Currently, I have the fourth edition of The Big Book of Australian History and a new book, Australian Survivor Kids, headed for the printer. (ASK doesn't have its own page yet, but it's about how to stay alive in dangerous situations like being lost, floods, fires, eruptions, dangerous seas...) These are both for the National Library of Australia, both were commissioned.
A lot of the time, my books are commissioned, and they tend to do well with the critics, the buyers and the judges. At other times, I write a book because I can and because I think it needs to be written. At times, I have trouble selling these, probably because I'm now an "old" gaffer.
Old? OK, I am a mid-septuagenarian but look at me! I still climb volcanos and work as a volunteer "visiting scientist" in my local school. I am also a bushwalker and bush regenerator, so I'm by no means ready to get up on the cart. That said, I plan ahead I'm not going to have anybody throw away some of my best material when I fall off my perch: some of these items will go straight to e-books, but some of them have a place as dead-tree books.
These are the works that I have that are almost complete or totally complete, sitting on my back burner, plus a few that I tried self-publishing through Amazon POD. My usual publisher is the National Library of Australia, but these do not fit with their mission plan.
I am open to offers!
1. Not Your Usual Rocks
Written for adults, the basics of rocks, the wonder of rocks. Probably 60,000 words, at least 350 high-res colour pics, needs a fair amount of work, but I am on it. This was the basis on which I wrote my acclaimed kids' book Australian Backyard Earth Scientist.
2. Looking at Small Things
This is about microscopy and engaging with nature. It began as a pro bono job for a small South Australian start-up, and they are handing it out as a PDF that you can get here. I have since improved it and written it as a book for kids 8 to 18 and their adult friends. 75,000 words and 700 pics, mainly colour photos. Easily trimmed.
3. Playwiths
This 70,000 words and 300 pics, mainly colour photos. This is STEAM on steroids, and is being looked at by a favoured publisher at the moment.
The book is based on a now out-of-date web site on sciences, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics that has pulled in 4 million views in the past 20 years: it meets a real need.
4. Australia before Plastic: How our grandies got by
I am a recognised champion in the popular Australian social history field. It combines the best of half a dozen books, now out of print, all of the research I left out. I wrote it as a long-form version, planning to cut it to 90,000 words, but it is now 270,000 words and looking really good. I would prefer to do a long-form version. It is half-way through the second-last edit, and will be ready in mid-October, when I will probably send it to e-book, on account of its size.
Note that I am discussing a 30,000-word version for younger readers with the National Library
5. Not Your Usual Science.
This is the result of 25 years as a writer of popular science. It needs some trimming and patching (a couple of months worth): it is currently at 461,000 words.
And my three Amazon POD books:
These can be withdrawn on a moment's notice
1. Sheep May Safely Craze
This is a novel, packed with lunacy. Check the link.
2. Not Your Usual Treatments
A history of quacks, quackery and seriously peculiar medicine.
3. Not Your Usual Gold Stories
This one was published by Five Mile Press, and released in a slip-case with Not Your Usual Bushrangers, but some sort of internal wranglings led to the remnants being dumped, and never released as a single volume, so I took it back.
Now here's some stuff about me that I lifted from the back of Playwiths.
About
Peter Macinnis
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| This caricature is to be used in my new book for the National Library of Australia, Australian Survivor Kids, out in 2020. |
Peter
Macinnis took seven years to get his Bachelor of Science, because he was intent
on getting an education. He then became a secondary science teacher before
being hijacked into the Department of Education’s administration, where he
completed a Master’s degree in statistical jiggery-pokery.
Unwilling
to seek a cushy refuge among the Refugees from the Classroom, he behaved
outrageously, calling out the parasites and became a regular contributor to ABC
Radio National’s science programs. This unusual creativity alarmed his superordinates
who bundled him up to Prinicipal Education Officer, whereupon he was told he
now had to behave himself.
Dismayed
by this prospect he ran away to join a circus called the Powerhouse Museum,
setting up their education division before being headhunted to work in fraud
detection. Then he became an educator at the Australian Museum before a lustrum
back in the classroom again, before being headhunted as a science writer. Since
2005, he has been a full-time writer, winning many awards for his writing for
children.
He is a
grandfather who plays the role of ‘visiting scientist’ in his local primary
school. He lists among his hobbies chatting to telemarketers in Latin, walking
up small mountains slowly, and sitting on top of small mountains, wondering how
to get down again.
He says
that education, teaching, training, wisdom, knowledge, learning, understanding
and erudition are not the same thing. If we target all of these with joy,
enthusiasm and culture, we will have done a good thing.
He
recently said: “Education has three legs: literacy, numeracy and curiosity”,
but then added “and joy”. Within a few minutes, he added ingenuity, creativity,
enthusiasm and culture. There he stopped, puzzled that education had thus been
shown to be an arachnid.
Afterword: my sense of wonder
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| Me looking for spiders in the Sahara. |
In 1962, I was an aspiring journalist on the University of
Sydney student newspaper, honi soit.
The editor, later a famous political correspondent, had decided to interview
the TV sensation, Julius Sumner Miller, a physics professor from California,
whose simple (and wickedly unexplained) demonstrations of physics had entranced
Australians that year. The editor asked me to come along, as I was enrolled in
the science faculty.
I had just decided to transfer to the Arts faculty, but I
said nothing, and we went along to Sydney airport with a (then) novel portable
tape recorder. “I can give you two minutes,” Miller said, but when the tape ran
out, 20 minutes later, he was still going, and I had resolved to be an Arts
student who cared about amazing things, a student with a sense of wonder.
Three years later, with my plans to become a pre- and
post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese historian shredded by outside events, I took up
botany (as one does), and the rest is history, just not of the pre- and
post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese kind.
I later became a science teacher who
enjoyed wonder, and I always had some curious rig or other on the front bench,
a thing I refused to discuss in class, dismissing it as merely something I was
trying out.
The mystery might be a home-made eucalyptus oil extractor; a
Masonite and plastic bag hovercraft powered by a vacuum cleaner; a square wave
generator; a pill-bug farm or a gas discharge tube. Another day, it might be a long
cardboard tube that boomed when placed over a Meker burner; bent-wire
bubble-makers; a water-driven sediment separator; a Berlese funnel or a
Baermann funnel (for nematodes); a dead sparrow being boiled down for its bones
in a one litre beaker; or leeches.
I did my best educating with my sideshows. A self-selected
gang of students stayed behind, demanding details—and getting them, then they
started suggesting improvements.
In my world, education involves all of
teaching, wisdom, knowledge, learning, culture, training, understanding and
erudition, but above all we must foster enthusiasm, wonder and curiosity.
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