The Empty Page Blog

Joanne loves nature, animals, cheese, funny movies, good books and strawberry daiquiris. She also loves her wonderful husband, Alwyn. She was one of the winners in the 2007 One Book Many Brisbanes short story award for Not in Mitchelton and was shortlisted for the Text Publishing Prize for Young Adult and Children’s writing for her manuscript Wildfire in 2009.

Joanne loves nature, animals, cheese, funny movies, good books and strawberry daiquiris. She also loves her wonderful husband, Alwyn. She was one of the winners in the 2007 One Book Many Brisbanes short story award for Not in Mitchelton and was shortlisted for the Text Publishing Prize for Young Adult and Children’s writing for her manuscript Wildfire in 2009.

Artshub have a great article on cahnges to the Google book settlement, which has some significant changes for Australian rightsholders.

Here, apparently, at some place called Paju Book City in Korea, where she's presenting a seminar on digital publishing at an international conference. Paju Book City is literally,  a "book city". It was allegedly created/funding by some rich guy who loves books. No joke. This is what the official blurb has to say, "This is a new 'City of Publishing' on a very large site (approx. 396,000 square meters) next to the Han River north west of Seoul. There are now more than 50 completed separate buildings for publishing companies, offices, printing works and public facilities at Paju."

Oh, and heads up to meanjin's blog, spike. they say Lovers of language must not miss the 100 Best Quotes from The Wire. There are spoilers for each season, but the montage runs chronologically so you can watch until you get to where you're at. And, if you don't like the words motherf*cker (among others) perhaps give it a miss.

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Graham Storrs writes primarily science fiction – hard sci-fi, in fact – everything from micro-fiction to great, fat novels, from comedy to space opera, and all the many forms and figures in-between. He has published several short stories published and his novels have begun to attract interest.

He lives with his family in rural Queensland some 250 km south of Brisbane on a 46 acre property that is mostly gum and wattle forest with magnificent, granite outcroppings. Read more about Graham via his Q&A with QWC here.

Sally Collings is the author of Sophie’s Journey, the inspiring story of Sophie Delezio and the new release Positive. She joins us today as part of QWC's Oct-Dec blog tour. Sally previously worked in book publishing for almost 20 years, dividing her time between London and Sydney. Now based in Brisbane and a mother of two, she is a freelance writer and editor. Her work focuses on stories of inspiration in the broadest sense – from portraits of life after loss to accounts of academic excellence.

By Cory Doctorow (This column was originally written for MAKE Magazine in late 2008.)

I became a dad in February 2008—during the run-up to The Day, I worked my butt off, getting as much work in the can as I could before my life got taken over by the fruit of my loins. All that hard work paid off. One day, I looked around and realized that it was *all done*. Everything. I’d been ruthless about telling people that I couldn’t even begin to consider their new projects until I had a handle on fatherhood, and I’d caught up on all the assignments and to-dos that had filled my long, long list. For the first time since I dropped out of college, I found myself with nothing—*nothing*!—to do.

QWC's Blog Tour visits Karen Tyrell today. She currently has a memoir under consideration by Allen and Unwin and has  also completed a children's science fiction chapter book and is now working on a crime novel.

Last week, I was invited to login to the preview of Google Wave. This excites me because I've been looking at ways to incorporate different tools into my workflow here at QWC. Especially for conferences or meetings and random collaborations. Maybe you could too.

Is it November already? Really? Well, that means we're almost halfway throught our blog tour - where instead of stuffing yourself silly with beers and dancing badly to Copperhead Road on the soundsystem (that happens later ) you stuff yourself silly with the thoughts, insights, projects and inspiration of Queensland writers'. Today we visit Brisbane writer, journalist and blogger, Gary Kemble of The Kemblog.