Alan Baxter's Blog, page 109

House Of Horror short story duel now up

You may remember a few days ago I blogged about suddenly having a deadline to write a 1,500 word story for a writer duel over at House Of Horror.

The theme was "something written on a tombstone". I put together my story, my opponent has written his and now they're both up for the voting public to read and decide which is best. It looks like you need to leave an email address and a comment as your vote, presumably something along the lines of "I like Pushed Too Far by Alan Baxter best!"...

Make A Wish Electron Boy saves the day

If you took an ice cube, dipped it in liquid nitrogen and then buried it at the north pole, it still wouldn't be as cool as this. Stories like this make me love humanity so much I could cry. For all the arseholes out there and all the shit that is contantly going down, once in a while something like this comes along and helps to reaffirm your faith in people generally.

Hat tip to Michael, where I originally found this story. The story comes from The Seattle Times. I've copied the whole thing b...

Ghost Of The Black novella now on Kindle

A Kindle edition of my novella Ghost Of The Black: A 'Verse Full Of Scum is now available at Amazon. It's US$0.99, but they add a couple of bucks for international Kindle users. It'll show here as costing $2.99. Good old Amazon.

So, if you're keen to get the ebook version, it really is 99c at Smashwords and you can get the Kindle friendly .mobi format. Or you can be a purist and buy from Amazon. Or you can buy a print edition from Amazon. Or you can just read the whole thing here at The Word

Great RealmShift review at Scary Minds

Scary Minds is "horror's last colonial outpost on the internet." It's a very slick website that dedicates itself to all things horror from Australia and New Zealand. It's "unapologetic in dedicating itself to purely local content." Sounds bloody good to me.

They've just posted a review of RealmShift and it's a great review and possibly the most thorough I've ever had. Here's a selection of choice comments from it:

Baxter doesn't waste much time ripping into things as Isiah is immediately...

Obscenity ruling

This is a bit of nonsense, but it's quality nonsense. The Onion is an awesome site and did a great skit today on a free speech ruling. Read the whole thing here, or check the image below for the nutshell version.

Dude, that is some quality swearing.

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A busy few writing days

It's been a busy few days for me on the writing front. Along with yesterday's Society of Editors thing (see previous post) I've had a couple of other things cooking as well.

Yesterday I found out I had a deadline of Friday to write a whole new short story up to 1,500 words. So I did that. I was pretty pleased with the story and the writing equivalent of a military strike that I responded to. It's something that I set in motion ages ago – months and months back. I had a story accepted for...

Society of Editors guest speaker

Last night I travelled up to Sydney as I'd been invited, along with Bill Congreve, to be a guest speaker at the NSW Society Of Editors meeting. The event started badly. As I live an hour and half's drive from Sydney, I always try to combine any errands when I do go up there. So I left two hours early with a several things to do around town before the meeting.

I got twenty minutes up the road and the traffic on the freeway was standing still. After a little while it began to crawl. And it...

Read my novella on real paper pages

Interestingly enough, after mentioning this in my previous post just minutes ago, it's now official. My serial novella, Ghost Of The Black: A 'Verse Full Of Scum, is now available in print from Amazon.

I originally posted this story in weekly episodes right here on my website throughout 2008. It's still available here for nothing on the Serial Fiction page. I then released the ebook version through Smashwords, which made the whole novella downloadable as a single volume in a variety of ebook f...

Interview at Evolve Journal

Evolve is an online journal of short fiction. They recently interviewed me as part of their Reject Writer series. They use the #rejectwriter hashtag on Twitter and the interviews focus on how various writers deal with rejection. Given that rejection is an everyday reality for the vast majority of writers I think it's an interesting idea. I'm keen to read more interviews in the series and see how other writers deal with the dreaded rejection slip. Or rejection email as it almost always is...

New mugshot

You may have noticed that the picture of me in the banner above has changed again. This is one of those random things that just turns out well. A Kung Fu buddy of mine, Louise, took this picture completely on the fly with her iPhone using the Hipstamatic app. It's funny how we now have the kind of technology in the iPhone that makes Star Trek devices look naff, and then we load it up with complicated applications designed to replicate a simpler, analogue era.

Anyway, I just happened to really ...