Alan Baxter's Blog, page 117
January 26, 2010
No censorship in Australia
Go and read Kay Smoljak's piece about ISP filtering, game ratings and so on. It's a good read. Get behind her ideas and let's try to stop censorship in this country.
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January 23, 2010
Aurealis Award winners 2009
The Award ceremony happened in Brisbane last night. I was very sad not to be able to get up there for it, but finances are only so elastic. I was greatly heartened, however, to discover a great little Twitter party happening as the Awards were announced. I got to vicariously enjoy the ceremony by tweeting with people like Margo Lanagan, Felicity Dowker, Tansy Rayner Roberts others while the results were tweeted live by several people in attendance, including Donna Hanson, who was generally...
Scientology Quote of The Week
It's been a while since I posted a quote of the week. However, sitting there this morning, reading the Sydney Morning Herald while enjoying my wife's wonderful poached eggs, I did laugh when I read this one. (By the way, I wasn't eating my wife's breakfast. I was eating the eggs she so kindly made for me. She was enjoying her own breakfast. Aaaaanyway.)
Here in Australia, Senator Nick Xenophon is calling for an inquiry into the tax-exempt status of the Church of Scientology. He claims that...
January 22, 2010
A Little Killing at Pow Fast Flash Fiction
My nonsense yarn "A Little Killing" has been picked up by Pow Fast Flash Fiction. You may remember this story from a contest I entered a while ago. It took second place.
The contest was to write a piece of flash fiction (under 500 words) using three of the following words:
murder, mystery, fire, gates, cat, warlord, gold, dwarf, planet, ship
Just to be a smartarse I entered a whacky little tale using all ten words. Now Karen over at Pow has picked up the story for her new flash fiction site. a
January 21, 2010
Jay Lake's larval stages of the writer
The wonderful Cat Sparks drew my attention to this one. Bloody funny. Mostly funny because it's so bloody true! And naturally, you could replace the word "American" with any other nationality. In fact, you could just take the word "American" out altogether.
The larval stages of the common American speculative fiction writerI have long observed that the common American speculative fiction writer (Scriptor americanus s.f.) goes through a number of stages during larval development, prior to...
Horror photographer Joshua Hoffine
Can you believe there's such a thing as a horror photographer? I had no idea, but this guy is simply awesome. Not only does he make horror into a photographic artwork, he does it all for real. Well, not actually real, but with sets, special effect make-up and so on. Like this:
"Lady Bathory" by Joshua Hoffine
He shot the blood separately and shopped it in post, but even that was shot on set.
How about this one:
"Baby Sitter" by Joshua Hoffine
All the people in his shoots are family and friends w...
January 20, 2010
I share this fear and reverence
As the alt-text for this cartoon says:
"That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm."
I share that fear and reverence. It's amazing that so much can be held in such a tiny space. Everything I've ever written could be stored on the tiniest MicroSD card with loads of room to spare. *shudder*
Original strip here, at the ever brilliant xkcd.com.
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January 19, 2010
Transcript of my Twitter interview
So I just enoyed my first interview on Twitter. It was all a bit bizarre, but a good laugh. Those good people over at AustLiterature have a Twitter weblog called Tweet An Aussie Author and they were kind enough to catch and post a transcript of the whole thing. It looks a bit like this:
Transcript: Alan Baxter Interview
RyanASpan: Welcome everyone to our very first Twitterview with @AlanBaxter. Alan, what was the first time you knew you wanted to be a writer?
AlanBaxter...
January 18, 2010
Interview on Twitter tomorrow
Just a quick reminder that I'll be interviewed on Twitter tomorrow. As per my previous post:
I'm going to be having a Twitterview… Twinterview… whatever.
I'm being interviewed on Twitter on Tusday 19th January by Ryan Span. It's an interactive sorta thing, so people can come along and ask me questions along with Ryan and I'll try to keep up. It's a bit experimental so I have no idea how it'll go, or even if anyone will bother tagging along, but we'll see.
If you're interested it'll be on at...
January 17, 2010
Australian spec fic till your eyes bleed
The Australian speculative fiction blog carnival is off to a galloping start for 2010. You can find the January collected posts at Egoboo WA.
There's loads of stuff there, including a few bits by yours truly. Things about Continuum, Natcon, feminism in spec fic and the furore surrounding it, reviews, fiction, interviews, publishing news, giveaways. By Odin's Mighty Bollocks, it'll take you till next month just to get through it all.
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