That Was the Week That Was - June 18th

Previously, I mentioned I was having trouble with Three Mobile over their handling of my account. Mixing up the account details for me and my daughter was bad enough the first time. But when they did it a second time, effectively canceling the sim card in my phone and transferring my number to my daughter’s phone, blood had to be spilt. Thankfully, Three worked hard last Friday to make amends, offering us both free upgrades on our phones.

I now have a wonderful LG KU990 Viewty, a beautiful piece of touch screen technology with the best video DivX playback I’ve ever seen on a mobile device. I can quite happily watch entire episodes of 'Doctor Who' on my lunchbreak.

Dollars and Amazons

I know, it’s an awful pun on the classic novel by Arthur Ransome, but it’s late and good headlines can be hard to find.

I love the Aussie dollar right now. Suddenly, it is cheaper for me to buy all my DVDs and books from overseas, even after factoring in shipping. It has been the best part of a year since I started buying my 'Doctor Who' DVDs from Amazon UK and this week I was able to finish off my 'West Wing' collection for pocket change from Amazon US.

Even with Border’s loyalty vouchers and end of financial year sales popping up all over, I am still finding Amazon the best deal. I carry out a few comparisons between the UK and US sites, combine a few things into one parcel for cheaper shipping and a few days later wonderful things appear on my desk at work.

I couldn’t even find the 'West Wing' boxes this cheap on eBay, once I’d factored in conversions. Some of you regular readers will already be aware of my ‘West Wing’ obsession. Now I have another 40+ hours of Toby to keep me entertained.

I plan to take advantage of our strong dollar for as long as it lasts. It won’t last forever. It was only a few years ago the tables were completely reversed and my beloved comic book prices were rising higher than petrol on a Bank Holiday weekend.

Putting the Wham, Pow, Sock Back in My Writing

Time to pull my finger out. I’ve been planning to complete some unsolicited comic scripts in the hope of gaining a commission for a long time. I was once invited to submit a script to Marvel to assess whether they could use me. But time has been against me and the career and life changes of the last twelve months have put such dreams on the shelf, next to the vampire movie script in desperate need of a rewrite.

Therefore, one of my goals over the next two months is to produce a couple of strong comic submissions I can use as a calling card to get some work in the comic industry. I have a half completed script which would fit the Marvel submission guidelines and there are a number of plots on my hard drive waiting to be developed into potential Future Shocks for 2000AD.

I have no intention of launching a full-time career in comics – I have more than enough work coming in to keep me busy for the foreseeable future. But comics have been a large part of my life since I was old enough to read. It would give me such a thrill to at least contribute to the genre – to be able to pick up a comic and see my name.

Of course, I could also say the same thing about films (hence the vampire script) and novels, so there are plenty of ambitions to get cracking on.

PlotDog’s Top Reads

Plotdog has announced the top five blog posts on writing for the week ending June 13th and CopyWrite makes the list. If you have written a strong post on writing, or just a piece of online fiction you are proud of, submit it into the latest Plotdog contest for the chance to receive extra traffic.

Top 5

About Writing/Grammar
Kimota (Jonathan Crossfield) - 'Grammar Wars'
Catherine @ Sharp Words - 'Do Dreams Influence Your Writing?'

Poetry
Jennifer M Scott - 'One More Time'

Flash Fiction / Fiction
Jennifer M Scott – ‘Last Request’
Francis Scudellari – ‘Belly: Chapter One’

And Finally…

Putting the Twit in Twitter – I managed to finally develop a tweet I was happy to enter into Smithereen’s fantastic Twitter competition. If you weren’t following me on Twitter when I unleashed it on an unsuspecting world, you can read my entry here.

The newest Apple Store opens in Sydney tomorrow and people have already started queuing. There are Apple fans flying in from San Francisco to sit on deck-chairs and swap Mac stories in the hope of nabbing one of the limited shirts available to the first few people through the doors at 5pm tomorrow. Can you imagine any other technology company provoking this level of devotion?

For the rest of us techno-geeks, Firefox version 3 was launched today. Some of us can get quite evangelical about this wonderful little browser, particularly as IE still insists on making life that much harder for the average webmaster. To celebrate the launch. Firefox are attempting to break the world record today for the most downloads in one 24 hour period. Hop over to the site, hit the download button and be part of a world record. And if you aren’t already a Firefox fan, you get a better browser into the bargain as well!

Class dismissed!