Mark Rossiter

Wikipedia image entitled “The Congo River near Mossaka”

I happen to be writing a collection of stories based on a trip I made across Africa some eighteen years ago. One of the stories, ‘The River’, is about a pirogue trip up the then Zaire River (before and since, the River Congo). This is one of the world’s great rivers, flowing from the mountain ranges in the east all the way through equatorial Congo and down to the sea. And from its mouth, the river is navigable past the capital, Kinshasa, back up to Kisangani, where traffic is stopped by the Stanley Falls.

I was part of a group of young people travelling by truck across Africa and a number of us hired a pirogue, a canoe, to take us four days up-river from the town of Bumba to Kisangani. This was no ordinary canoe: two hollowed-out tree trunks roped together made a stable sleek boat, powered by one small outboard petrol engine, our home on the water and under the stars for three nights. Continue Reading »

Fascinating report on ebook prices in UK.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/aug/05/kindle-bookstore-cheapest-option

What you notice, straight away, is that Kindle books are cheapest, especially compared to Apple’s offering, iBooks. So let’s think this through.

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I’ve been hankering after a new e-reader for a while and this week I made the plunge.

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This creative non-fiction piece is to be published in Arcade Publications‘ Nth Degree, the 2010 Anthology from AAWP, the Australian Association of Writing Programs. Continue Reading »

Blog post on the subject of the Young Narrator on the Guardian’s Books site by Australian writer Evan Maloney.

Includes my choices of Young Narrators (Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield and Christopher Boone) and also some others which perhaps do not strictly fit into the category, because either they’re older or they turn out to be writing from an adult perspective (therefore they’re only retrospectively Young Narrators). In these latter examples, the voices may appear to be young but their choice of concepts, concerns & language constructions, not to mention knowledge about the world and their retrospective writing stance, reveal they are not in fact using the true voice of a Young Narrator.

Of course, writing is all smoke and mirrors, it’s all about creating an authentic voice but this often means utilising every tool and technique available to elicit an emotional reaction. And, as Maloney says, “challenges of writing in the voice of a young narrator are off-puttingly severe”.

Evan Maloney’s new book is Tofu Landing.

The word barter is completely misunderstood by many people using it. It means something quite different to what they think.

How could this have come about? In the age of online dictionaries, where the meanings of hundreds of thousands of words are at our fingertips, why is an incorrect usage of this cheerful and useful little word so prevalent? And does it really matter?

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I am a fan of books on war. There. I’ve said it. Actually I haven’t read many since I was about fifteen years old, but I am still partial to a browse in the Military section of the bookshop every now and then. Which might be rather strange for a committed pacifist who believes that there must always be a better alternative to sending in the soldiers. But there’s something about a war story … Continue Reading »

If you’re a writer of history, you might be interested in the 2010 History Festival “Writing the Past” at the NSW Writers’ Centre, Sat 13th March. All kinds of writers from novellists to academics and professional historians will be there and there are panels on historical fiction, writing politics and true crime, memoir and individual lives, stories of Sydney, as well as biography and local/community.

The festival page is here and you can download a program here.

Here’s my first e-reader, a BeBook, bought at the beginning of this year and still going strong.

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When does a short story become a novel? I’m not looking for an answer like “when it’s a novella” or one that involves numbers of pages or words. Rather, I’m interested in process: how an idea for a story, a story that could fill say five or ten thousand words (well within the classic definition of a short story), might be “stretched” into novel-length. Can we tell when this has happened? Can we point at a place in the text and say “there, that’s where it happened”?

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