I’ve been curiously anticipating the announcement of the 2008 Man Booker Prize winner since I heard a Book Show podcast a week or two ago – an interview with an academic who’s headed to the UK to research the judges’ notes and behind-the-scenes documentation of the Booker. During this podcast there was much discussion of what kind of book wins the Booker, especially in recent years – for example, an ethnic writer from a place like India is seeming to have more chance these days than a white, resident Brit.

(Incidentally, I’m not sure how well-known the Booker Prize is to any of my US readers – but it’s given to novelists from the Commonwealth, which of course includes Australia, and is why we always hear a lot about it here.)

I’d always imagined the judging panel for the Booker would consist of the best literary minds of the Commonwealth. It doesn’t. Not to detract from this year’s, or any year’s, judging panel, but it strikes me that they are a bunch of near-normal people, including some who may not know a whole lot about books. This year Louise Doughty is on the list, a novelist I heard speak a couple of times at this year’s Perth Writers Festival, so of course she does know something about books, but since she’s still intensely involved in creating them herself, seems almost a bit “young” for this kind of panel. And it’s led by Michael Portillo, an ex-politician; perhaps it’s just a British thing, but there are very few Aussie politicians I’d feel happy with being on this kind of panel.

As I write this, the Booker Prize hasn’t quite been decided – it’s being awarded tonight, British time, and I’ve learnt that the judges don’t even know the winner yet – apparently they meet just a couple of hours before to make the final decision. I already went through the shortlist a while ago and placed reservations for those novels at my local library (sorry, I can’t afford to buy them all) so I hope to be reading the Booker winner within the next few weeks.  And when I find out who the winner is I’ll add a small note in here so you can all rush out to read him (or her, but there’s only one female writer on the shortlist so the odds are low!).

Next day edit:

Well, lo and behold, an Indian writer won again! Although Aravind Adiga, whose novel The White Tiger has won the 2008 Booker, was apparently partly raised in Australia so thumbs up to that. Oh, and I don’t have anything at all against Indian writers, it was just interesting after hearing the podcast that mentioned it as a trend, along with going to early-career novelists – this is Adiga’s first. Last week, without realising it was a shortlisted Booker novel, I saw a guy reading it on the train and was intrigued by the cover. But annoyingly it’s the only title from the Booker shortlist that my local library doesn’t have – I’m sure it’ll be on the way soon though.

In the ongoing saga of unpacking my boxes of books, I’ve come across yet another interesting (and practically historical!) find. Back in 2000 and 2001, I was living in Perth (having never left it – I did so in mid-2001) and I was just starting to get back into writing after not doing much since I left high school. It was good timing, because at the same moment, writing online was just starting to take off.

I’ve just unearthed my writing diary from 2001 – appropriately, it was a Dymock’s “Booklovers’ Diary” although they didn’t see fit to put an apostrophe after Booklovers – I’d added it myself with a black marker. In this diary I recorded the amount of writing I did for various websites and interestingly, also kept a record of how much money I earned.

Back then, my big loves were writing for two websites: Themestream and WrittenByMe. Both are long since defunct, and when I see how much they were paying me to write simple, personal fiction and non-fiction, I’m not surprised. For example, my notes tell me that during the year 2000, for writing just a dozen or so not-very-good stories about my unexciting experiences, vaguely cast as fiction, Themestream paid me over A$120. WrittenByMe seemed to pay me too, but I didn’t record the amounts, unfortunately.

And not about fiction, but nonetheless interesting: I was also writing for Suite101 back then, on teaching and assessment, my specialty back in the days before I started teaching ESL. In my diary I can see that I was paid an absolute fortune for these articles when compared to what Suite101 has paid me in recent times for travel articles that receive a whole lot more in pageviews. Unbelievably (I’d forgotten, but remembered once I saw it written in this magical diary) they even paid me US$150 for an article on John Dewey – it wasn’t that long, I don’t think, and we are talking nearly ten years ago so it was worth A$300 to me – and I recall that they actually asked several writers to submit the same article, paid us all and used just one.

These days things sure are different online. Of course, I have higher standards about where I’d write, but there are no magic sites that pay considerable dollars just for page views of simple, unedited fiction. Which on the whole is probably a good thing – I’m sure the quality of what I and others wrote meant it didn’t really deserve to be online or paid for – but it’s still a pity. If I could use a time machine and head back to the turn of the century I’d quit my day job and write my little heart out, and I might be a better fiction writer now (or at least more practiced) and have a smaller mortgage!

Do any of my readers out there remember writing online back in those times? I’d be interested to hear what you think – let me know in the comments.

Having lived overseas for so long, I’m still catching up with how the world of writing works here in Australia, and that explains why the Australian Book Industry Awards slipped under my radar last month. But now that I’ve become aware of them, I noticed something especially interesting to me – that Scribe Publications won the gong for 2008 Small Publisher of the Year.

Curiously, I’d never heard of Scribe until several of the writers I listened to at the Perth Writers Festival mentioned that their Australian publisher was Scribe, and when I did my research I discovered that Scribe is exactly the same age as me! They’re based in Melbourne and publish around 70 books a year, both non-fiction (often about Australia) and novels – including “imported” titles that are published here under the Scribe imprint.

Anyway, all this has one point behind it: I don’t know enough about the Australian publishing industry, but I should. One clearly important part of becoming a fiction writer is becoming a published fiction writer, and what I do know is I’ll need much more than luck to do that. So I’m putting myself on notice that I must start to pay more attention to the Australian publishing scene.

I’ve always thought that with two grandmothers who lived into their 90s and a mother and father who both look and act considerably younger than they are, my longevity was unquestionable. I’ve been calculating my superannuation requirements assuming a long, long life, but I’ve just read a story that suggests maybe I should start planning my pensioner years with a shorter span in mind!

The good news is the distressing fact that I might die younger than expected only works if I actually becoming a “real” novelist. So if things don’t work out with novels, at least I’ll have a few more years alive to do some more reading. Apparently there have been a bunch of studies done over the years looking at the age at which writers of various kinds die, and a recent article in the Guardian summarised the work of James C Kaufman, an American professor who seems particularly obsessed with this somewhat morbid topic.

Here’s the deal: if you’re a poet, you’re going to die first. Playwrights come next, living on average just one year longer than poets. Novelists will live four years longer than poets. But switch to writing non-fiction and you’ll live almost six years longer than a poet. I guess if I keep away from poetry – that’s probably easily done, because while I quite like reading it occasion, I don’t think I have the right talent to write it – at least I won’t die the youngest.

Unpacking some boxes last week, I found a magazine I bought when I was thirteen years old. It was the June 1989 edition of an American magazine called The Writer, and I read it in bed the other night – chuckling my way through most of it.

I was shocked by how much the writing life has changed in less than twenty years. In most ways, I’m glad it has, because the advent of the internet, and blogs (I wonder what we would have guessed a “blog” was back in ’89) has certainly helped me to write more.

Back in this 1989 edition of The Writer, AIDS was a big topic, and fonts were old and, to today’s eyes, ugly. Calls for submissions gave only snail mail addresses and encouraged writers to telephone an editor with queries; an article to help beginner writers included a list of typing conventions that are laughable today.

Above all, reading this magazine reminded me that the writing business was slower back then. Every query you’d send would wind its way around the world, and hopefully back to you, by snail mail. Writers would have a long time to forget about pieces they’d sent off and they had the excitement of waiting for the postman to bring some good news amongst the daily bills.

There’s something quite appealing about that, but I don’t want to go back. My editors shoot me editorial schedules on Sunday night to publish on Monday, magazines are starting to prefer email submissions. I get paid regularly, a maximum of a few weeks after writing.

When I think about my fiction writing, though, I can’t help but wonder if I would have been better off back in the 80s. Fewer distractions and deadlines, and perhaps I wouldn’t even write non-fiction at all – I might have a regular day job and devote my spare time to writing beautiful fiction. Short of finding one of those elusive time machines, I’m just going to have to switch off my router and pretend that I’m back in the internet-less 80s and get my fingers dirty with my novel.

I’ve just read a scary story about literary ignorance in Britain. Published at Ananova, some of the most frightening results of a survey of 3000 people are:

• One third of people didn’t know Shakespeare wrote plays (many thought he’d been a king!)
• A quarter didn’t know John Keats was a poet
• And for me, the most shocking, is that more than two thirds didn’t know A A Milne was a writer. Hello?! Winnie the Pooh?!

The scariest part is that I suspect the results might be even worse here in Australia – both if the survey asked about British writers, and perhaps worse if it asked about Australian writers, who don’t get anywhere near enough air time here.

I don’t want to be a big literary snob, but when people like – well, I don’t even want to mention their names in my blog, but typical celebrities of today who make the headlines despite having no skills or personality – are the names everybody knows, and people in Britain don’t know who Shakespeare was – well, I think that’s a pretty sad state of affairs. I’m not saying everyone should memorise a Keats poem or read the complete works of Shakespeare, but is just a little bit of awareness too much to ask for?

I just caught up with the news that American novelist Norman Mailer died on Saturday, which struck me as unusual timing. Why? Because it was just last Friday that I started reading one of his books for the first time.

Weirdly, I came to know Norman Mailer through his appearance in an episode of the Gilmore Girls that I saw (dubbed) in Germany. He struck me as a grumpy old soul but intriguing, and I’ve been meaning to grab one of his books for ages. Last week at the library An American Dream jumped out at me and I’m about half way through. Notably I felt that it’s the first book I’ve read in a month or two that is written beautifully, and it’s just what I need to read while I’m trying to churn out my own novel.

Anyway, Norman Mailer, RIP. It seems like you’ve left plenty of books behind for me to read, so I’m won’t complain yet.