Narrelle M. Harris's Blog, page 51

iPadding

A few tweaks were made to my iPhone app, Melbourne Literary – and now it's all formatted for the iPad as well! There are some screenshots of how it looks in that format in the app store, and it's making me covet new tech!

If any of you have bought the app, either for iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, it would be great if you could leave a review in the app store. It needs at least five reviews for the app to indicate it has any reviews at all, and of course having reviews will encourage people to have confidence in buying it when it comes up on searches for Melbourne guides!

The app has been well received so far, and I hope to do an update in around February next year. If you know of any Melbourne writers, books set in Melbourne, Melbourne literary locations or anything else that would be good to add, let me know!

Review: Bleed by Peter M Ball

Having experienced first-hand the tribulations of writing the second book in a series, I was a little nervous awaiting the sequel to Peter M Ball's Horn. I sang Horn's praises in my old blog, for the way it smashed together two genres – faeries and hard boiled detective fiction – and made something new out of them. It's a damned difficult book to describe without making the listener twitch and back off slowly, because unicorns, gritty crime drama, rape and resurrected PIs who are former...

GaryView: The Last Vampire by Christopher Pike

Lissa: I hate cliffhanger endings.

Gary: I have the next one if you want it.

Lissa: God yes, please!

Gary: So you liked it?

Lissa: It was fun, and a nice change to the whole teen girl in love with a creepy older vampire guy thing.

Gary: Isn't it still creepy when it's a teenage boy in love with an older vampire woman?

Lissa: Yes it is. It's just a reverse gender creepy. And there were some interesting elements to the vampire back story. The whole set-up about the origins of vampires in India, and t...

GaryView: Aussiecon 4 report

Gary (@garyHooper44) and Lissa (@lissawilson83) caught up on Twitter just after the convention… (the feed has been tidied up here to make it easier to read.)

Lissa:  Hey there @garyHooper44 – where have you been for the last five days?

Gary:  Hi. I was at a science fiction convention.

Lissa:   Really? What did you do there?

Gary:  Went to panels mainly, to listen to people talk about SF and vampires and stuff. There was a strange one: zombies vs vampires.

Lissa: Who won?

Gary:  I think it was a...

Theatre Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Yohangza Theatre Company

When Tim and I travel, we like to catch a little theatre if we can. This can be a little tricky when visiting a non-English-speaking country. Luckily, we both love Shakespeare and are very familiar with a lot of the Bard's work. This means that if a local production of a play we're familiar with is on, we'll try to see it. We already know the plot and we can concentrate on other elements, like stagecraft and local cultural influences.

I have seen 'Anthony and Cleopatra' in Italian, with...

Pleasantly brain dead

After all my boasting that I was probably the only person at Aussiecon 4 who was in better health at the end of the festivities than at the start, on Tuesday the adrenalin stopped pumping and I felt exhausted all day. But it was a nice kind of brain-dead tired, ya know?

I had an excellent time, and Monday was a hoot. I'm a raging extrovert (as those who've met me will attest) and I like to talk! So being on panels is a thing of joy rather than fear for me. Even when I haven't had time to...

Aussiecon 4 – Day Five

Tomorrow is Day 5, and the last day of the Worldcon. The nasty bug that had been lingering for the first few days now seems to be fading at last, leaving me wishing I had a time machine to do over the first few days again – so many panels and readings and speeches I missed! But I had a great time loitering in the dealers room and spoke to a lot of wise, wonderful, funny, thoughtful, kind people, so actually I can't complain.

I attended a panel called "Has Hollywood sucked the life out of...

Aussiecon 4

Today is Day Four of Aussiecon 4, the Australian Worldcon. I started with a nasty cold and while still a bit ill, I'm actually getting a little better each day. Surely this means that, against tradition, I should be in perfect health by Day 5, instead of a total wreck like everyone else.

I've done a few panels so far – I had a marvellous time with Bob Kuhn, Alison Croggan and Rob Shearman on a panel about Science Fiction and the Theatre, in which we more or less concluded that the two genres w...

Melbourne Literary App: Guerilla Literary Launch!

It's almost spring, the Melbourne Writers Festival is in full bloom, and here comes the Melbourne Literary iPhone app to crank up the literary vibe another notch!

Full details of the app are listed below, but we're also having a last-minute literary launch to coincide with the Writers Festival.

Launch: 6pm on Wednesday 1 September 2010 at Softbelly Bar, 367 Little Bourke St, Melbourne.

It'll be rough-hewn, last-minute, lots of fun and oh so literary. See you there! (BYO beret)

Even if you can't m...

GaryView: Get Vajazzled for $17!

This post is the result of seeing this very sign in front of a beautician's in the city. I posted about it elsewhere, and Sally said I should GaryView the moment. So I did.

Gary: I saw something on a sign the other day that I didn't understand.

Lissa: What was it?

Gary: It said "Get vajazzled for $17″.

Lissa: …

Gary: What's 'vajazzled'?

Lissa: …

Gary: Because it sounds like something they would do on that show you like. With all the singing.

Lissa: Glee. Ah. No. I don't think so… well, Brittany and S...