Tim Jones's Blog, page 61

Fantastic Voyages: Writing Speculative Fiction: Wellington, Thursday 17 September

Many thanks to Fitz for the poster

That's right! Helen Lowe and I are going to be getting together on the 17th of September, under the guidance and chairpersonship of Radio New Zealand's Arts on Sunday presenter Lynn Freeman, to discuss writing science fiction and fantasy in New Zealand — and getting it published too. Unity Books will be there to help sell books, and I hope that, if you're able to make it, you'll be there too.

If you're keen on reading and/or writing science fiction and fantasy yo

An Interview with Tim Upperton

Tim Upperton's poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Bravado, Dreamcatcher, Landfall, New Zealand Books, New Zealand Listener, North & South, Reconfigurations, Sport, Takahe, Turbine and Best New Zealand Poems 2008.

Tim has won first prizes in the New Zealand Listener National Poetry Day Competition, Takahe magazine's poetry competition, and the Northland and Manawatu short story competitions. He is a former poetry editor for Bravado, and tutors creative writing, travel wri

Voyagers Sets Sail With A Great Crew

Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand is making its public debut at the New Zealand Poetry Society monthly meeting in Wellington on Monday 17th August. The meeting, which starts at 7.30pm at Wellington's historic Thistle Inn, will feature local poets with work in Voyagers reading two poems each: one of their own poems from the anthology, and one other poem from the anthology that they particularly like.

The featured poets will include:

Puri Alvarez
Robin Fry
Tim Jones
Rachel McAlpine
Jane

An Interview with Joanna Preston

Joanna Preston's first solo poetry collection, The Summer King: Poems, has just been published by Otago University Press. The manuscript won the 2008 Kathleen Grattan Award.

Joanna Preston was born in Sydney and spent her childhood in outback New South Wales. In 1994, she migrated to New Zealand, although from 2003 to 2006 she lived in the UK, where she gained an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan. Her poems have been widely published, and won awards, in New Zealand and in

We All Have To Eat: Anarya's Secret Moves Home

My Earthdawn novel Anarya's Secret, published in December 2007, now has a new home page on the revamped site of RedBrick, which has just released the Earthdawn 3rd edition. You can now find Anarya's Secret here:

http://www.redbrick-limited.com/cms/index.php?categoryid=67&book_id=12

Here's the first few paragraphs of Anarya's Secret, to give you an idea of what the book, and Earthdawn, are about:

Anarya's Secret - Prologue

We all have to eat.

Anarya grew up in a community sliding down the long slope t

The Government Says 40% Greenhouse Gas Reductions Can't Be Achieved By 2020. I Say They Can.

The New Zealand Government has just announced that it has ruled out New Zealand adopting a 40% target for greenhouse gas reductions on 1990 levels by 2020. Countries are required to go to this year's Copenhagen climate negotiations with a target on the table, and the New Zealand Government has recently been consulting on what target New Zealand should go in with.

Climate science says that we need developed countries to take on a 40% reduction target, but the New Zealand Government has rejected th

Anarya's Secret Moves Home

My Earthdawn novel Anarya's Secret, published in December 2007, now has a new home page on the revamped site of RedBrick, which is developing Earthdawn under license from FASA. You can find it here:

http://www.redbrick-limited.com/cms/index.php?categoryid=67&book_id=12

Here's the first few paragraphs of Anarya's Secret, to give you an idea of what the book, and Earthdawn, are about:

Anarya's Secret - Prologue

We all have to eat.

Anarya grew up in a community sliding down the long slope to extinction.

An Interview with Mary Cresswell

This is the first of three interviews I will be running over the next few weeks with New Zealand poets whose first solo books of poetry are being launched on or near Montana Poetry Day on Friday 24 July.


Mary Cresswell is a Wellington poet who lives on the Kapiti Coast. She came to New Zealand from Los Angeles in 1970, after having lived in various parts of the US, in Germany, and in Japan. She graduated from Stanford University in California with a degree in history and English literature. She i

Lovelace and Babbage vs The Economy

I had no intention of posting tonight, but this, from artist Sydney Padua, is so brilliant - and so timely - I could not resist.

Lovelace and Babbage vs The Economy: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

You can read Lovelace's origin story (which has slightly more relationship to consensus reality) as well.

Literature, mathematics, computing, Byron. What more could you want? (But if you do want more Ada Lovelace and George Gordon, Lord Byron, check out Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land by the brilliant John

Broken, Beat & Scarred: Is Traditional Publishing Really On Its Last Legs?

Influential tech blog ReadWriteWeb (headed by Wellingtonian Richard MacManus - well made New Zealand!) has posted a lengthy two-part article, "Bits Of Destruction Hit The Book Publishing Business" (Part 1, Part 2). The basic thesis is contained in author Bernard Lunn's introduction to the first article:

"Bits of destruction" is a phrase Fred Wilson uses to describe the destructive part of "creative destruction" brought on by digitization. We hear a lot about the destruction wrought on the newspap