but not brilliant.

To be creative…but not disruptive or innovative.

To play the game…but not to change it.

To play by the rules…instead of shifting the battlefield, to where she can make new rules.

 

Some Starbucks stores have begun preventing mobile workers from accessing electrical outlets. I’ve always been fascinated in the US how the staff don’t shuffle you along. In Perth, not sure what it’s like in other places round the country, coffee shops get annoyed if you stay for like more than an hour. They tend to hint and then get less and less subtle about moving you along. Even when you’re ordering several rounds of drinks and food.
NASA and Tor/Forge Books team up

Time travel and warp drives may, alas, be out of the picture in a new partnership between Nasa and Tor/Forge Books, which will see the science fiction publisher’s authors teaming up with the space agency to release a range of “scientifically accurate and entertaining” novels.

 

Economics Rewrite Book Business



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2 Comments

  • By Marg on 31 August 2011 at 6:05 pm

    Bugger! The letters event looks great but it is my son’s birthday so I guess I have to do stuff like make him a cake and cook his favourite dinner and stuff!

  • By AlisaK on 31 August 2011 at 9:39 pm

    Ah well, yeah you should probably do that.

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