Alan Baxter's Blog, page 106
July 16, 2010
The plane home
The trip home has begun. The looooong trip home. We've got to Dubai and are killing time before the last leg into Sydney. Free wifi at the transit lounge is a good distraction (although Metal As Fuck is a blocked site!)
On the first leg of the trip I watched Clash Of The Titans. Mindless eye candy but most entertaining. Then I watched Ondine. It's a selkie tale with Colin Farrell and was absolutely brilliant. I highly recommend it. I had one major issue with it but I'm prepared to let that...
July 11, 2010
Busy, busy, busy
So I was hoping to update things here a bit more often, but I haven't. No excuses. I've been too busy enjoying my holiday and catching up with old friends and family, so I'm sure you all understand.
The trip around Scotland was truly awesome, especially as my wife had never been before. Cornwall and Devon as beautiful as ever, and the company superb. My old hometown has been excellent, seeing so many old faces and carrying on like no time at all has passed. That, as far as I'm concerned, is...
June 29, 2010
New theme and radio silence
My thanks again to James for helping me get this website sorted out after the horrible crash of two weeks ago. You'll see there's a new theme in place. Rather swanky too, I think. We'll be working on customising this over the next few weeks, so I hope you like it.
Our travels around Scotland have been fantastic and we're moving on again today. I'll probably be out of net coverage for a few days now, so don't be surprised by an unusual online silence from me until around Monday. Be good!
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June 27, 2010
Writers Of The Future Honourable Mention
For the first time ever I entered a story in the Writers Of The Future competition. The thing takes a fair while to turn around, with entries going into a quarterly judging period. Winners of each quarter battle it out at the end of the year.
My first effort just scored me an Honourable Mention for this year's 2nd Quarter, so I'm pretty happy with that. I wonder if that'll help me sell the story somewhere else now?
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June 24, 2010
Horror discussed on The Book Show on ABC
Earlier this year Kim Westwood, Paul Haines and myself were interviewed for ABC National Radio. Paul and I were discussing horror and whether it is flavoured by Australian culture, while Kim led a discussion on the nature of dystopia in speculative fiction.
You can listen to or download the interview here.
I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, travelling as I am at the moment, so hopefully we don't come off sounding like a couple of numpties. Fingers crossed.
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June 20, 2010
Movies on a plane
Long haul travel is always good for catching up on missed films. On our recent flight I watched:
Alice In Wonderland – meh. I was fairly underwhelmed by this one. I really hoped I'd enjoy it more.
Sherlock Holmes – strangely, I thought I wouldn't like this, but I loved it. The black magic Scooby Doo kinda story was cool.
How To Train Your Dragon – very cute, very clever and surprisingly easy on the heavy moralising for a kid's animation. Great fun.
Shutter Island – excellent, dark thriller...
June 19, 2010
Travelling the world while shit hits the fan
First off, my heartfelt thanks to my web guru James, who saved this site when the upgrade to 3.0 smashed the theme format. Not only that, he even dropped a post to let you all know what was happening. Thanks Jim!
I'm currently in Edinburgh, having just arrived 34 hours after leaving home. We had decent enough flights and all that. By far the worst part of the journey was the last hour trying negotiate Edinburgh in our hire car to find the hotel. Seriously, Edinburgh – NOT car friendly...
June 18, 2010
New theme
The Word was upgraded to WordPress 3.0 this morning and unfortunately this broke the theme we had been using previously – apologies to anyone who couldn't access the site earlier. Have put a temporary theme in place for now, will be working on customising this over the next few weeks.
June 17, 2010
Walking the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu
I apologise if things are a bit quiet around here for a few weeks. I'm off on holiday, heading over to the UK and Italy to see sights and friends and generally have fun. I'll try to blog anything of relevance if time allows, but otherwise normal service will resume around mid-July. In the meantime, here's a picture of a cat demonstrating my current mood:
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Baggage anthology from Eneit Press
Baggage is a new anthology of short stories, published by Eneit Press and edited by Gillian Polack. You may remember Gillian being mentioned on here before – she was kind enough to officiate for me at the book launch of MageSign late last year. This anthology that she's put together is a pretty awesome concept and I'm really looking forward to reading it. As part of the blog tour promoting it, I've got a post here with some of the contributing authors and Gillian herrself talking about the c...
