What! How, I hear you ask, in 2011, has a reasonably internet savvy novelist come to this, when other writers have been blogging for a decade? More!
And I answer. Well, er, I've been busy writing.
And you say, Oh, come on, no one's that busy. Besides, you must have been reading blogs for a thousand years. Haven't you ever felt the urge to deliver your own fatuous musings to an uncaring world?
Um, actually, I don't read a lot of blogs. Might have read fifty. A hundred, tops. In my life.
[expletives deleted]. Busy writing what? No one writes that much.
I don't have a problem with commitment. I have a problem with overcommitment. Book opportunities come up and they're just too exciting to say no.
?
A couple of years back I signed up for a humorous fantasy series for kids with Scholastic, my best ever title, Grim and Grimmer. Four books, 180,000 words all up, in a year and a half. http://www.scholastic.com.au/
Doesn't sound like anything special (said in a sneering tone).
But about the same time I also signed with Orbit for a new epic fantasy trilogy, The Tainted Realm, 600,000 words. http://www.orbitbooks.net/
Plenty of people write more.
But I also had the last of my Runcible Jones kids' fantasies to write. And a novella for Legends of Australian Fantasy. And the revised editions of my Human Rites eco-thrillers, plus mentoring and book introductions and articles, and a terrifying amount of environmental consulting in my own small business. So no, there wasn't time for reading blogs, much less writing them.
And a good thing, too. What can you possibly contribute that hasn't been excreted a thousand times before?
Nothing much, I dare say. Fans ask me how my writing is going, so I'm going to talk about that. And like other writers, I'm often asked for advice about writing and the book business.
And I still get a lot of mail about a long article, The Truth about Publishing, which aims to tell beginning writers all they need to know about how the system works. It was written quite a few years ago now so I'm going to update it, section by section. Plus another long article, The Art and Science of Book Promotion, which has become sadly dated by the rise of social media and is also crying out to be updated. The original articles are on my site, www.ian-irvine.com
And anything else I can think of about the future of writing, and books. That's pretty much it, really.
[Grudgingly} I suppose it's enough to be going on with.
