Alan Baxter's Blog, page 106

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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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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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...

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...

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.

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...

Patrick Stewart knighted

It's a particularly special day when the Captain of the Starship Enterprise is knighted by the Queen of England. From Levar Burton's (Geordie LaForge) Twitter page, we get this exclusive picture:

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Dark Pages preview #2

In the ongoing series of previews from the Dark Pages anthology from Blade Red Press, here's an excerpt from the second story in the collection:

Heart of Ice

by Martin Livings

Lidja sits astride the deacon's sodden corpse as he writhes, his erect penis cold and wet inside her. Sweat runs down the young sorceress' chest, between her small breasts, as she rocks back and forth against the dripping body. Her hair, usually black, sweeps across her eyes in a golden blur. She tilts her head back...

Let's get Peter Watts to Aussiecon

This is a perfect example of what I love about the Australian spec fic community. My good friend and awesome author Cat Sparks has come up with a damn fine plan, and I can only endorse it wholeheartedly. I'll let Cat's explanation stand unedited:

Many of you will be familiar with this story already but for anyone who isn't:

Last year Canadian marine biologist and science fiction writer Dr Peter Watts underwent a terrifying ordeal at the hands of over zealous border crossing guards in Port...