Alan Baxter's Blog, page 72
January 31, 2012
The Drabblecast
You'd all know by now what a fan I am of fiction podcasts. I'd heard mention of the Drabblecast many times, but never got around to checking it out until recently. Norm Sherman, the host there, often features on other podcasts I listen to, as a narrator or guest, and I've enjoyed his work. I'm kicking myself that it took me this long to get around to subscribing to his own podcast. It's everything I love about fiction and more.
As it describes itself:
The Drabblecast is an award-winning, illustrated, listener-supported audio fiction magazine, released as a free to download, weekly podcast. It features short stories at the far side of weird, including science fiction, horror, fantasy, and everything in between. It is hosted and produced by Norm Sherman. The Drabblecast is open to submissions and is a paying market.
The production values are excellent, the host is great, there are all kinds of fiction including Drabbles of 100 words and Twabbles of just 100 characters. These things really aren't stories per se, but they are good fun. In a dark, sick and twisted kind of way, which is exactly how I like my fun.
And I'll certainly be submitting some work to the Drabblecast in the future. If you like your fiction weird and podcasted, get on board this crazy train.
All the details here: Drabblecast.
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January 26, 2012
Damnation And Dames ToC and cover art announced
Seriously, how sexy hawt is that cover? This is the new anthology coming soon from Ticonderoga Publications, called Damnation And Dames – Sixteen Stunning Tales Of Paranormal Noir. Or, as I've decided to called it, paranoirmal. That's right, suckers, I've just named a genre. Remember, it all started here.
Well, it actually started with editors extraordinaire Liz Gryzb and Amanda Pillar, who came up with the concept for this book and put out the submission call. It's a great theme. I love noirish stories and all my work tends to have some influence from the noir or crime angle. Even a lot of my sci-fi – I just can't help it.
And yes, I have a story in this book, of which I'm very proud. But it's not as simple as that, because I can't take all the credit for the story. For the first time ever I've collaborated on a piece of writing, and the story in this book is called Burning, Always Burning, and was co-written with the hugely talented Felicity Dowker.
I would often see collaborative stories and think to myself, "How the freaking fuck do people do that?" My work is usually so personal. I sit here in my cave and tap away at my keyboard, letting the sweating babies of my fetid imagination creep out into the world. How could I ever share that process with anyone?
As it happens, it was surprisingly easy. Felicity and I have been good friends for a long time, and have long respected and enjoyed each other's work. During an email exchange one day, when we should have been working, we started slinging lines back and forth in a noirish, Mickey Spillane kinda way, just for shits and giggles. We only got about half a page of stuff down before it petered out, but we both agreed it would be kinda fun to write something together one day.
A while later, Liz Grzyb and Amanda Pillar put the call out for paranormal noir stories. It seemed fated. So we decided to give it go and dusted out those couple of parapgraphs, polished them up, talked about our ideas and plot and then just started bouncing the thing back and forth. We'd write about 500 words, edit the previous 500 and email it away. Sooner or later, it would come back – the 500 new words edited and another 500 added. Or so. It just worked. The story grew. We live nearly a thousand kilometres apart, but through emails and text messages we came up with our yarn and, without any subjective bias of any kind, it's fucking great.
We submitted it and we're both very proud that it was accepted. Seriously, look at the company we're in:
Lindsy Anderson – The Third Circle
Chris Bauer – Three Questions and One Troll
Alan Baxter & Felicity Dowker – Burning, Always Burning
Jay Caselberg – Blind Pig
M.L.D. Curelas – Silver Comes the Night
Karen Dent – A Case to Die For
Dirk Flinthart – Outlines
Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter – Prohibition Blues
Donna Maree Hanson – Sangue Sella Notte
Rob Hood – Walking the Dead Beat
Joseph L Kellogg – The Awakened Adventure of Rick Candle
Pete Kempshall – Sound and Fury
Chris Large – One Night at the Cherry
Penelope Love – Be Good Sweet Maid
Nicole Murphy – The Black Star Killer
Brian Grant Ross – Hard Boiled
And you'll notice among that stellar company the All-Time Collaboration World Champions, Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter. Sixteen stories, eighteen authors, paranormal, noir, sexy covers, murder and mayhem, monsters and mysterious femme fatales. How can this book not be freaking awesome?
Damnation & Dames will be launched at Swancon 37, Easter 2012, and will be available in trade paperback for $30, and as an ebook in Kindle format post-launch. The anthology will be available from Ticonderoga's online shop at indiebooksonline.com, and internet bookstores such as bookdepository.com and amazon.com. Seriously, I can't wait.
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ThrillerCast episode 36 – The Long and the Short of It with Angela Slatter
ThrillerCast is back for 2012. Fellow Gryphonwood Press author, David Wood, and myself are back crapping on again about all things reading, writing and publishing related, especially things relevant to genre fiction. Thrillers, action adventure, sci-fi and fantasy, crime – if it's good stuff, we'll crap on about it. And if it's bad, we're not afraid to go there either.
Episode 36 is live now and we have a great chat with short story expert and all around top lass, Angela Slatter. We talk about the highs and lows of various lengths of fiction and Angela gives some great advice.
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January 23, 2012
Beautiful reading time-lapse gif
I snurched this from Hex's tumblr – it's just lovely, and the sentiment is reason enough to read. Even if we can one day dream of being like those people and doing those things, we can read in the meantime.
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January 22, 2012
Post-apocalyptic short story podcasts at Wily Writers, edited by me
You should know by now what a fan I am of podcast short fiction. I wrote about my favourite podcasts a while back. I also wrote here about giving generously to podcasts you enjoy, as the stuff they produce is usually free, but the writers and podcasters need to be paid for their work. My own fiction has been podcast a few times now – I read my story Crossfire for Outlandish Voices, Pseudopod released my original short story, The Seven Garages Of Kevin Simpson in their episode 242 and Wily Writers have podcast two of my stories – a reprint of Stand Off and my post-apocalyptic yarn, Declan's Plan, which co-won Wily Writers Short Story Contest. Stand Off was also included in Night Mantled, Volume 1 of The Best Of Wily Writers.
And that neatly segues to my reason for posting today. I was very honoured when Angel McCoy, the power behind Wily Writers, asked me to guest edit a themed month for their podcast. The theme of my month was Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia. I read a lot of really good stories and it was hard to pick the two winners. I'll blog a bit later on about the process of reading, judging and editing for that, and my thoughts on the subject. Hopefully it'll help both myself and other readers here when we submit our own fiction to any publication.
In the meantime, I did select two winning stories. I wanted strong stories, with good ideas, powerful characters and a tangible sense of place. But I also wanted two stories very different from each other, to explore the theme as fully as possible.
The first story is up now:
Even horror writer J.P. Bloodstone is unprepared for the actual end of the world. Stranded in Beverly Hills, he discovers something far worse than decomposing zombies, vampiric aliens, or infected mutant motorcycle-riding killers.
As I wrote on the Wily Writers site about this story:
I really like the voice of "Bloodstone." It evokes all kinds of classic writerly angst, like the misanthropic Hunter S. Thompson. Imagine someone like that on their own in a post-apocalyptic world, and you've got the start of this story. Couple that with a classic bit of writer/reviewer animosity, and the bones of the story are in place.
This piece is well written with a strong character and an excellent description of the post-apocalyptic world. It also cleverly uses the character to explore possible reactions to an apocalypse, while the reality in this case is a lot less exciting. There's humour here as well, in the character and the situation.
All Wily Writers stories are published on the site in text as well as podcast, so whatever your preferred format, the option is there. Bloodstone is a great story, read by the excellent Philip Pickard (who also did a great job reading Declan's Plan for me).
I'll post about this again when the other winning story goes up, then I'll post about the process of judging and editing after that.
And thanks again to Angel McCoy for inviting me to be a part of this. As a writer, it was fun to be on the other side of the fence for a change.
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January 21, 2012
Place As Person – my guest post at Mary Victoria's site
You might remember a few days ago that I posted a Tuesday Toot for Mary Victoria. Mary was tooting about a new anthology she's in called River, and part of her promotion of that book is to run a series of guest posts on her own site. Each post is by a different specfic writer and each writer is discussing the idea of Place As Person.
Have you ever become so deeply fascinated with the setting of a book that it lingers on, invading your mind long after reading is done? We all know good world building is essential to any story. But occasionally an author takes that art one step further, creating an environment that enthralls, breathes, lives.
I was very pleased that Mary asked me to contribute, because I'm a huge fan of well-realised places in fiction. Locations are definitely characters in my stories.
You can find my guest post on the subject at Mary's site here.
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January 18, 2012
SOPA and PIPA are stupid, Oatmeal nails why
I'm very much in support of sites like Wikipedia, which are blacking out in protest of SOPA and PIPA. If you don't know what they are, there's this (the only Wikipedia page NOT blacked out) and this handy infographic. This is something that affects all of us, and it's very important. Don't think it's only those crazy Americans and it doesn't affect us – this affects everyone and is the start of a slippery slope.
My books are pirated all the time. I see them on fileshare sites and there's nothing I can do about it. And yes, it pisses me off. But it's a part of the modern world. As the old saying goes, the only thing worse than piracy is obscurity. Sure, I'd like to see stricter controls in place to protect film and music piracy, and, of course, ebook piracy. It's in my interests – it affects my ability to make a living. But I do not agree with SOPA or PIPA as anything like valid ways to deal with the problem. It needs to be crushed for the fucking idiocy it is.
Of course, my little corner of the web here won't make much of a dent if I black out. Ironically, the only thing likely to happen is that I might lose a couple of books sales. But I will speak out against the bills. And I can't think of a better way to do it than with this animated gif from The Oatmeal. It's simply perfect:
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ThrillerCast is back for 2012
ThrillerCast – the podcast I co-host with thriller/action adventure author, David Wood, is back for another year. We chat about anything to do with thriller and genre fiction, and regularly have cool guests on the show.
The first ep of 2012 has just gone live and it's a corker. We talk about our plans for the year, discuss KDP Select, have some free books to give away AND have a chat with Myke Cole, author of the Shadow Ops books – the first one, Control Point, is out next week from Ace.
The books sound great:
Cross The Forever War with Witchworld, add in the real world modern military of Black Hawk Down, and you get Control Point, the mile-a-minute story of someone trying to find purpose in a war he never asked for. – Jack Campbell, New York Times Bestselling author of The Lost Fleet series
I'm definitely looking forward to reading that. Myke is a great guy too, and a total nerd for roleplaying games. It's a fun chat.
Check out the new episode here.
And check out Myke's site here. You can pre-order Control Point now.
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January 17, 2012
Tuesday Therapy at Lisa L Hannett's blog
Lisa Hannett has been running a regular feature on her blog called Tuesday Therapy where she's had a variety of writers give a little snippet of advice or experience for other writers to take solace or inspiration from. It's a great idea and some very interesting stuff has already gone up there. She was kind enough to ask me to contribute and my post is up today, wherein I talk about one of the many similarities between writing and martial arts.
You can find all the previous posts in the series here.
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January 16, 2012
Tuesday Toot – Mary Victoria and River
Tuesday Toot is a semi-regular feature here at The Word. An invite-only series of short posts where writers, editors, booksellers and other creatives have been asked to share their stuff and toot their own horn. It's hard to be seen in the digital morass and hopefully this occasional segment will help some of the quality stuff out there get noticed. It should all be things that readers of The Word will find edifying.
Today, it's Mary Victoria.
Who is Mary?
Mary Victoria was born in 1973 in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Despite this she managed to live most of her life in other places, including Cyprus, Canada, Sierra Leone, France and the UK. She studied art and film and worked as an animator before turning to full time writing. She now lives in Wellington, New Zealand with her husband and daughter. She's the author of Tymon's Flight, Samiha's Song and other books.
What are you tooting about?
Have you ever become so deeply fascinated with the setting of a book that it lingers on, invading your mind long after reading is done? We all know good world building is essential to any story. But occasionally an author takes that art one step further, creating an environment that enthralls, breathes, lives.
Alma Alexander has collected together an anthology of stories evoking one such magical place. It is a river – the River. Whether young or old, a bubbling spring or a wide brown snake, it winds through all our tales, magical and eternal. For there really is only one River, vast and full of life and death and mystery and history and adventure and quiet dreams.
In order to celebrate the release of this anthology, several wonderful speculative fiction authors have come together share their thoughts on the subject of Place as Person. Come and join us!
Who: Alma Alexander, Joshua Palmatier (aka Benjamin Tate,) Irene Radford, Tiffany Trent, Angela Slatter, Gillian Polack, Helen Lowe, Tim Jones, Kaaron Warren, Jacey Bedford, Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Allyson Bird, Kim Falconer, Lisa Hannett, Sue Bursztynski, Philippa Ballantine, Alan Baxter and more!
Where: http://maryvictoria.net/?page_id=462
…And may the rivers you cross always know your name.
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