Alan Baxter's Blog, page 102

August 23, 2010

My Aussiecon 4 / Worldcon schedule

Aussiecon 4I'm getting very excited about the fast approaching Aussiecon4/Worldcon. It's going to be massive with loads of cool people and crazy stuff going on. It also turns out that I'm going to be rather busy there. I'll be running my Write The Fight Right workshop again, which I'm very pleased about. I did this at Conflux last year and it seemed to go down very well.

I'm also going to be on a few panels, doing a signing and a kaffeeklatsch and, bizarrely, helping kids make lightsabers. The full...

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Published on August 23, 2010 00:58

Jeff Newman's Headaches at 52 Stitches

52 Stitches is a publication that publishes a new "horror bit" – flash fiction stories with a dark theme – every Monday morning. In the late (northern) summer/fall of 2010, all collected stories will be published in a trade paperback. In the meantime, each story is available on the website. The 2009 collection was great and that book is out now. I'm very pleased to be included in this year's collection and my story has been posted today.

The story is called Jeff Newman's Headaches. There's a c...

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Published on August 23, 2010 00:05

August 22, 2010

Headline of the week

On the day after Australia voted with a resounding "meh", I opened the weekend papers quite sick of the election. It'll be days or weeks before our hung parliament is sorted out and I didn't really want to read any more about it for the time being. Give me something else, I thought, something worldly, outside Australia and interesting. I got it.

druids Headline of the week

It's actually a story about the British government changing their minds about a big funding spend to upgrade the tourist facilities at Stonehenge...

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Published on August 22, 2010 08:05

August 20, 2010

Sourdough & Other Stories

I love getting books in the post. I particularly love getting beautiful books in the post. Look what arrived today:

sourdough Sourdough & Other Stories

This is what it looks like under the dust jacket:

sourdough under Sourdough & Other Stories

Oh yes, that is one fucking beautiful book. It's also from a print run limited to 300 copies. And it's a collection of short stories by the incredibly talented and generally wonderful Angela Slatter. It's basically a giant wad of awesome, dripping in awesome sauce. I can't wait to read it. I'll also be schlepping it down to...

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Published on August 20, 2010 01:57

August 18, 2010

BOFF and a free book

If you're a regular around here you'll know that I periodically post a bit of free fiction under the Friday Flash banner. Friday Flash is the brainchild of J M Strother. His idea was that every friday people post a piece of flash fiction (1,000 words or less) on their websites and share said fiction with others via the #fridayflash hashtag on Twitter. It grew very popular and now J M has an engine on his site that collates all the stories every week and it's become quite the fiction...

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Published on August 18, 2010 02:05

August 17, 2010

Nothing to see here

No really, this is a test post. I apologise for any inconvenience.


As compensation, here's what happens if you cross Giger's Alien with My Little Pony:


my little alien Nothing to see here


Move along now. Nothing to see here.


.

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Published on August 17, 2010 13:57

August 16, 2010

Become a Shambler to win a zombie prize pack

zombieNecroscope is the zombie-specific sub-blog of Horrorscope, the Australian Dark Fiction blog, described thusly:

NecroScope is the official zombie review subsite of Horrorscope (the award-winning news and literary criticism zine dedicated to dark fiction). Necroscope deals specifically with all things related to zombies, revenants, and the walking dead, whether in fiction, non-fiction, cinema, comics, games, or any other media, and regardless of origin or variety (supernatural or viral, Voodoo...

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Published on August 16, 2010 01:17

August 15, 2010

My digital kingdom

This is as much for my own benefit as anything else, but I thought you lot might be interested. I've started fine-tuning my online presence to get a bit more control over it all. I'm the first to admit that I'm an absolute net-whore. I wander around the digital domain waving my business at anyone that happens to look in my direction. Such is the nature of the modern world.

I have all kinds of online communities that I like to be a part of, as well as keeping an online presence to promote my...

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Published on August 15, 2010 10:28

August 13, 2010

Write a haiku, win a zombie novella

I'm prepared to bet that the above title has never been seen by humans before. And it takes a dude like Jason Fischer to make that happen. Jason is a good friend of mine, a top notch writer, a Writers Of The Future winner, no less, and a master of puns. His novella, Gravesend, published by Black House Comics, is available now. It's an installment in After the World – a new ongoing series, each issue a new story set in a world where the dead don't take no for an answer.

Gravesend is in...

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Published on August 13, 2010 02:11

August 12, 2010

Grudge Monkey to enforce motivation

This is the Grudge Monkey:

demotivational posters grudge monkey Grudge Monkey to enforce motivation

That's right. Get the fuck out of his way.

I've come to an arrangement with the Grudge Monkey – he's going to take it personally whenever I procrastinate or procrastilax. Therefore, if I'm cocking about when I should be writing, Grudge Monkey is going to come and fuck me up. It's a fairly serious situation I've put myself in, but I'm a terrible procrastinator. All writers are in my experience. So drastic action was required.

From now on, whenever I'm not writing when I...

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Published on August 12, 2010 05:11