Alan Baxter's Blog, page 123
November 18, 2009
Unfriend becomes word of the year
My good friend and IT lifeline, James Frost, sent me this. According to The Register, the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year is "unfriend". As in, "Me and Haley had this huge, like, fight and stuff so I totally unfriended her on Facebook."
The actual entry is: Unfriend: verb; to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.
Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary, said, "It has both currency and potential longevity"...
Outlandish Voices podcast coming soon
I had an interesting experience last night. By the very generous invitation of Laura Goodin I went to Wollongong and recorded one of my stories for a podcast. Laura produces the Outlandish Voices podcast where short speculative fiction stories from established and emerging writers in the Illawarra region are read, usually by the writers themselves.
One of my stories, Standoff, has been podcast before, but that was read by someone else for the Wily Writers website. This is the first time I've r...
November 15, 2009
Ah, humanity, you dichotomy, you
It says on the About page here that I'm an optimistic cynic. Sometimes it's hard to be optimistic though. People can be so stupid. I was reading in the weekend SMH about this American-born Jew in Israel that "spends most of every day preparing for the arrival of the Messiah". This guy is 44 year old Yehuda Glick and he oversees the "manufacture of the utensils the high priests will need when the day arrives". Apparently they need all kinds of urns, trumpets and garments woven from golden...
November 13, 2009
On the subject of novellas
By the way, talking of novellas (as I have been fairly extensively recently) I should probably take the opportunity to pimp my own work! Don't forget that you can download the ebook of my novella Ghost Of The Black: A 'Verse Full Of Scum for free from Smashwords. And therein lies another great opportunity for authors getting their novellas out there. Ebooks are definitely going to enable more writers to get novellas published or allow writers to publish their own novellas and get them read.
Vi...
November 12, 2009
X6 Launch, now with added pics
OK, this will be my last post on the whole X6 thing. Maybe I should explain a little bit about why I'm so enamoured by the whole thing. Apart from the obvious fact that it contains great stories, including some by good friends of mine, X6 is part of a new movement in small press that is very exciting.
As I've said before, X6 is a Novellanthology. That's an anthology of novella length stories. It's a big old tome at over 600 pages and contains six stories. The exciting thing about it is that...
November 11, 2009
It just gets weirder all the time
I always get loads of spam comments on this blog. Most of them get picked up and trashed by the Akismet plugin, but sometimes I need to check first. I just had a bunch of spam comments from someone that was trying to pimp their LiveJournal page about yeast infections.
Really?
.
X6 Launch in Leichhardt tomorrow
I'm going up to Sydney tomorrow evening to attend the launch of the X6 Anthology from Coeur De Lion Publishing. I picked this book up at Conflux 6 and haven't had a chance to read all the stories yet, but I can tell you already that it's brilliant. I talked about this book a bit a few weeks ago, where I mentioned Paul Haines contribution, Wives. Seriously, if you read nothing else this year, read that. I've got back into the book again now and I'm currently reading the first story, Sea...
November 10, 2009
Editor Unleashed/Smashwords "Why I Write" essay contest
You may remember a while ago that Editor Unleashed and Smashwords ran a flash fiction contest. The top 40 entries were collected in an ebook anthology and each earned their author $25, with the winning entry getting $500. My story, Parklife, was one of the top 40.
Well, they're at it again. Editor Unleashed and Smashwords are now running an essay contest. They want essays from writers on why they write, in 750 words or less. The winner receives $500 and all the top entries will be collected...
November 9, 2009
Time keeps ticking by
Time
Pink Floyd (Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour)
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
S...
November 7, 2009
A new flash fiction and some links
I've updated a couple of things here at The Word today. Firstly, my flash fiction piece The Book, which was published in issue 136 of Antipodean SF, has now been archived so I've added the story to the Dark Shorts page here. You can also still see it in the Antipodean SF archives here.
Plus I've added a few more links to the Writers, Publishing & Spec Fic sites list on the Links Page. Now you'll also find there the blogs of Gillian Polack, Pat Bertram and Felicity Dowker. All well worth a...
