A debate which has been brewing for a long time flared up again recently: should writers expect to be paid for writing for publication on the internet? Online publications Mamamia and The Hoopla recently published pieces on why they don’t pay writers (Mamamia) and why they do (The Hoopla). The Mamamia article in particular seems…
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I imagine being the “crème de la crème” sounds tantalisingly delicious to children of an impressionable age. For one, foreign words to young ears always sound exotic and important, for another, it is the sort of phrase likely to be picked up from an adult, and most children wish to be older than they are,…
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I’d never really thought about it before, until I started reading Joumana Haddad’s Superman is an Arab, but Superman really is a disastrous invention. I’ve never been drawn to the character or the stories surrounding him and have never seen the movies, but still, why doesn’t it raise more eyebrows that Clark Kent is only…
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I know I said writing is all about finding time to write. I wrote that I would do this, despite all my other commitments for the month of November, as I can’t call myself a writer unless I make the effort to find the time to write. Well, okay – I won’t call myself a…
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What could be more exciting, exhilarating and adventurous than committing to working on every continent in the world before your thirtieth birthday? This is the goal New Zealander Hap Cameron set himself when he was twenty-one, after graduating from a marketing degree at university. He wanted life experiences, and to avoid the trap of falling…
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I’m always suspicious of overly thick books. I pick them up with caution, wondering if the author really needed so many words to tell the story. I wonder if the writer simply wished to indulge themselves by constructing a five-hundred page tome, filling it every little detail, and leaving nothing for the reader to discover…
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I’ve come to the realisation that taking part in NaNoWriMo as a uni student is not the best idea. November is the month where final assignments are due and the end-of-semester frenzy kicks into gear. It is also the month where summer days start filling the week with wonderful regularity and, to top it all…
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I’ve never felt so cheated by a book before in my life. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought Caroline Overington’s Sisters of Mercy promised crime, mystery and intrigue. To be fair, this book offers all these things, and plenty more. It is a compelling, captivating story. But what it gave me and what…
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November is fast approaching. For some, that means the end of another semester of uni or the start of summer. For the aspiring novelists of the world, that means gearing up for another NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an event where writers attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. That…
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In Year 12, my English teacher set Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader as one of our texts. The Reader is set after World War II and a major part of the novel is a trial of an SS officer who is being tried for war crimes. Schlink is a crafty writer. He neither wanted to condemn…
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Tom Lubbock was an English writer and illustrator who worked as the chief art critic of the Independent from 1997 to 2011. In 2008, Lubbock was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour and given only two years at the most. Until Further Notice, I am Alive reveals his journal entries during his illness and demise,…
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Technology continues to impact the ever-changing book industry, and recently the literary world has been questioning the authenticity of online book reviews. Popular crime writer RJ Ellory has admitted to faking glowing, 5-star reviews on Amazon for his works, using different pseudonyms, while at the same time writing negative reviews of rival authors’ works. This…
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With the twenty-first century came the rise of the celebrity. We live in a society obsessed by the concept of “celebrity”. We lap up and crave stories and rumours and gossip about people placed firmly in the public eye, and don’t we just love it all the more if their lives turn to trash in…
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Writing is often seen, and used, as a healing process for people who have endured traumatic experiences in their lives. By expressing what they have been through on paper, it has been found that this enables people to process what has happened to them and start to move forward. Stepping into the Sunshine is a…
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