Furthermore, they want this thing done in 10 years.

I love my adopted country, but it’s shit like this that sometimes makes me wonder if I’m not buying into the wrong continent (I mean, the US is feuding over $8 billion invested in passenger rail in the world’s largest economy, meanwhile Bulgaria is investing $4.3 billion US in it. Bulgaria!). In 50 years, at this speed of high speed rail linking up, I wonder what that will mean for the flattening of Europe/Asia/India and its connections, versus a US where here in Ohio, a fairly large industrial heartland, we’re *hoping* to just get basic, slow service this decade.

It’ll be interesting.

The files are provided as in-progress RTFs linked below. Donations are accepted and appreciated via any standard credit card or paypal.

It’s All Just A Draft

Introduction

Section 1: The Basics

Writers Read
Writers Write
Writers Finish Projects

Section 2: Selling Short Fiction

Published Writers Submit Stuff
Published Writers Format Manuscripts
Published Writers Find Markets
Published Writers Get Rejected
That First Sale Pt. 1
That First Sale Pt. 2

Section 3: Workshopping

Clarion: Six Weeks of hotdogs, pushups, and pages Pt 1
Clarion: Six Weeks of hotdogs, pushups, and pages Pt 2

Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tonnes of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13 million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 3m hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world’s most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.

On the more hopeful side, Next Big Future links to an article that crunches some data about overall African poverty and notes that over the last 20 years, poverty has actually fallen fairly significantly, putting a lie to the meme that Africa is just a hole that Western nations are throwing aid money at.

After three decades of zero or negative growth, Africa began a growth spurt around 1995 that has been sustained at least to 2006. The poverty rate in 1970 was 0.398. That is, close to 40% of the entire population lived with less than one dollar a day in Africa in 1970. After a small decline during the first half of the seventies, the rate jumped to around 0.42 in 1985 and stayed more or less at that level for a decade. In 1995 there is a dramatic change in trend: the poverty rate began a decline that led to a ten percentage point reduction by 2006.

That isn’t to say things aren’t still rough, but the narrative that its the same or getting worse is a misrepresentation. Western reporting on Africa focuses on terrorism, starvation, natural disaster, and war, from what I’ve seen. It’s always useful to inoculate a culture of fear based understanding of Africa with some broader based reading.

I feel really, really bad. The Bookstacks folk were nice enough to put a nice display of my books up on their virtual jetty and everything, I apologize profusely for my idiot moment.

Let’s try this again:

Hey, next weekend (and not this weekend, as I somehow thought), I’ll be giving a reading in Second Life! The nice folks at Bookstacks have even set up a nice little preview of my book covers here. It’ll be on Sunday, at 7pm EST.

More details about the other readers in this series are here.

Enjoy.

It’s All Just A Draft

Introduction

Section 1: The Basics

Writers Read
Writers Write
Writers Finish Projects

Section 2: Selling Short Fiction

Published Writers Submit Stuff
Published Writers Format Manuscripts
Published Writers Find Markets
Published Writers Get Rejected
That First Sale

Section 3: Workshopping

Clarion: Six Weeks of hotdogs, pushups, and pages

The point to take away from this essay is: if you’re an author and you rely on your North American rights, you’ll be on the bread line. To actually earn a living, you really need to exploit other territorial and language rights.

Read the last two paragraphs in particular if you’re in a hurry. You should be reading his last few posts about the minutiae of publishing.

Enjoy.

It’s All Just A Draft

Introduction

Section 1: The Basics

Writers Read
Writers Write
Writers Finish Projects

Section 2: Selling Short Fiction

Published Writers Submit Stuff
Published Writers Format Manuscripts
Published Writers Find Markets
Published Writers Get Rejected
That First Sale

Section 3: Workshopping

Clarion: Six Weeks of hotdogs, pushups, and pages

Whenever I see something that prompts an ‘oh, cool, I’d like one of those’ reaction, I put it in my ‘things I want to buy list.’ That way, my brain is comforted that I won’t forget that I wanted that cool gadget, and I know where to look for it later to investigate it further.

But a cool thing happens. It’s not a ‘todo’ list as such, so it often gets ignored as I take care of the things that need taken care of right away. It’s often only once a month or so I go over the list.

When I go over the list, I will often delete items that, two months later, just aren’t so cool.

For example, two months ago I saw the Withings Internet Scale. Loved it. But as Emily pointed out, I do have a bodyfat scale, and calipers already. As usual, it sat on the list. I looked at it today and deleted it as I looked at other gadgets on the list and thought I’d rather have those. My current scale works just fine. The cool of period worked.

Ditto Fitbit. I have an iPhone, there’s program on it that does basically the same thing.

I did, however, get the soda carbonation kit thats been on the list for four months thanks to a gift card from my parents for the holidays. But I still need to fill the CO2 bottle and call the company about sending me the wrong adaptor to go over the 2 liter bottle (they send me a home keg adaptor).

There’s an iPad on the list, which I doubt I’ll get anytime soon because I’m happy reading text off my iPhone screen, which also goes with my everywhere. However, I’d like to get back into reading graphic novels and comics, as well as anime, and the iPad would be brilliant for that. So its on the list. I haven’t deleted it from the list, but I haven’t felt a need to buy it either. I’m just happy its on the list, and that there is a list.

I had the first few pieces of the project posted at a Google wiki. People were complaining about how Google Sites displayed the text on various browsers, making it hard to read. And even though I was continuing to update the project in my occasional spare time, I grew frustrated with how to share it properly.

But due to the friendly prompts, I decided to set it up like this: I created a page here at TobiasBuckell.com for the little book-in-progress. I’m going to post the RTFs direct from Scrivener as they’re finished to the website, and then link them via the dedicated page. It makes things, hopefully, easy to read. And with RTF files, you can portably put them into whatever reader you like and format them for reading however you wish, which I hope solves the viewing issues.

The dedicated page is Just A Draft. As I post new items, I’ll link them here as well.

I have two more completed bits: Writers Submit Stuff, and Writers Format Manuscripts. I also completed the part ‘Writers Finish Things.’ Ironic, as it took quite a long while to finish it. Here’s what we have so far:

It’s All Just A Draft

Introduction

Section 1: The Basics

Writers Read
Writers Write
Writers Finish Projects

Section 2: Selling Short Fiction

Published Writers Submit Stuff
Published Writers Format Manuscripts
Published Writers Find Markets
Published Writers Get Rejected
That First Sale

Section 3: Workshopping

Clarion: Six Weeks of hotdogs, pushups, and pages

The four bits I am working on are obviously low priority compared to the paying work (which is very important, right?), but this shuffles in and out as I’m able, as I’m enjoying writing it and cutting in info from archived emails, journal entries, and the blog, as well as memories.