Alan Baxter's Blog, page 104

Bill Congreve collection from Blade Red Press

Most of you know that I keep a foot in both camps, being a writer and a publisher. My small publishing company, Blade Red Press, has just announced its latest project – a single author collection of dark short fiction from Australian author Bill Congreve. The collection is called Souls Along The Meridian, and will be available soon.

Full official announcement here.

Please share the news with anyone you think might be interested.

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"Stand Off" to be a short film

It's no mystery to anyone that reads this blog that I'm a big fan of movies. A lot of you may also be aware that my writing style is often called cinematic or that people talk about how my books would make great films. This pleases me no end – I would love to see my novels turned into movies (as I was gushing about in my recent Inception review). One review of RealmShift (I think it's on Amazon) described my books as graphic novels without the pictures. Which would be novels, which they are, ...

The nominations are in and the votes are cast

Aussiecon 4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, has announced the ballot for the 2010 Hugo Awards and all the votes have been cast. Now it's just a case of counting it all up.

There are some awesome nominees this year and some truly deserving ones. I'm looking forward to the announcements on these. Below is the full list of categories and nominations.

Best Novel

(699 Ballots)

•Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
•The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
•Julian Comstock...

The nominations are in

Aussiecon 4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, has announced the ballot for the 2010 Hugo Awards.

Best Novel

(699 Ballots)

•Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)

•The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

•Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

•Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)

•Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)

•The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

Best Novella

(375 Ballots)

•"Act...

LiveJournal crossposting

This is a bit of a test post, so apologies for wasting your time. By way of explanation, I also use a LiveJournal blog as I have a lot of writerly friends who blog with LJ. In order to keep everything organised, anything I post here I also post over there. I've just discovered, thanks to Jason Fischer and Aidan Doyle, that there's a plugin for WordPress (which runs this site) that will automatically crosspost to my LJ account. So I've just installed and configured it and now I'm posting this ...

Movie review – Inception

I think I love Christopher Nolan a little bit. He's made some of my favourite movies of all time – Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight. I am constantly going on about the homogenous rubbish coming out of Hollywood and lamenting that there are no clever, interesting, new stories being made into film. That's not just because I have two novels out that would make awesome films. Incidentally, I'd give a testicle if Christopher Nolan would make my books into films, but ...

Font fight!

I found this via Cat Sparks and Jason Fischer who themselves found it on the Ban Comic Sans site. Those three links alone are worth the price of this post, but check out the video.

Nerdy font based fun. It's brilliant.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

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Halloween horror book signing at Dymocks Southland

Here's a little something I'm quite excited about. On October 31st, which as you all know is Halloween, there's going to be a little horror-fest at Dymocks Southland bookstore.

A bunch of us dark writer folk are going to be doing a group book signing there in celebration of all things… well, dark. It's a great idea and I'm honoured to have been asked. I'll be sharing the signing table with some truly notable writers. Joining in on the day will be Bob Franklin, Kirstyn McDermott, Jason...

Singing My Sister Down – the play

Margo Lanagan is a great spec fic writer from Sydney. She's incredibly talented and quite justifiably well recognised for her work. Recently you may remember me talking about her novella Sea Hearts in the X6 Novellanthology from Coeur De Lion. Her latest novel is Tender Morsels, published by Allen & Unwin in Australia, Knopf in the US and David Fickling Books and Jonathan Cape in the UK. And that's just a small cross-section of her work.

Anyway, one of her short stories that she's perhaps...

New Aussie spec fic to check out

It's a good time for Australian speculative fiction at the moment. There are a bunch of new books coming out or recently released by awesome Aussie authors. Some of these people I'm lucky enough to count among my friends and some of them I don't know personally, but know them as their reputation in the field precedes them. I also know that I'm going to be pretty poor coming back from Aussiecon4, as I'll inevitably be buying a lot of books there. I hope I can sell a few books myself to maybe e...