Alan Baxter's Blog, page 102
August 23, 2010
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...
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.
It's actually a story about the British government changing their minds about a big funding spend to upgrade the tourist facilities at Stonehenge...
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:
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...
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...
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:
Move along now. Nothing to see here.
.
August 16, 2010
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...
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...
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...
August 12, 2010
Grudge Monkey to enforce motivation
This is the Grudge Monkey:
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...