Alan Baxter's Blog, page 123

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...

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...

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?

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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...

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...

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...

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...

52 Stitches and Seizure

I've just added a couple of new links to the Markets For Writers page: 52 Stitches and Seizure. These are both very cool markets for spec fic and they're also well worth a look if you're not a writer. There's some great stuff to be read there.

52 Stitches is a dark flash fiction blog that posts a new dark spec fic story every week, 52 weeks a year, then collects those stories into an anthology at the end of the year. I've recently submitted something to them, so fingers crossed. Pop over and h...

Interview about writing fight scenes

When I gave the "Write The Fight Right" workshop at Conflux 6 back at the start of October, one of the people attending was Phillip Berrie. He asked me if I'd answer a few questions on the subject for the A Writer Goes On A Journey website. I was more than happy to do so and you can see the interview now. If you're interested in a little bit about writing covincing fight scenes, check out the interview here.

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Read a few flash fictions and vote for mine

Karen Lee Field, over at Karen's Desk, is running a little contest. The winner will get a AU$25 Amazon voucher and an ebook version of the short spec fic anthology "Speculative Realms: Where there's a will, there's a way". When you vote on the contest, you are also in with a chance to win the ebook. The contest involved people writing a flash fiction piece (no more than 500 words) and they had to include at least three of the following words:

murder
mystery
fire
gates
cat
warlord
gold
dwarf
planet