I’ve been flattened by a cold this week, which has been no fun for anyone. Still, the one thing I have managed to keep up with (not the writing or the housework, obviously) is my RSS feed.

The Orange Prize in Britain, which has built such a prestigious reputation as a literary prize for women, has lost its sponsorship and is undergoing a rebranding. Luckily, its supporters are not letting that stop them – roll on the Women’s Fiction Prize.

Closer to home, the Stella is being launched in Australia as an equivalent prize to the Formerly-Orange. The first Stella Prize, for a book of fiction or non fiction by an Australian woman writer published in 2012, will be presented next year and you can enter your books now.

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So, Pinterest.

I have been, like many people, looking at this latest social media phenomenon from the outside in, and as I learned with Twitter and Tumblr, these things don’t always make a lot of sense until you jump in to see what the water feels like.

In fact, along with the media flurries about how Pinterest SHOCK has lots of women and SHOCK is the new big internet traffic light system, one of the most common comments I’ve seen about it has been “OMG I so don’t want to know what Pinterest is, one more social media is going to break me.”

Which, fair enough.

So I didn’t know much, going in, about it apart from, well, it’s about arranging pictures. And there’s a remarkably fan-lite community (cos, as Kaia remarked to me, they’re all still on Tumblr). I asked the universe to put the Galactic Suburbia books on a pinboard last week, and our listener Celia leaped into action, showing if nothing else that if the book selling industry really is going down the tubes, it’s not Galactic Suburbia’s fault.

After that, I had the taste for it! So I signed up myself.

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