Montana Poetry day is about to break over us all like a tsunami of luminous phrases, and frankly I’m so utterly swamped by how many events are on all over the country that I’ve decided not to even try and enumerate the beggars. Hopefully it will be quite hard to miss but should you decide to really get stuck in, then go to the Booksellers NZ site, which will tell you all you need to know about who, what, where and when.

Meanwhile, back in the world of prose, an interesting snippet has reached LeafSalon about another e-novel. One that we profiled not long ago, the Daughters of Freya, I recently finished, and yes, it was good. The storyline was good, the characterisation was cleverly done, especially given the medium, and I will even go so far as to admit that I turned the computer on before breakfast on more than one occasion to check for new, thrilling installments (sent overnight from the USA) when the going got really tough. And if the ending lacked a certain je ne sais quoi the writers knew it and had a few extra emails back at the ranch to let you down a tad more gently. What I felt was that it was just a beginning really – and would love to see more.

Then the other day, in fact the same day as I finished Freya I received an email from James McGoram, who in the year 2000 started a small e-publishing venture called Evasion.

He and the others involved in the site are now doing other stuff, and hopefully they’ll get back into it ‘as soon as one of us gets fired from our current jobs’. However, James has just put up his very own novel on the site, in twelve easy pieces. He had a couple of setbacks publishing it and so decided to just whack it up. James says in his ‘author’s note’:

… it seems to me that it's readers that validate an author's worth, not publishers (although I'll conveniently leave questions of editing aside.) In this modern age, when the tools to publish ourselves are so readily available, I figure, what the hell. I'm not after money. Nor even fame. But I wrote this thing, and I like the idea of somebody else enjoying it.

Bless! So there you are: a whole free novel at your fingertips. James also told us to pass this on: if anyone would like the challenge of editing the site (as a guest at first, and perhaps permanently later on) please let him know at james@evasion.co.nz and he’ll send further information.

Could this be you?