Well for me anyway! Hooray I'm in Sydney! For Sydney Writers' Festival!

Currently, I'm snuggled under my sleeping bag in the dorm in the hostel I'm staying at: a dorm which I have to myself I might add! Another hooray for room & ensuite to myself!

I must admit I won't be uploading any photos as my mini laptop, as much as I love it, is very slow, and I don't have the time nor patience currently to wait!

However, you can hit LIKE on my Facebook Fan Page as I've been putting photos up there, and will continue for the rest of my time here.

(Side note: in extraordinarily good timing on Facebook's behalf, when I checked Facebook on the way to the airport this morning, a thing flashed inviting me to download a new Pages app - how awesome! I've been on there ...

In what can be seen as a well-timed follow-up to the story about the English novelist who quit in favour of becoming a teacher, The New York Times too did ask:  is there too much pressure on authors?

This is no doubt a hot-topic with debates flying all around the internet.

In Writer’s Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking, The NYT explores publishing and says the once-normal 'book a year' is now out, in favour of two books per year.

Coupled with the fact that authors also have to maintain websites, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, write short stories for release about six weeks before their novels PLUS find time to, you know, have a life/families/etc - some are asking is it little wonder authors like the English author above are quitting?

The e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing, the article says. The push for ...

I have to admit I've been a bad little blogger lately: that is, I've barely read any blogs.

I can trace this back to when I moved from Blogger to WordPress.

See, Blogger has this nifty in-built blog reader thing where you can add blogs to your reader and in a scroll box all the new posts appear.

So I subscribed to roughly one hundred bookish websites, including my own, and every time I'd log into Blogger (on average this was hourly) I'd scroll down the list until I hit my own post recent post: I knew then that I'd read all below that.

This was the perfect way to keep up-to-date with everything and I loved it.

Fast-forward to WordPress which has no such reader.

So everything sort of dropped off the radar.

I'd only read posts that I saw on Facebook or Twitter - few ...

I have been extremely fortunate that I've been meeting all the authors who have written my favourite books over the past few years.

I have five top favourite books (they all swirl around the top equally; there is no specific order) - and when you consider one of those authors is deceased (Richard Yates), another hasn't put out a book this year and therefore unlikely to tour (Tom Perrotta) - I'm doing pretty damn well when I say can I've seen the other three in the flesh: Michael Cunningham, Liane Moriarty and now I can joyfully add Jeffrey Eugenides to that list.

It was a special event, a coat-tail ride-off from Sydney Writers Festival: 10 Writers, Five Double Bills.

Joshua Cody and Jeffrey Eugenides

It’s nice to be surprised as a reader. You open the pages thinking you know how the story goes, but instead you’re ambushed ...

I thought it would be fun to go behind-the-scenes of the short story contest that I helped judged.

It all started way back when (read: about a month ago) I applied to be a judge.

There was the call-out, and I emailed a short plug for myself and a CV. I made the short-list and was sent an application form, which I promptly filled in. It included questions like why do you want to be a judge and what can you offer.

I got the phone call while I was walking down a street in Richmond; I’d just had breakfast with a former boss of mine. A wonderful, lovely woman who has been a great help, inspiration and a whole other bunch of things to me – since I’ve known her really, but also specifically these past few months.

So I was already elated ...