Alan Baxter's Blog, page 122

My short horror story now published at Seizure

You may or may not know about SeizureOnline. According to the website:

Seizure is

* a new avenue for authors to get published

* a collection of serialised novels

* a website with RSS feeds, sub-divided by each story with its own feed

* available worldwide

* released monthly in collected book format.

It's a pretty cool and very slick little venture. Primarily Seizure is interested in serialising longer works over several editions. However, they also want to publish occasional one-off short...

If you want to be taken seriously, submit properly

This is a post that's very important for all the writers out there, but it should also be pretty entertaining for the non-writers that read my blog.

I've spent the last few months working very hard on the first Blade Red Press anthology, Dark Pages Volume 1. The process is still ongoing, final stories are being selected, contracts are going out, cover art is being designed and so on. There's a long way to go yet before the antho sees the light of day. However, I've learned a lot thus far. A...

I came second in Karen's flash comp

You may remember a little while ago I asked you to go and read a few flash fictions and vote for mine if you liked it? Here's the post in question. Well, you're all crap because I didn't win.

However, to look at it another way, you're all brilliant because I came second. Turns out I win an ebook. Thanks everyone. You can see the announcement here. I'm very pleased with that. I'll post the story here at the end of the week as a Friday Flash entry.

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I will kill George Lucas with a shovel

My friend Michael over A Nadder put me on to these and I did enjoy them. I have to say, I am in pretty much total agreement. Firstly, from the You AUGHT To Remember blog (wherein I'm hoping, by the capitalisation, that the spelling mistake is deliberate) we have a Cease & Desist letter addressed to George Lucas for crimes against his own previous brilliance during the last decade.

The letter begins:

Dear Mr. Lucas:

It has come to our attention that your actions over the past decade in the...

Might need to reschedule

I was walking from King's Comics to Galaxy Books this morning before heading back to Freecon and saw this. It gave me a chuckle. Hundreds and hundreds of years of systematic indoctrination, persecution and abuse? They might need more than an hour to fix that.

Freecon 2009 – you coming?

No posts for days, then three in a row. I am the bus poster.

Just wanted to let everyone know about Freecon 2009 this weekend. This is a small and completely free SF convention held in Sydney each year. This year it's at Bankstown library (a two-minute walk from Bankstown Railway Station, toward Keating Park, the Bankstown Court complex and the Town Hall apparently).

It runs over Friday evening then all weekend. The sessions are Friday November 27th from 6 to 8 pm, Saturday November 28th from 8...

Speak of characters and critique shall appear

Funny. I'd just published the previous post about characters, then off I went to check my Google Alerts. I found a review of RealmShift by Karen Lee Field. I know Karen from a great writers messageboard that sadly no longer exists and I usually read her blog. I'm rather honoured to discover that RealmShift was the first ebook Karen ever read, on her new iPod Touch, and it was a pleasant experience for her in terms of ebook reading and enjoyment of my novel. It's an all round superwin!

Interest...

Cliched characters

I saw this via S F Signal blogger John De Nardo's Facebook feed today and it made me laugh.

The 10 Most Clichéd Character Types in Sci-Fi:

10. The Robot Who Wants To Be Human

9. The May-Or May-Not Be the Devil Guy

8. Pure Energy Beings

7. The Accidental Time-Tourist

6. Genetically Superior Smug Humans

5. The Monocultural Alien

4. The Captain Ahab

3. The Bumbling Robot

2. The Evil Twin

1. The Over-Obsessed Scientist

Click on the title link above to have a breakdown and examples of each of the ten – very a...

I'm genetically obliged to post this

Just so you don't think that I'm being plainly racist here, my British heritage makes me genetically obliged to post this. It's something I can't avoid, I was culturally committed from the moment I saw it. Here's a Chinese taxi driver with a no holds barred approach to his work:

refuse to carry frenchmen and dogs

I'd love to know just what his experience was that caused him to have that sign made up. You can only assume that it wasn't a single incident either. Or if it was a single incident...

I'm sick

Summer colds really suck. Summer colds especially suck when you also suffer from hayfever. I'm currently moping around the house, coughing my guts up, sneezing, getting through tissues like a man possessed and generally feeling very sorry for myself. I also have a headache.

It pisses me off because I had stuff planned for this weekend, starting tonight, and that might all turn to nought now.

Bastard.

I'm really sick.

That is all.

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