I was given the link to this opinion piece and I have to say, despite my love of eWriting, it resonates with me. In a nutshell, we are doing too much nowadays. We think we have to be doing stuff every second of every minute because to a large extent, simply put, we can.

But just because we can it is no reason why we should, or for some it seems, must. Must be doing something and generally something to do with technology, with the electronic gadget of the hour. I have misplaced my cell phone and while I am sure it will turn up sooner or later, I have had to pay $25 for a new SIM (with the old number). A friend of mine has given me a brand new Sony Ericsson T300, that’s the one you can stick a camera in the bottom of and take photos. Yeah, it’s brand new but old stock he got in an auction, which is what he does for a living. Buys up lots of electronic stuff and sells them online.

So I have the Icy Blue model, without the camera. Announced in October 2002, it is small, light and works like a bought one, so to speak. It does not do what the latest gee whiz Nokia I had (still have I am sure, somewhere) but then I never used all the stuff that phone had. Too complicated. I just wanted to make and take calls!

So I will take the post to heart and hang up the keyboard for the evening. I plan to go to sleep by ten pm tonight and get up at a dawn breaking 6am tomorrow, even though I don’t have to. But if I can get two or even three hours ahead of myself it has to be a good thing. I will walk the dog, feed the chickens and clean out their coop and do my 5BX (I love my 5BX no matter what my Osteopath reckons!), maybe even try a few yoga postures, do my old Tai Chi form and be ready when the tribe awakens.

There is no time to turn your life around like the right here and now.

One thing that struck me when I did the MA(Writing) was that the women far outnumbered the men on both the faculty and the student body. I also felt that some of the topics were very feminist oriented and at times there seemed to be a slightly bemused tone when a man would make a blokey post. Did anyone else feel that at any time to any degree? Nothing overt or outwardly hostile, not even antagonistic or belligerent but to my perception there was on occasion definitely ‘something’ in the air.

I read yesterday a Foreword by Tom Keneally to the 2006 edition of ‘An Introduction to Australian Publishing’ where he makes the same observation; that there are increasing numbers of women in the industry, both as writers and on the publishing side of the bed. Two thirds of the contributors to the book are women which seems to back him up a tad.

Put aside any defensive (no matter how subliminal they may be)responses because quite frankly it makes no difference to me, I can’t see this as a ‘bad’ thing for writing and publishing. If it were the other way around I would feel there was less chance of a fair suck of the savloy for all given the history of the ‘old boy’s net’ in many industries across the decades.

In some respects one shouldn’t be too surprised as publishing (and writing) have always been occupations where women could apply their talents other than in the scullery. For middle and upper class ladies in the 19th Century there were few occupations they could pursue that were not considered scandalous and the literary industry was one, along side teaching and medicine. The Bronte sisters and Jane Austen spring to mind and later Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie and so on. Publishers often hired females to do the hack work and eventually realised perhaps they had as good a nose for a marketable manuscript as any of the men on the payroll. When the two world wars took many of those men away, women stepped in and took over the reins more than adequately.

After the second world war and with the advent of contraceptive measures that freed women in so many ways, changes in society have found more and more women in the workforce and increasingly it seems in the writing business. And why not?

Traditionally roles were split pretty clearly into domestic chores rearing the kids for her and something sweaty and tiring for him. Middle class people had ‘standards’ and ‘appearences’ and thus a woman wanting a career often reflected poorly on her husband’s capacity to provide for her. So for the sake of his ego and cultural norms of the time, I wonder how many female intellects rotted away doing the valuable and necessary work in the home but never really reaching their potential?

I can fully appreciate why many women are miffed at mankind, emphasis on the first syllable. We men (not me personally I hope all you ladies will accept) have been too clever by half. We have invented more than enough labour saving devices to do most of us out of jobs and to put the rest of them at risk of competition from the fairer sex. Even that, ‘fairer sex’, sounds chauvinistic and patronizing when one comes to think about it.

Perhaps as we continue deeper into the 21st Century we will shed ourselves of many of the old attitudes and adopt many of the newer ones that simply accept we are equal in many respects yet sufficiently different to offer good reason to have some diversity in any group, to get the best of what men and women can do and without consciously remarking on it every time.

I confess I read very few female authors. Not because I don’t like them but because the genre I enjoy reading for pleasure are mostly catered for by male writers. Female writers tend not to write too many thrillers and adventure stories. They do now and then and I have read a couple of great ones. I’m not into the Barbara Cartland stuff or anything remotely close. Sue Grafton I adore and I enjoyed Patricia Cornwell but I am hard pressed to name any others. Ruth Park (Harp In The South)was a great read also but so too Frank McCourt and ‘Angela’s Ashes’.

I also note my daughters play with dolls and do girlie things without any prompting from me or their mother. They naturally want to nurse dolls and even play house. I joke that most of the toys on sale at K-Mart are stereotyping the domestic female role from birth but the reality is stereotypes have to come from somewhere.

So perhaps the new acceptance of women by us men has to be tempered with some allowance for ‘stereotypical’ behaviour, no matter how sexist it might seem to a pusher of feminist theory. The neat thing about so many women being in the writing and publishing game is that the words we read and hear do affect the words we think with and speak. In time we might find we have been having our attitudes adjusted gently for decades and only just now might be realising it. And now is too late to regress although letting go of old thinking and embracing the new is always the most threatening part of any process of change. Trust the ladies to do it gently enough we hardly noticed until we started to like it!

Just for a week or so, even a few days will help. I need to catch up on all the latest developments in eWriting and publishing. It seems that just as I think I have this eBook stuff down to an easy pdf file convert someone throws in Mobi and Epud and however many other format for their own eReaders. eReaders? When did they sneak up on us… oh there’s dozens of them now?

Wait a moment, aren’t iPads giving them a run for their money? Not to mention Netbooks with 7 or 10 inch screens and tiny keyboards. I have one of those for when I am traveling and to keep up with the PC world. Quite a few sites look different in Internet Explorer to what they do with Safari, Mac’s browser. I use Firefox on both my iMac and the little Samsung Netbook and even that has updates on a regular basis.

it seems as I start to think I am getting somewhere I find there is more. Social Media is a good example. I have known of it for some time but only now as I start to dabble do I find out how it is the ‘next big thing’ and so forth. Then there is Myebook.com where I am even as I type uploading a second title. I love the format, very similar to the Flipbook program I was introduced to in 2004 by Canadian conman Arthur Hawke.

Which segues nicely into mentioning how there are still far too many scams and rubbish offerings online and I guess there always will be. Some of them are worse than the most juvenile Nigerian 419 scam letter but like those millions in deceased estates across west Africa, people seem to keep falling for them.

I have seen some selling the Dot Com lifestyle and promoting tens of thousands of dollars a month from just a couple of hours here and there when you are sick of the beach or vacationing in the tropics. There are some genuine dot com moguls out there and I am working my way towards that status but still have a long way to go. A bit like the uploading of my eBook. Funny how even the coolest WOW things soon need to be virtually instantaneous or we get frustrated.

I read somewhere today it is not a case of stop the world I want to get off but rather stop the world, I want to get on. I wish someone would do that because while it was stopped maybe I could play catchup? No? Well I guess I need to get my head around the idea of life being a work in progress then. I suppose I will never know it all and just as I do they will create the next big thing and away we go again. The best course of action is to accept change as constant and inevitable and go as hard as you can, maybe get ahead of the pack for a bit here and there.

Funny how things work out sometimes. I decided to get with the program and sign up for Twitter the other day. As a result I found and followed a Twitterer in the publishing business and have since rhizomatically wound my way to a new (for me) eBook publisher, Wordlube.com where I have done a trial publishing of my ‘Philippine Dreams 2010′. You can click the link image above and view the ebook in the great format they use, free of charge for a few weeks. I am going to study the software and the system and see how it fits in with our plans for selling my writing, my eWriter Project college course and so on.

I am keen to get some comments and feedback on the eBook format they use. It allows inclusion of multi media such as video and audio and I plan to produce a version with some great video clips taken from our vacation in Manila and Cebu.

San Francisco writer Matt Stewart has had his novel published in paperback by Soft Skull Press, after he first published it on Twitter! The 95,000 word novel took around 5,000 tweets to get it all online at 140 characters a tweet! I guess that is one way of getting noticed and it certainly seems to have worked for Matt. There is also an iPhone application under development and in the article linked above, he speaks about other multi media ideas for books.

I like the recipes and the photographs of book locations ideas. I think they add a lot of interest to the reading and, like the extra features on DVDs today,pretty much expected by the younger generation. And the younger generation is going to be here a lot longer than the older ones so maybe we should start taking notice of what they want. I think this makes good sense as very often change is driven from the young up the ladder to the older demographics. While at first we may scoff or chafe at the thought of change, eventually change always happens and before you know it we are either waxing over the ‘good old days’ that usually never were or we take it all for granted.

I went online with Twitter the other day and while the world hasn’t come beating a path to my door, it hasn’t come to a shuddering halt, either. I changed a belief (that Twitter is soft, a gimmick and not for serious use) and I tried something new and it didn’t hurt. But then few things in life are ever fatal. It is the fear of change that keeps us locked down where we were. We get to a certain point and we feel this is it, we’ve reached the pinnacle. So we hunker down and dig in. Then we resist any change and stay in our bunkers while the world passes us by and only sends troops back to mop up the hold outs if they make too much noise grumbling.

I’m not going to fight a pointless rearguard action. I’m going to embrace change and progress and technology (from a user/operator’s perspective, not a technicians’) and keep up with society in the 21st Century. I am planning on doing audio versions of my books and offering them as MP3 downloads and CDs. I can publish the CDs at Lulu and have them drop ship them to buyers so there isn’t even a need for me to fill the garage with bubble wrap and brown paper!

I’m thinking podcasts, You Tube My Channel and video blogging. Why not? I have the technology with two  iMac’s in the house and a business partner who handles the tech end. What we can’t do we can outsource very affordably and get it done online somewhere. Whatever else they might call me, it will never be ‘Luddite’!

I signed up for Twitter yesterday. I figured you have to keep up with these trends even if you think they might be a bit soft. It is the way of the future, in fact it is how it is right now and it will only get more and more Twitterish in years to come.

Communication is what it is all about and instant communication at that. Society has developed preferences for this kind of social networking and there is little point ignoring it or fighting it. You will just be left behind. I decided years ago I wasn’t going to be left behind when I watched my father give up on trying to program his VCR. I confess I still can’t program mine but my eldest is going to High School next year so I have a fall back position should I ever need to do so.

The thing is, technology is here to stay and it is getting more and more to be a part of everyday life. I remember when offices had telex machines and faxes came in. Or typewriters and then Wang Word Processors were the rage. In 1986 I was dictating reports to a mini-cassette recorder and sending them off for the office secretary to transcribe. I don’t think there are any secretaries left nowadays, they are all personal assistants or office administration managers.

I typed my first words on an Olympia machine that was manual and non correcting. White out was the saviour of the day but as a Military Policeman we were forbidden to use it. We had to start again and make sure there were no mistakes. I later had a small Brother machine when I was a private investigator and I wrote my first manuscripts on that thing.

I could reminisce but its getting late. No matter how much technology might change our lives some things are constant and one of those is getting a decent night’s sleep.

I was given a url link to a web site that sells an online writing course. You sign up for at least 12 months at $47 a month for the Standard membership and $57 a month for the Premium. That works out at $564 to $684 a year. If the course really does teach what it promises and the student really can then turn that knowledge into an income, that is how it should be. While many people pay for these course, few in fact actually apply the lessons learned and so have no-one to blame for failure or lack of success (the two are different after all) than themselves.

But even if the lessons are valid, the hype that stands in for sales copy is a bit of a worry to my mind. The seller claims an online writer can have a leisurely breakfast, shop at the mall, have lunch with friends, see a movie and have a family dinner, THEN spend just a few hours of an evening writing blogs and voila! Bob’s your uncle and you are making a great living as an online writer. If only it really was that easy. Perhaps for some it is once they have put in the horus and the effort establishing themselves.

The claim is made the student can earn $250 an hour once the course is over and if they apply the lessons learned. The explanation offered is that you can charge $200 for a 200 word article it took you half an hour to write. So the $250 an hour is an average then? You’re saying you can make $250 an hour for several hours a day, several days a week? I’m sure some can but for the vast majority it is not a reachable star and writing ability would have little to do with it.

The reality as I have experienced it is that writing online is not as easy as these vested interest course offerers make out. Finding the client is hard and realistically takes far more time than actually writing anything for him. I need to spend more time finding work than doing it and many of the ‘cute’ amazing solutions these courses offer are nowadays so cliched they simply don’t work.

We all want to be writers and the internet makes it easier to become one and to actually make some money at it. The down side is that it levels the playing field for everyone and so the competition is huge. The good news is the internet is infinite and ever expanding and there will always be enough to go around. The flash Harry’s will grab some of the spotlight but good, solid tortoise like performance will bring home the business every time.

There is a market and a demand for instruction in Online Writing. Most CertIII courses are priced around the $500-900 mark and CertIV courses range from $1300 to $2600 and more at the pricier of the private colleges. Compared to say $600 for a course that is not recognized by the Australian Qualifications Framework and VETAB across Australia and New Zealand and even accepted in the UK, EU and USA and Canada… it is surely false economy not to invest a little more.

I think an adult education course should achieve two main objectives. First it should actually train and secondly it needs to capable of assisting in earning an income. This means it must be recognized and hopefully sought after by employers.

I just read that a woman in Georgia has turned 130 years old. That’s the country on the Black Sea, not the US state, in case anyone was curious. I doubt there is anyone in the US that is healthy enough to live that long and we in Australia are waddling up fast behind them. This woman lives in a remote, mountain village. This suggests to me she has had to keep physically active far more than her city dwelling sisters might and her diet would be far less processed than yours or mine.

I do wonder how much change she has actually seen since 1880. Do they have television and the internet in her village? Cell phones? Was she even aware that Joseph Stalin ruled the country between the Czars and the current democratically elected Georgian president? How much protection and longevity would such isolation offer? She has had a long life, but has it been a good one? Quality of life is important and while you never miss what you never had or know exists, has she had a good life? Consider before the Russian Revolution was five years old she had passed her 40th birthday and was quite possible a grandmother. By the time the Second World War was happening in her neck of the woods she was past retirement age!

There have been many stories written about immortality, time travellers and dynastic sagas because there is a  marketable fascination with time and ageing and life. When I turn 130 it will be the year 2092. I wonder what this world will be like then? Maybe I need to go and hide away in some mountain fastness because most of these really old people seem to live well above sea level. So long as I can get online there…. why not?