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Canterbury Festival Crime Scene

David — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:49:31 +0000

We’ll be doing something special at the great Canterbury Festival this year — a day-long fun event that will test your story creation powers. Meet us at the Farmhouse on Sunday October 24, 11.30 am and we will set a series of clues scattered around the lovely city during the day. Come back in the afternoon and tell us very briefly how they might shape a crime story. You could win a prize!

I’ll be kicking off proceedings in the morning and there for the denouement in the afternoon, then talking a little about how I structure my own work. If you’re a budding writer or someone who just wants some insight into how books are constructed don’t miss it.

Last day in Melbourne…

David — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:09:48 +0000

Fantastic time here in Melbourne thanks to the wonderful Crime and Justice Festival. Comes to an end tomorrow. One tip for anyone coming out here… my favourite place to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner…. Cumulus in Flinders Lane. There’s a good review with pictures here.

Melbourne’s amazing Vic Market

David — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 07:31:59 +0000

I’m a sucker for markets. The Rialto in Venice, Testaccio in Rome, London’s Borough Market, Seattle’s Pike Place, Rome’s Campo dei Fiori.

But Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market – Vic for short — is something else, sprawling place where you can buy everything from a didgeridoo to some of the loveliest food around. A great place and very busy on Sunday morning so I wasn’t able to get the traditional bratwurst from Drago’s — no time before my final event at Crime and Justice with Garry Disher and Adrian Hyland, ably overseen by Jude Bourguignon.

You’ll find a few photos below. Thanks to everyone from C&J for the invitation to Melbourne — a lovely event in a friendly and beautiful city. One more meeting tomorrow then it’s on, briefly, to Singapore. Oh — and you can see the reason I dashed down to the Vic Market at the end of these photos. It’s the only place I know that sells the dog’s favourite toy — Eddie would be mortified if I came back without one.

A special place in Melbourne

David — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Abbotsford Convent is quite a place for a book festival. Here are a few photos from yesterday’s session of Crime and Justice. It was once an important Catholic convent but fell into disuse. Melbourne residents fought a plan to turn it into one more posh housing complex and now have it as a wonderful arts and leisure complex, set in parkland by the Yarra river.

There are some wonderful facilities here, and a great selection of busy restaurants and a couple of bars. It’s quite the most unusual location for a book festival I’ve seen, and with a busy round of other events throughout the year. A pleasant stop just four km outside the centre of the city. Here are a few external views and some shots of the wonderful Royal Arcade in central Melbourne.

A sense of shame

David — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:10:01 +0000

The programme for the Melbourne Writers Festival, which runs August 27 to September 5, was in this morning’s edition of The Age. Quite a line-up I have to say, from Brett Easton Ellis to Joss Whedon. Several of my mates are coming along too, Peter James, Simon Kernick and Val McDermid among them. They’ll have a great time. I’ve done the festival twice now and it’s quite something.

But how about this from the programme…

‘There seems no end to our shameless enthusiasm for crime stories.’

I put the word ‘shameless’ in bold there because, frankly, it took my breath away.

This is a country that’s just awarded its top literary prize, the Miles Franklin, its equivalent of the Booker, to Peter Temple, a ‘crime writer’, for Truth. Are we really supposed to feel some guilt, some sense of shame for wanting to read stories that address so directly the world we inhabit?

Melbourne Writers Festival 2010

A few days in Melbourne

David — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:24:00 +0000

I’m currently in lovely Melbourne for a few days for the annual Crime and Justice Festival at the Abbotsford Convent. Here’s the itinerary… including a chance to catch me on web radio from anywhere you like.

July 15, 11.30 am Melbourne time live on 3CR Radio with Jan Goldsmith – you can listen here http://www.3cr.org.au/

July 16 8.30 am live with Peter Haddow on 3MDR Radio in the Dandenon Ranges. You can listen here http://www.3mdr.com/

July 17 4pm, in conversation with Robert Gott at Crime and Justice, Abbotsford Convent.

July 18, 2pm, talking about book locations with Garry Disher and Adrian Hyland, Jude Bourguignon on the chair at Crime and Justice, Abbotsford Convent.

You can find the very full programme for the festival here. I’ll be around outside those times, of course, and wouldn’t miss the opening Friday night event with Shane Maloney and Catherine Deveny for anything.

Another Thrillerfest, the best yet

David — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:02:55 +0000

I always come to Thrillerfest thinking I’ll write a couple of blog posts. I never do. No time. And what do you write about? The amazing gathering of names? The enthusiasm of authors and readers alike? The fact that most of New York’s publishing industry – and a good few people from outside the US – now turn up to support an event that didn’t even exist five years ago?

Thrillerfest is just amazing. Many thanks to my fellow panelists for making our events so enjoyable, to Kathi Antrim and her team for the colossal job of organising the convention, and to the general audience who turned out to keep us all on our toes.

Some eight hundred people and banners all around 42nd St, Grand Central and Park Avenue. My how ITW has grown. Hope I can make it next year. Now to Melbourne for Crime and Justice…

Thrillerfest and CrimeFest events

David — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:23:00 +0000

If you’re in New York for ThrillerFest and CraftFest next week do say hello. I’ll be around and about for the duration and speaking at these events…

CraftFest: A talk on keeping a book journal, Wednesday July 7, 3pm.

ThrillerFest: Where are the Secrets of the Lost Art, Saturday July 10, 2pm. Panel master: Steve Berry. With Glenn Cooper, Brian D’Amato, David Hosp, Raymond Khoury and my old mate M.J. Rose

How Do You Cross Continents: I’ll be panel master, with my panelists R.J. Ellory, Sebastian Fitzek, Maria Gustafsson, Peter James, and Camilla Lackberg.

We’ll all be signing after Saturday’s sessions at 5pm in the book room. The full and rather amazing lineup for Thrillerfest is below.

Thrillerfest 2010 Schedule

Microsoft’s new online backup offering

David — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:57:09 +0000

I was, of course, tempting fate when a few weeks ago I wrote about Microsoft’s rather wonderful online backup and synchronisation service, Mesh. It’s now going to be retired and replaced by a new service, Windows Live Sync. You can try out the beta for yourself here (I am – it seems to work fine). Since quite a few of you discovered Mesh through my last post here’s an update of what’s changed.

First – don’t feel you need to do anything quickly. Apparently Mesh will stay live for six months or so and you will all be given notice when it is going to close. LiveSync is an update of another MS online sync product and will take Mesh’s place entirely. In some ways it’s a lot better. In others perhaps not….

You can download the beta here. You need a free Live ID. There is a version of Sync for Macs too. The Windows version comes with some other extras too – an update for Live Writer and the ability to sync Internet Explorer favourites and elements of Outlook too. It will remove Mesh and you will lose all the connections between Mesh’s online backup and any linked PCs or Macs (though not the files themselves).

After a reboot you find a new Live Sync beta application (if you used the old Live Sync service you need to uninstall that manually to let the new one run). You sign in to the Live Skydrive – Microsoft’s version of Dropbox. You can back up anything you like to this web storage drive here manually – with a generous 25 gb for free. But 2gb of that is devoted to files that you are syncing to your PCs or Mac too. Go to View synced folders and you can see the folders you’ve picked for sync on your PC. These will be updated automatically and shared between the computers you choose. It’s a rudimentary kind of backup, and good enough for me.

Once your files are there you can see them, share them, download them or just let them update automatically among your machines. Here are my three computers working together that way. It’s very simple to understand and use. One gripe people will have is over the amount of storage. Mesh gave us 5 gb. Now it’s down to 2gb, so if you want to back up more you need to upload it manually to your Skydrive to use the rest of the 23gb you have there.

It’s a slightly odd way to do things. But I just work with Word and OneNote files these days. I have every book and possible idea backed up into that 2gb now and it’s still not half full. The other thing worth mentioning is that this new service is fast. Mesh could stutter for a while before syncing machines. Not this.

I have one main PC and two laptops of different sizes. All my most up to date files are on the main computer so I set that to sync to Skydrive first. I then deleted all the copies of the same files on my laptops and told them to sync to those uploaded files. It took a while to get everything there in the first place. But once that was done things stayed in sync much more quickly than they ever did with Mesh.

Not bad for free. Microsoft are apparently mulling whether to add extra storage for a fee. The whole Live package of Hotmail and storage and sync is looking very impressive to me right now. This is what Google promised to become with GMail, Google Docs and then long-promised but never-delivered online storage option. I know Microsoft aren’t fashionable at the moment, but in some ways they’re doing a much better job than Google. If they offer a paid-for equivalent of Google Premier Apps, handling email without ads, they could have me as a customer.

Progress in the vegetable patch

David — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 07:45:13 +0000

With more than a little help I am endeavouring to be a less of a bad gardener this year. So really I can’t claim credit for the fact the vegetable patch is looking rather good at the moment: beetroot, carrot, courgette, sweetcorn and potatoes all thriving.

In our little hothouse the tomatoes are coming along too. Most of these seeds are from the wonderful Franchi company courtesy of Seeds of Italy. This is much more down to them than it is to me.

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