Alan Baxter's Blog, page 129

Brimstone Press releases Eye Of Fire ezine

As a member of the Australian Horror Writers' Association, I got sent the first issue of Brimstone Press's Eye Of Fire ezine automatically today. Brimstone Press is a great Aussie publisher that concentrates on the darker side of things, so they obviously get my vote. They started producing Black magazine, but distribution costs forced them to stop after just three print editions.

With Eye Of Fire they've announced that they would really like to revive Black in print, using direct dsitribution ra

ebooks are the future

When RealmShift was first released I was against the idea of ebooks. I wanted to write and sell real books, dead tree books, solid books with pages that get dog-eared from being read over and over again. I love books. I'm a bibliophile of the highest order. As far as I'm concerned, there's magic in books. Not just in the imagination of the stories or the knowledge contained in the content, but in the very act of being a book. Books are modern day magical items. The more books you have together,

My first #fridayflash effort

So, following yesterday's post, here's my first flash fiction piece for the #fridayflash community of writers and readers. Please feel free to share the link for this post around. As mentioned yesterday, this little yarn was my entry in the last ever Flash Fiction Contest over at Scribe's runboard, which is closing down soon. The Scribe contests were always themed and the theme for this one was 'forgiveness'. Love to hear what you think of it in the comments.

Forgiveness

I lay on the ground in the

#fridayflash online fiction community

Back at the end of May I blogged about a new idea doing the rounds called Fiction Friday. The idea was to have people write a short piece of flash fiction (less than 1,000 words) and post it on their blog. They would subsequently Tweet the link on Twitter, with the hashtag #fictionfriday, and people could follow that hashtag and watch the community. Readers would get a batch of new fiction every week and writers would get a chance to showcase their skills to a wider audience.

Well, I was planning

Call Yourself a Writer Meme

The lovely Joanna Penn over at The Creative Penn website tagged me with this meme. You can find Jo's answers here. You can find the original meme (with rules, no less!) here.

So, on to the questions then.

Which words do you use too much in your writing?

An editor once told me, 'Try not to have all your characters say "Indeed" all the time.' It's a bit harsh, but I think there's some validity in that. It does seem that any character over 40 in my work does have a propensity to say 'Indeed'. I've bee

Blog book tour article

For those of you interested, Pat Bertram asked me if I would write up an article about my recent blog book tour for her Book Marketing Floozy website. So if you're thinking about doing something similar to promote your own writing, this article pretty much gives you all you need to know to get started, with examples from my own tour.

You can read the article here.

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Excellent advice for short story writers

I recently entered the Katherine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction Awards 2009, an Australian short story competition. Sadly my story didn't win a prize or a recommendation, but that's okay. I have another story to put back into the market now and see if someone will buy it. (You have to look for the positive in rejections to survive as a writer.)

However, the wonderful Tehani Wessely (editor, writer, Aussie legend) was the judge of the comp this year and she sent out an excellent letter with

New Markets For Writers page here at The Word

I've been meaning to get around to this for a while and I've finally got it done. Another thing I can tick off the ever-growing To Do list.

I've had a links page here for a while now with interesting online places for you all to visit. I've now expanded that and added a new page of links specifically for writers. This page lists markets both in print and online that are open to submissions of short stories, flash fiction or novels. The majority of them are specualtive fiction markets, given that

Ultraviolence is the only defence against zombies

We already knew, from the infallible source of George Romero, that ultraviolence is the only defence against zombies. Well, now it's been mathematically proven. My good friend (and invaluable IT support guru) James pointed me in the direction of this article in The Register.

Professor Robert Smith? of Ottawa University, an infectious-diseases specialist, has published an authoritative mathematical model of zombie plagues. Firstly, let me point out that this profs name is actually Robert Smith?, q

Marketing fail of the week

My wife spotted this in the paper the other day. It was a full page ad showing fifteen different bras on sale at Myer. The one that really caught her eye was this one:

You'd think that a marketing department would avoid suggesting that a piece of clothing minimised comfort. Ladies, we present the most uncomfortable bra possible! Obviously, they mean that the bra is a minimising design (for those unsightly large boobs? I'm a guy, how am I supposed to understand that?) yet it's designed to minimise