Here’s another story that I wrote some years ago. It’s more cogent than ever when you hear increasingly ‘impact’ and ‘impactful’ in traditional media. And I’ve lost the battle completely over ‘multiple’, a rubbish word that bedevils most communicating these days.   ON THE FIRST day of tumultuous 2020, a Serbian used the English language properly. Novak Djokovic told reporters that he had been saddened and moved – I’m paraphrasing – by the plights of Australians “affected” by bushfires. Hallelujah!! …

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What follows is a piece I’ve written that ‘culture’ editors  at The Age and The Weekend Australian have rejected. It follows my anger at the prime minister’s recent short speech about artificial intelligence. I think the story needs exposure, that writers deserve more government support, especially when those who lead us annually shower sport and other less-important cultural endeavors with millions. Time to pay writers a wage By Stephen Downes It costs money to be a writer. Thousands of us …

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Vertigo, the best website about photo-embedded literature, has published a long and generous appreciation of my new novel Mural. First and foremost, it explains in considerable detail — several hundred words — what the book is about. The narrator’s thesis is that the ‘difference between someone with a benign passion and someone with a violent obsession is razor thin’, Vertigo’s author Terry Pitts writes. Spot on, I’d say. Of Mural’s many reviews, Pitts’s explains my book in the greatest detail. He talks …

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