Alan Baxter's Blog, page 133

Twitter and the back cover blurb

I get numerous spammy auto-bots following me on Twitter everyday. As I trawled through them yesterday something occurred to me. A person's Twitter bio is very much like the back cover blurb of a book.

To explain, Twitter is infested by scumbags that have bots set up to auto-follow anyone that might be vaguely interested. For example, I happened to post a tweet the other day that had the words "real estate" among the 140 characters. For the next two days I was getting bombed with dozens of followe

A 'Verse Full Of Scum now a free ebook at Smashwords

I've been making a few changes around here with a view to future writing projects. Firstly, I've changed the button in the Navigation panel that used to read Serial Novella to read Serial Fiction. This ties in with the new Serial Fiction page. At the moment it's not very different to the original page, as the only thing there currently is my dark fantasy/sci-fi novella A 'Verse Full Of Scum. I released this story as a weekly serial over about eight months last year and the completed yarn is now

Black magic versus prayer in Islamic Indonesia

Talk about appealing to the lowest common denominator. I was both amused and disappointed when I read about this in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald. It's one of those strange crossovers between real life and fantasy novels.

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous nation (with around 237 million people) and it has the largest Muslim population in the world. It also has an incredible range of cultural and religious diversity across its 17,508 islands. (I know, that's a lot of islands!) And

The RealmShift and MageSign Virtual Book Tour – Starts July 20th

The internet is a wonderful thing. We all know that. But it still makes me happy from time to time with new and original things. Webcomics like Jesus & Mo or xkcd, for example. Forums dedicated to any number of niche subjects where you can become firm friends with someone you've never met that lives half a planet away. Lolcats and Loldogs. The answers to pretty much anything you might want know. Answers you didn't want to know to things you wish you'd never thought of. And virtual book tours.

The

The Call Of Cthulhu by H P Lovecraft – review

I first read some of H P Lovecraft's short stories back in my mid teens. Me and friends even played some Call Of Cthulhu role playing game, investigating weird phenomena while trying to hold onto our sanity points. Ever since those days the intergalactic horror fiction of Lovecraft has had a special place in my heart. I recently decided to reread some of his stuff and picked up the new edition of The Call Of Cthulhu And Other Weird Stories, edited by S T Joshi. This edition was first published i

Quality short story by David B Coe

David B Coe is the author of the Crawford Award-winning fantasy The LonTobyn Chronicle, Winds of the Forelands and Blood of the Southlands. He's also, I'm honoured to say, a good friend of mine. I was reading his blog recently and came across a post informing people that a short story he'd originally had published in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show was now available on his website as the exclusive rights with IGMS had expired. So I went on over to have a read.

Everything about Davi

Spelling and the fear of new technology

I read an article in The Sydney Morning Herald today that talked about a poll conducted by Galaxy. They asked 400 people in Sydney and Melbourne aged over 16 to spell eight commonly mis-spelled words. The words in question were:

embarrass

accommodation

accessory

February

guarantee

opportunity

eighth

receipt

According the article, people should be red faced about their inability to spell. Apparently around two thirds couldn't spell embarrass, seventy per cent couldn't spell accommodation and a quar

Editor Unleashed/Smashwords Flash Fiction 40 – I got in

First off, thanks to all of you that took the time to vote for me in the recent Editor Unleashed Flash Fiction 40 competition. I am very pleased to say that I won a place in the top 40. I didn't win first prize, but out of 280 entries it's incredibly satisfying to get selected into the top 40. My story, Parklife, will now be included in the winners anthology, published by Smashwords, and I'll also get $25 prize money. Result.

The contest was open genre flash fiction up to a maximum of 1,000 words

"Crossfire" added to the Dark Shorts page

My short story "Crossfire", which was recently published in The Oddville Press magazine, has been added to the Dark Shorts page here. Rather than reprint the story on my site like I usually do, I've made a direct link to the PDF file of the magazine in question. It's a free publication and it's full of interesting stuff, so have a look. Feel free to right click and save as if you haven't already got a copy of this issue.

You can find previous issues via The Oddville Press website.

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Last chance to vote me into an anthology

You may remember that I entered a flash fiction piece in a competition organised by Editor Unleashed and Smashwords. I asked you to go and have a read and vote for me.

Well, my story currently has 65 votes and a rating of 3.12 out of 5. That’s not a bad rating overall and puts me quite well up the running, but I don’t know if it’s good enough to make the top 40 and get included in the anthology.

If you can spare a few minutes, please go over to the Editor Unleashed forums where the comp is being h