Alan Baxter's Blog, page 102

It's a drive-by!

You may remember Angela Slatter from such posts as yesterday's glowing review. Well, some time ago she sent me five questions as part of her drive-by series of interviews. She's been doing this for a while now, asking people five questions, the last of which is always about donuts. Some awesome writerly folk have been included, and I'm rather humbled to have been cast among them. In one of those synchronicity moments, my little drive-by has been posted today.

It's a good bit of fun, so pop...

Sourdough & Other Stories by Angela Slatter – review

You may remember a few days ago I was bleating on about the awesome book I'd received in the post, Sourdough & Other Stories. As you can see from the picture here, it truly is a work of art in and of itself. Well, now I've read it and Angela Slatter's stories inside are works of art too.

I'm a sucker for a good fairy story. And I mean a proper fairy story, where nasty things happen, even to the good people. It makes my teeth flex to see these sanitised Disney fairy tales, where it's all...

The King's Accord in Flesh & Bone: Rise Of The Necromancers

Writing is a bit like a gruelling series of floods and droughts. I write all the time, but I go through months without getting anything accepted for publication, then I get a flood of acceptances all at once. The same thing seems to happen with publication. Nothing comes out for ages, then loads happen at once. As well as my flash fiction piece, Jeff Newman's Headaches, being published today at 52 Stitches and the recent release of the Best Of Friday Flash anthology, featuring my story...

My Aussiecon 4 / Worldcon schedule

I'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...

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...

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.

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

Sourdough & Other Stories

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

This is what it looks like under the dust jacket:

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...

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...

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:

Move along now. Nothing to see here.

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Become a Shambler to win a zombie prize pack

Necroscope 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...