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89 Chapters on CityFM89 radio Pakistan

28 January 2011 in | Comments (0)

Gorgeous poster from 89 Chapters - more info on the interviews next week.

OpenBookToronto Writer-in-Residence

28 January 2011 in Virtual Book Tour | Comments (0)

For the month of February I’m going to be Writer-in-Residence, online, at OpenBookToronto.

My main task will be blogging every other day and interacting with readers via those blog posts.  Blogging every other day is a fairly substantial undertaking; as anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m more of an occasional than regular blogger.  So, we’ll see!  I’ll post links to that blog on this blog, so please come and visit me there!

Me and My Reading Device

20 January 2011 in | Comments (2)

Having posted a rant last September on this blog called ‘Why I Still Don’t Have an E-Reader’, I now have an e-reader.  I was given the fancy glossy one - you know which one I mean - for my birthday just before Christmas.

And I have to say that I’ve found the transition from reading pbooks to reading on it pretty seamless.

The fact that this particular device offers a wealth of other entertainment opportunities hasn’t worried me too much.  I bought a novel on it, and I read the novel.  It wasn’t a particularly good novel, but it still held my attention throughout, even when I was in the midst of my worst spell of Angry Birds fever.  Doubtless I’ll buy more.  The temptation to buy stuff for this device, from books to content of all kinds, is huge:  really, it’s the ultimate consumer device as the way to get the most out of it is to buy more and more stuff to consume on it. 

It’s pretty.  It’s shiny.  The issues I mentioned in that earlier post still remain true.  But now that I have it, for me the biggest concern will be trying to figure out which books to buy for it, and which books to buy in hard copy.  If anyone has a formula, or a set of guidelines, for figuring out that one, please tell me. 

In other news, I posted a tweet the other day saying ‘Maybe someone will enable Flash on apple devices while Steve Jobs isn’t looking.’  A little bad-tempered joke on a Monday morning (and of course not unrelated to my new reading device).  This tweet was RTed, and then RTed some more; then William Gibson RTed it, and it got RTed more and more.  A tiny moment of twitter sunshine.  Then the darkness of broken web browsing closed in once again.

Lifelines Nominated for a BETT Award 2

11 January 2011 in Lifelines | Comments (0)

Tomorrow night is the prize-giving dinner for the 2011 BETT Awards.  Chris has hired his tux and I’m going to sew a button on my best outfit and wear my new Fluevogs.

‘Lifelines’, the digital fiction project Chris Joseph and I created for educational publisher, Rising Stars, has been nominated in the category of Secondary, FE, and Skills Digital Content.  The other projects look great.  But fingers crossed!  It would be great for Rising Stars, and for us, to have a win. 

In advance of the award ceremony, there’s been two pieces about my work in the papers of late:  an interview in the Independent on Sunday, ‘Brave New World:  Writers Will Have to Change Their Attitude if They’re to Catch Up with the Videogames Industry’, and a Comment piece in the Guardian’s Classroom Innovation supplement today, ‘Educators Need to Utilise the Explosion in Digital Writing’. 

I’ll be giving a seminar at BETT on Friday. 

Publication Day in the US today

4 January 2011 in | Comments (0)

Today is publication day for Touchstone, Simon & Schuster’s hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions of ‘The Mistress of Nothing’.  Hooray!!! 

There’s been a few good reviews already - the links are in the Press section of the website.  The US market seems huge and totally foreign to me, so fingers crossed that my novel finds its way.

Just before Christmas the enhanced audio edition of the book created by McArthur & Co, CBC Books, and myself for the Canadian market was released.  It featured on the homepage of the iBookstore for a while, which is great.  If you’ve seen the edition, I’d love to hear from you - I have yet to see it myself, as getting hold of it outside the Canadian market territory has proved difficult.  I hope that readers like it. 

As well as publication day, this is my first day back at work post-holidays - very tough getting started on life and work once again.  But I’m looking forward to 2011, and having my novel come out today as well is a great boost, and very exciting!