Peter Cooper's Blog, page 4

New Things

Wow I can't believe it's been two months since I last posted here. I guess that says something about how busy I've been, and also how time is mysteriously speeding up with every year that goes past.

I just came back from Judo and I'm still buzzing so it's probably a good time to post something. I started doing it way back in March after an old friend posted a video on Facebook about his club. I've done martial arts before, Karate as a teenager and Taekwondo as an adult (I didn't advance far i...

Nose Off the Grindstone

My wife and children come back tomorrow from a week's holiday interstate (thank goodness, I've missed them horribly). While they've been gone, as per my previous post, I've been beavering away trying to get 20,000 words written of the latest draft of Book 3. I'm happy to report that I ended up writing 19236 words, just over 4200 of which I did today which brought me to the end of the draft with a day to spare. Loud cries of 'woot' all around, I say! And this afternoon I went to the local copy...

Nose to the Grindstone

This weekend my wife and sons are heading off for a week's holiday with the in-laws, sans me as we decided it was better for me to save some leave for the end of the year. This means that, in between eating pizza and throwing my dirty underwear all over the floor, I'll be aiming to get some serious word-count happening on the latest draft of Tales of the Blue Jade book 3.
I've set myself a target of 20,000 words, a quarter of the book. It seems a heck of a lot, but I've broken it down to arou...

Short Stories (Again)

I have a continuing love-hate relationship with short stories. Whenever I read a great short story, or an anthology of great short stories (such as Magic Dirt, by Sean Williams, which I recently finished) I get all fired up and motivated and I sit down and try and write my own. And even though I've been lucky enough to have a few published, writing them is still hard, even harder than writing novels (and that's truly saying something).

The main battle I have with short stories it not coming up...

CBCA Conference 2012

I had a great time last week chairing the "Other Worlds Other Values" panel at the Children's Book Council of Australia conference. I was pretty nervous beforehand, being decidedly out of practice with the whole public speaking thing, but once I sat down at the table my butterflies fluttered off and I was good to go. And it was a great time all round. To be honest, I had difficulty coming up with questions that would tease out the topic, and I was banking on the panellists being able to find...

Interviews Galore

Well, two actually.

Firstly, my fellow writer in the trenches Pete Aldin has interviewed me for his new (and very schmick) website www.petealdin.com. Definitely worth checking out, not just for the interview but for his practical and very down to earth writing tips. Drop in and say hi.

Also, my publisher has an interview on the Omnibus Blog which you can find here.

And now I'm hoping I haven't wildly contradicted myself between these two interviews.

I'm also hoping to post an account of the rece...

Quite Frankly, I'm Stressed.

I could probably say "stretched" instead of "stressed" but I think both words express the same thing accurately enough. At work I've been given a new task and it's not something I've done before (programming code to talk to a PLC through a serial port, if you want the gory details), and no matter how much time I spend banging my head on the desk I'm not making very good progress. Then on the writing front I have just over six months to complete book 3 of Tales of the Blue Jade and I'm getting...

A History of the World's Most Unsuccessful Competitions

So, perhaps we'll say no more about that then...

However, should anyone anywhere still fancy a free copy of Mapmaker's Apprentice, I'll send it to the first person to put a comment under this post. Any kind of comment will do: what you ate for dinner; some poetry you wrote as a child; your opinion of the effectiveness of garlic for the treatment of gout; even a blank space or a blob of text generated by randomly thumping the keys. Whatever you want to post, please do it, a...