Writers on Wednesday: Ian Lipke

Welcome back to Writers on Wednesday. This week I am chatting with Australian author Ian Lipke. 


Tell me a bit about yourself …

I became a teacher of primary children in 1958, transferring to secondary schools in 1964. I have taught in schools in remote and metropolitan areas of Queensland, Australia.

I left school teaching in 1977 to lecture at the University of Queensland and at Queensland University of Technology.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s I was a deputy principal at several high schools, before retiring to run my own tutoring business.

In 2006 I returned to postgraduate studies through research at the University of Queensland, gaining an M.Phil in the process.

I have co-written two textbooks for older school children, and at the time of writing, I am the immediate past president and current secretary to the Management Committee of the University of the Third Age, Brisbane.

I am also the editor of the ‘words’ section on Reviews – Media Culture a publication of QUT's (Queensland University of Technology) Creative Industries Precinct.

I have a wife, two children, and two grandchildren.

My self-published novels include Nargun and Nathan, a two part series focused on Australian aborigines in the nineteenth century and their troubled relations with white settlers, crime procedural novels called Lest Evil Prevail and A Killer Calls. I have an unpublished boy meets girl meets monster type novel called Trickle.

Tell us about your most recently published book?

This is A Killer Calls. A girl, daughter of an anal-retentive father is forced into teacher training by his indomitable will. She meets Blue, a policeman in training and falls in love. She ditches teaching and becomes a police constable attached to a suburban police station. She is raped on the job. Blue and his girlfriend Michelle, investigate. The tale becomes a dig beneath the surface of a city to find the muck that law and order rest on. Searching through the gangsters and the conmen, Blue and Michelle find a murderer much closer to home than they could have imagined.

Tell us about the first time you were published?

Omitting the textbooks my first book published was Nargun, the story of a fictitious aboriginal warrior who led the fight against early nineteenth century white settlers. It is a love story and a study in cross-cultural relations too. Five years in the writing, ten years in a drawer, the book was resurrected by a friend who insisted I self-publish.

As writer, what has been your proudest achievement so far?

My answer to that would have to be Lest Evil Prevail. Several critics gave it a big thumbs up. One has included his critique on Amazon. The book generated a small amount of interest when it was published by a press in the USA. It has gained greater sales since I moved my books to www.kdp.com and CreateSpace.

What books or writing projects are you currently working on, if anything?

Just this morning I finished Trickle, a story of a little dog whose fighting qualities inspired a boy and a girl to stand against evil, and overcome a monster that had escaped from the pages of Greek mythology to bring evil to the modern world.

Which do you prefer? eBooks or Paper Books? Why?

Paper books every time. I love the smell of a newly opened book, and I love to sit and marvel at the books I have in my extensive library.

Indie Publishing, or Traditional Publishing?

Traditional publishing…but I have never been lucky enough to have a publisher accept my manuscript. The competition is ridiculously tight. We’re forced into indie publishing.

Aside from your own books, of course, what is one book that you feel everybody should read?

Musth by Australian writer Fred Guilhaus. It is fresh and original, and is home grown.

Finally … is there anything you would like to say to your readers in Adelaide, Australia?

Love, sex and a sense of adventure are the key elements in a good fictional story. Adelaide is especially blessed because Wakefield Press is on your doorstep. This publisher produces fictional books that serve up all three human emotions and, what is more, they produce non-fictional books of world standard…if only they would publish my books.

Links

Lest Evil Prevail:

Amazon US: http://amzn.com/B00RA1EUM6
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00RA1EUM6
Amazon AU: http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00RA1EUM6

Nargun:
Amazon US: http://amzn.com/B00RCNMONY
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00RCNMONY
Amazon AU: http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00RCNMONY

Nathan:
Amazon US: http://amzn.com/B00R8QQ7YW
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00R8QQ7YW
Amazon AU: http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00R8QQ7YW

A Killer Calls:
Amazon US: http://amzn.com/B00RSYCU4A
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00RSYCU4A
Amazon AU: http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00RSYCU4A

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more