Mike Crowl's Blog, page 19

Kindle highlights on Goodreads

I'm just reading Penny Sansevieri's book, 5-Minute Book Marketing for Authors. I'd thought I'd read it before, but according to the record I keep of books I've read, I haven't. (Still with me?)

Maybe I started it and then it got interrupted by some other book coming along the chute, such as her other title, How to Sell Books on Amazon by the Truckload, which was really good. Anyway, this 5-Minute book is helpful, and has some good ideas in it.

I was reading it at a rehearsal for...

p-book

I work with a Chilean man, helping him with his English pronunciation and reading. Today we came across an article in a magazine from 2015 in which the author, Jani Patokallio, wrote about introducing the word p-book (or pbook, or pBook, to use his own variation on spelling possibilities).

He had apparently used this word back in 2000 when ebooks (or e-books, or eBooks) were coming into their own. I think he had hopes that the word would take off as a means of distinguishing printed books...

Real life impinging on fiction

Over the last few months I've been typing up old diaries from the 1990s - there were 700 pages of them, and I've only typed up just over 200 so far.

In the entry I copied today I was remembering an event that happened way back in 1954, when my grandfather suddenly died one Saturday. I'm guessing he had a heart attack, although I don't know this, since I was only nine at the time.

My mother and I lived with my grandparents, because she and my father had split up. He stayed behind in Australia wh...

Cockamamie and gallimaufry

Geraldine McCaughrean, courtesy of Oxford English Dictionary
This week, Geraldine McCaughrean won the Carnegie Medal for her novel, Where the World Ends, a book aimed at middle-grade, early secondary readers. She used her winner's speech to highlight the problems she's had directly (as have other authors) with publishers wanting to dumb down language for children. 

She warned that a new focus on “accessible” prose for younger readers will lead to “an underclass of citizens with a smal...

Chesterton's brother and Kindle formatting

By chance I recently came across a book about G K Chesterton, the famous early 20th century writer.
I have some 36 of his titles on my shelves, in paperback and hardcover, and a few more on Kindle.

The book was written by Chesterton's brother, Cecil, although when it was first published his name didn't appear on the cover. It's entitled, G K Chesterton: a Criticism, and looks at the early period of GKC's writing life, when he was still establishing himself, and then suddenly becoming well-know...

Raphael Alexandre Lustchevsky

I was recently asked to write a review for a local paper, but due to some muddle, the review didn't reach the right person on the staff in time. It looks as though it's not going to appear at all. So I'm including it here on the blog, for anyone who's interested. Due to the paper's restrictions, the review has to be no more than 300 words. 


Review of Raphael Alexandre Lustchevsky’s concert at Marama Hall, 10th May, 2018

The Polish Heritage of Otago and Southland and the Polish Embassy spon...

Distorting the facts

Back in 2015 I wrote about the play, Souvenir, which focused on the performances and life of
Florence Foster Jenkins. In 2016, Meryl Streep starred in a movie about the same person, which we saw around the time it came out, and then watched it again on Netflix last night.

I remember feeling somewhat disappointed in the movie, which also stars Hugh Grant as her husband, and Simon Helberg as Cosmé McMoon, the pianist who accompanied her in her later years. 

Not only do we discover that...

On Writing 4: Writers should expect to get paid

In a diary entry for the 22nd of June, 1989, I noted: Yesterday I received $25 in the post from The Mouthpiece magazine it's about eleven months since I last wrote to them, and received a favourable reply, and a cheque in answer to my cheeky request. I'd read in the 1987 Writers' Yearbook that a cheeky writer had requested money for his work from a magazine that supposedly never paid, and had received a cheque. So I thought it was good enough for me too!In today's money $25 is about $60...

On Writing 3: Objectivity and subject matter

The two previous On Writing posts referred to extracts from my old diaries that were dated from 1990. It only occurred to me later that I'd started the diary in 1989, of course, and that that's where I should have started with these extracts. No problem. I'm now going back to 1989, where there's plenty of material for me to work on.

The first mention of writing comes on the 18th of April, 1989, the day after that initial typewritten diary began. It's interesting that it also discusses ideas. W...

On Writing 2: Ideas

On the 21st of January, 1990, I had some exciting news. I wrote at the time that it was 'quite exciting.' I'm sure I meant it was really exciting, and it was: a children's story I'd written had been accepted for a very popular New Zealand children's radio programme called Ears, which ran from 1988 to 1996. (Ears was the name of the programme; the story was called When Dad Went Fishing. You can read it here.)
Instead of encouraging me to go on and write more children's stories, I did...