Archive for May, 2009

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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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