There has been a hiatus

 It is 6 to 7 weeks since I posted last, and here is the reason: I have been clearing off the back burner of stalled projects and good ideas.

You see, I'm not getting any younger, but there's stuff on my hard disc that will go to waste if I don't get it out there. All I can say is hooray for Amazon Print On Demand and Amazon Kindle.

Old Grandpa's Book of Practical Poems is clearly a nod to T. S. Eliot in the title, but this is a collection  of 328 pieces of poetry and verse that I think every youngster should at least recognise by the age of 18. The idea came to me when I was reading A. A. Milne to a grandchild, and our discussion threw me back to a time when I was working for an online encyclopaedia, and delivering verse on request to teachers who emailed me.

Being methodical, I checked the text, formatted it correctly, sorted it by author and sorted authors by their dates, and before the operation went pear-shaped, I had more than 600,000 words of poems stored away. It's all stuff to read to kids, or for kids to read, a sort of Dead Poet's' Society to enjoy at home.

That's now all available as an ebook for Kindle, but also as a handsome volume in print, for less than $25.

They Saw the Difference is something completely different. For the past half century, I have been writing essays about how science came about. Many of them were broadcast on ABC Radio National, a few appeared in that online encyclopaedia, and others were first written for this blog, or as part of the more than 60 books  I have had published.

Once again, the print volume comes in at under $25, and for that you get >SQRT(2) * 10^5 words, which is two normal paperbacks worth.

I probably could have got either of these books taken up by a traditional print publisher, but the one I really want to go through the trad route is my next book, which is on echidnas.

You see,  publishers are wary of having two books by the same author on the market at the same time. I play all over the fretwork, and one of my books competes with any other, but there's no talking to the petals.

So not a word to anybody, OK? Normal service will be resumed next week.