Alan Baxter's Blog

I am so often entertained by the search results that apparently lead people to my website here. I'm a bit of a nerd for stats and searches and things like that, so it's always a bit of fun for me to check. The top search results leading people here over the last week are:

halloween

grease

robot

robots

dirty dancing

Some of those are no surprise, others a little less obvious at first glance. It's a bit like the things that might be called out during improv night at a comedy club. Then again...

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Further to my previous post here and a quick chat about the Aurealis Awards that it triggered on Farcebook, the ever sage Angela Slatter drew people's attention back to a post she made on her blog in October. As a teaser for her post, I present this:

Gore Vidal famously said "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies" – Gore was, of course, a sad old git, and should be a role model for no one.

Damn straight. Go and have a read of Angela's post (nay, grump) on people and their...

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Sadly, I didn't get a nomination, even though I had a couple of bits entered this year. I wouldn't ever expect to win against the kind of competition there, but a nomination would be nice. I would say, "Ah well, next year", but there may not be a next year for the Aurealis Awards. I hope there is, so fingers crossed.

In the meantime, here's the list of nominations for this year from the Aurealis Awards website. I'm pleased to see Paul Haines's "Wives" is in there. I would have had to kick...

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I recently entered a writing contest over at Scribe's Writing Desk. The direction was to write a piece of flash fiction (under 500 words) using three of the following words:

murder, mystery, fire, gates, cat, warlord, gold, dwarf, planet, ship

Just to be a smartarse I entered a whacky little yarn using all ten words. It took out 2nd place and I won an ebook. So it seems only fitting to share it here as this week's Friday Flash. May I present:

A Little Killing

It was a murder mystery that had the ...

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Anyone that's read more than a few posts here knows that I'm a big fan of small press. You'd probably also know that I'm a big fan of Gillian Polack. Gillian has been a good friend to me and officiated at the launch of MageSign at Conflux 6 a couple of months ago.

Well, also at Conflux, Gillian had a book launch of her own. Her novel, Life Through Cellophane, was published by Eneit Press, with copies arriving along with the publisher on the actual day of the launch. Phew! So I've been slowly g...

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Created by Oatmeal

(Thanks to Jason Fischer for this one.)

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You may or may not know about SeizureOnline. According to the website:

Seizure is

* a new avenue for authors to get published

* a collection of serialised novels

* a website with RSS feeds, sub-divided by each story with its own feed

* available worldwide

* released monthly in collected book format.

It's a pretty cool and very slick little venture. Primarily Seizure is interested in serialising longer works over several editions. However, they also want to publish occasional one-off short...

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This is a post that's very important for all the writers out there, but it should also be pretty entertaining for the non-writers that read my blog.

I've spent the last few months working very hard on the first Blade Red Press anthology, Dark Pages Volume 1. The process is still ongoing, final stories are being selected, contracts are going out, cover art is being designed and so on. There's a long way to go yet before the antho sees the light of day. However, I've learned a lot thus far. A...

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You may remember a little while ago I asked you to go and read a few flash fictions and vote for mine if you liked it? Here's the post in question. Well, you're all crap because I didn't win.

However, to look at it another way, you're all brilliant because I came second. Turns out I win an ebook. Thanks everyone. You can see the announcement here. I'm very pleased with that. I'll post the story here at the end of the week as a Friday Flash entry.

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My friend Michael over A Nadder put me on to these and I did enjoy them. I have to say, I am in pretty much total agreement. Firstly, from the You AUGHT To Remember blog (wherein I'm hoping, by the capitalisation, that the spelling mistake is deliberate) we have a Cease & Desist letter addressed to George Lucas for crimes against his own previous brilliance during the last decade.

The letter begins:

Dear Mr. Lucas:

It has come to our attention that your actions over the past decade in the...

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