Alan Baxter's Blog, page 136

2009 Australian Shadows Awards open

As reported at Horrorscope on Friday, Australia’s top honour for horror fiction, the Australian Horror Writers Association’s Australian Shadows Award, is now open for 2009.

In previous years, short stories competed with novels and anthologies, but from 2009 onwards, awards will be issued for the best works in Short Fiction (short stories), Long Fiction (novellas, novels, and single-author collections), and Edited Publication (for editors of anthologies and horror fiction magazines).

The Australian

Author 2.0 Program launched today

My good friend and fellow indie author Joanna Penn, from The Creative Penn, has been hard at work putting together a new online training program for indie and self publishing authors. It’s called the Author 2.0 Program and it’s all about using Web 2.0 to produce, promote and sell your books.

There are 12 modules to the program:

Module 1: Writing 2.0
Module 2: Self publishing and Print-on-Demand
Module 3: Ebooks
Module 4: Websites
Module 5: Author Entrepreneur
Module 6: Blogging
Module 7: Marketing 2.0
Mo

#fictionfriday at Twitter

J M Strother over at Mad Utopia came up with this idea for authors to build up their platform using Twitter. The hashtag symbol is used for Twitter searches and is a powerful tool for following trends or news items. Strother has suggested using a hashtag of #fictionfriday to post regular pieces of short fiction on your website or blog, then tweet the link on Twitter every Friday, accompanied with #fictionfriday. He’s modeled the concept on the popular #followfriday hashtag, which is a great way

A little more publishing success

This is what makes it all worthwhile.

I would write whether people wanted to read my stuff or not, let’s get that clear from the outset. I’m a writer. I have stories to tell. I love it when other people read my stories and enjoy them, especially when they tell me what moved them and why. I was ecstatic when I heard that two customers at Infinitas Books in Parramatta had pre-ordered MageSign after reading RealmShift, before I’d even finished writing it. Things like that make a writer glow inside.

Win a signed copy of RealmShift

I thought it was about time I ran a competition here through my website and gave away a book. I guess I’m just feeling very generous today. It’s also a transparent attempt to get more people reading my work - I’ll be honest about that from the outset in the interests of full disclosure. Of course, reading my books is reward in itself, but there’s never any harm in offering something for free.

Here’s the deal. On my website here are downloadable PDF files containing the entire first three chapters

What’s the one millionth word, Noob?

According to the Global Language Monitor, an association of academics that tracks the use of new words, the English language will celebrate its one millionth word next month. Just what that word might be is obviously the subject of much speculation. With the rapid growth of language recently, it could be something very weird. The massive influx of various social media and other online activities has given rise to numerous new words. In the running for the coveted one millionth spot are “defriend

Terminal Illness now added to the Dark Shorts page

I do my best to keep this site updated with as much new stuff as possible. In that regard, I’ve just added my flash fiction story Terminal Illness to the Dark Shorts page.

This story was originally published in the March 2009 edition of Antipodean SF. I was really pleased to get something accepted by Antipodean SF as it’s a web magazine that I really like, and I love their idea. They regularly publish good quality flash fiction. Flash fiction is the term used for any really short stories, usually

Asimov’s Robot Laws are bullshit

You may remember a little while ago I posted a video link of Isaac Asimov listing his three Robot Laws. An interesting discussion followed in the comments on that post.

I’ve just come across this article on Gizmodo that posits that those Laws are, in fact, utter bullshit. Some interesting points are raised, but I think the author over there is missing the point between mechanical tools and actual robots with AI, which is more what Asimov was referring to. Of course, that’s a whole new can of worm

The posts that never die

Sometimes you write a blog post and get the feeling that not a single soul ever read it. Other times you write something and it sets a fire under someone. This has happened recently. I don’t know how many of you go back and check old posts for new comments - my guess is none of you.

So I thought I’d bring this to your attention. Back at the end of December last year I wrote a post about the bizarre rise of “Real Life Superheroes”. It was a small and innocuous post, mainly taking the piss out of a

Avoid the old cliches and let originality shine

Too often in fiction writing, especially short fiction, tired old ideas get recycled more often than grandad’s underpants when nanna goes on a coach trip. We’ve all heard the old, “And then he woke up and it was all a dream” example. That’s probably the most famous of the overused tropes and I fervently hope that no-one beyond grade 3 ever uses it again.

But there are a lot more tired old ideas that many people seem to think are still valid. You can take an old idea and put a new spin on it, but