Alan Baxter's Blog, page 129

Writer Appreciation Week

There's something fitting about me finding out about this on a Thursday. It's a bit like when I fell in love with rock and roll music in the 80s and wished I'd been born in the 50s. Or when I finally got that pair of blue plastic trainers with velcro instead of laces in the late 70s only to discover that everyone had moved on and Converse Hi-Tops were back. But still, at least this time it's not quite over so I can still join in a little bit.

According to Nathan Bransford – Literary Agent this we

25 Best Writing Blogs

One of my favourite websites, Editor Unleashed, is running a poll to select the 25 Best Writing Blogs. There are five categories, Fiction Writing, Marketing & Social Media, Publishing Trends, Creativity and Freelance Writing. Each category has ten nominated blogs in an open poll.

And I've been nominated. I know, hard to believe, but it's true. The Word is listed in the Fiction Writing category here. Any of you good readers that enjoy this blog, I'd love it if you could take a moment to drop in ov

Additions to the Markets For Writers page

I've made a couple of quick additions to the Markets For Writers page here at The Word. The first was a terrible ommission on my part. Given that I'm a member of the Australian Horror Writers Association I shouldn't have left off Midnight Echo magazine, but for some inexcusable reason I did. That's now been added to the list.

Also, my friend and outstanding writer, Cat Sparks, recently directed me to the The Inkspillers Website. This is a site for Australian writers that is regularly updated with

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