Clariel\u00a0<\/em>by Garth Nix<\/a>. Both good reads if you like Australian speculative fiction.<\/p>\nI also continued my Aussie reading with The Dagger’s Path<\/em> by Glenda Larke. I’ll be reviewing that one for the Australian Women Writers’ challenge, so no spoilers here.<\/p>\nI’ve started to think about what kind of books to recommend to Ms 7 as her reading improves, so when I saw the first two volumes in the Ranger’s Apprentice series by John Flanagan for $2 at a local library book sale, I decided to dive right in. The books were much as I expected, with a relatively simple plot and themes more relevant to those still at school than a 40-something adult. Still, I found myself turning pages at a rapid rate and I kept reading until I’d finished both books, so they must be doing something right!<\/p>\n
I’ve got three books on the go at the moment:<\/p>\n
\n- Phantazein\u00a0<\/em>edited by Tehani Wessely from Fablecroft – an anthology of short fiction. I’ve quite enjoyed the stories so far, but I’ll say more in my wrap up (I think I’ll review it for the AWW challenge as well).<\/li>\n
- Dodger<\/em> by Terry Pratchett. I was saddened to hear of the death of Terry Pratchett recently – his Discworld novels\u00a0were a great source of joy through my adolescent years, and have remained firm favourites ever since. I’ve put off reading Dodger<\/em> for quite some time – not really sure why. I’m about 25% of the way through now and loving it – but it is love tinged with a slight sense of sorrow that this will be the last piece of “new” Pratchett writing aimed at adults I will probably ever read.<\/li>\n
- Land of the Golden Clouds\u00a0<\/em>by Archie Weller. This has been on my bedside table for way too long now, a victim to my preference for eBooks over physical. I have at long last made it past the first chapter – and it is a very interesting read. Not the sort of book where you can skim read anything though, so I’m finding it slow going. The overlay of Aboriginal culture onto a far future landscape is deeply fascinating though – more once I’ve got a bit further.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Finally started on season 5 of Game of Thrones in May, and ripped through the first 5 or 6 episodes. I won’t say much more for fear of spoilers, but excellent television (as the first four seasons led me to expect!).<\/p>\n
A fair bit of SF has started up recently, eating into my productive time. I’ve started:<\/p>\n
\n- 12 Monkeys<\/em> – OK first 3 episodes based very loosely around the movie of the same name but haven’t been compelled to keep watching. This one is teetering on the edge of being sacrificed to the gods of Foxtel hard drive free space.<\/li>\n
- Wayward Pines<\/em> – interesting show – I’m about 4 episodes in and the central mystery is keeping me hooked. Not sure how much beyond any big reveals I’ll last though – still, I’ll keep watching for now.<\/li>\n
- Arrow\u00a0<\/em>season 3. It really annoyed my that The Flash<\/em> and Arrow<\/em> were played separately from each other. I enjoy both shows, but the crossover episodes from\u00a0The Flash<\/em> gave away too many plot points from\u00a0Arrow<\/em>. I have heard other commentators complain about the flashback format, slowly revealing what happened to Oliver Queen when he was presumed dead for 5 years, but I really like it.<\/li>\n
- Gotham<\/em> made a return to our screens and I’ve kept watching. I quite like it – I was even inspired to go back and start watching the Christopher Nolan Batman movies again. Seems to be hitting its stride.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I’m hovering on the brink of succumbing to the lure of Netflix, just so I can watch\u00a0Daredevil<\/em>, which I’ve heard good things about.<\/p>\nOn the writing front, I went back to an old story I’ve tinkered on here and there for quite a while. At 11,000 words it is an inconvenient length for submission – I really needed to either cut a few thousand words and submit it as a short story or flesh it out to novella length. To be honest the world is starting to grow on me, so I’ve written the first cut of another few thousand words so far, and will probably write quite a bit more before I’m done. None of this is helping get anything published of course, but I find as long as I’m actually writing, the not being published part isn’t quite so hard.<\/p>\n
Oh, and of course my piece for Antipodean SF issue 200 was played on the Anti SF radio show, episode Gemma<\/a>, released on 23 May\u00a02015. It’s surreal to hear my work in audio form, and I’m always grateful to Nuke for providing that extra channel for people to enjoy the fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n
<\/p>Hi,\n
Welcome to Mark Webb’s author website. At this point the site is rather sparse – I’ve only recently started writing and there isn’t a lot to show for it right now. You can check out\u00a0my biography<\/a>, see …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,11],"tags":[139,168,64,21,14,15,115,66,18],"class_list":["post-2765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-watching","tag-alan-baxter","tag-archie-weller","tag-garth-nix","tag-news-2","tag-review","tag-specfic","tag-tehani-wessely","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-writing-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2765"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2777,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765\/revisions\/2777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}