Alan Baxter's Blog

No posts for days, then three in a row. I am the bus poster.

Just wanted to let everyone know about Freecon 2009 this weekend. This is a small and completely free SF convention held in Sydney each year. This year it's at Bankstown library (a two-minute walk from Bankstown Railway Station, toward Keating Park, the Bankstown Court complex and the Town Hall apparently).

It runs over Friday evening then all weekend. The sessions are Friday November 27th from 6 to 8 pm, Saturday November 28th from 8...

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Funny. I'd just published the previous post about characters, then off I went to check my Google Alerts. I found a review of RealmShift by Karen Lee Field. I know Karen from a great writers messageboard that sadly no longer exists and I usually read her blog. I'm rather honoured to discover that RealmShift was the first ebook Karen ever read, on her new iPod Touch, and it was a pleasant experience for her in terms of ebook reading and enjoyment of my novel. It's an all round superwin!

Interest...

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I saw this via S F Signal blogger John De Nardo's Facebook feed today and it made me laugh.

The 10 Most Clichéd Character Types in Sci-Fi:

10. The Robot Who Wants To Be Human

9. The May-Or May-Not Be the Devil Guy

8. Pure Energy Beings

7. The Accidental Time-Tourist

6. Genetically Superior Smug Humans

5. The Monocultural Alien

4. The Captain Ahab

3. The Bumbling Robot

2. The Evil Twin

1. The Over-Obsessed Scientist

Click on the title link above to have a breakdown and examples of each of the ten – very a...

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Just so you don't think that I'm being plainly racist here, my British heritage makes me genetically obliged to post this. It's something I can't avoid, I was culturally committed from the moment I saw it. Here's a Chinese taxi driver with a no holds barred approach to his work:

refuse to carry frenchmen and dogs

I'd love to know just what his experience was that caused him to have that sign made up. You can only assume that it wasn't a single incident either. Or if it was a single incident...

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Summer colds really suck. Summer colds especially suck when you also suffer from hayfever. I'm currently moping around the house, coughing my guts up, sneezing, getting through tissues like a man possessed and generally feeling very sorry for myself. I also have a headache.

It pisses me off because I had stuff planned for this weekend, starting tonight, and that might all turn to nought now.

Bastard.

I'm really sick.

That is all.

.

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My good friend and IT lifeline, James Frost, sent me this. According to The Register, the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year is "unfriend". As in, "Me and Haley had this huge, like, fight and stuff so I totally unfriended her on Facebook."

The actual entry is: Unfriend: verb; to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary, said, "It has both currency and potential longevity"...

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I had an interesting experience last night. By the very generous invitation of Laura Goodin I went to Wollongong and recorded one of my stories for a podcast. Laura produces the Outlandish Voices podcast where short speculative fiction stories from established and emerging writers in the Illawarra region are read, usually by the writers themselves.

One of my stories, Standoff, has been podcast before, but that was read by someone else for the Wily Writers website. This is the first time I've r...

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It says on the About page here that I'm an optimistic cynic. Sometimes it's hard to be optimistic though. People can be so stupid. I was reading in the weekend SMH about this American-born Jew in Israel that "spends most of every day preparing for the arrival of the Messiah". This guy is 44 year old Yehuda Glick and he oversees the "manufacture of the utensils the high priests will need when the day arrives". Apparently they need all kinds of urns, trumpets and garments woven from golden...

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By the way, talking of novellas (as I have been fairly extensively recently) I should probably take the opportunity to pimp my own work! Don't forget that you can download the ebook of my novella Ghost Of The Black: A 'Verse Full Of Scum for free from Smashwords. And therein lies another great opportunity for authors getting their novellas out there. Ebooks are definitely going to enable more writers to get novellas published or allow writers to publish their own novellas and get them read.

Vi...

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OK, this will be my last post on the whole X6 thing. Maybe I should explain a little bit about why I'm so enamoured by the whole thing. Apart from the obvious fact that it contains great stories, including some by good friends of mine, X6 is part of a new movement in small press that is very exciting.

As I've said before, X6 is a Novellanthology. That's an anthology of novella length stories. It's a big old tome at over 600 pages and contains six stories. The exciting thing about it is that...

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