Books By Alan

Click on book covers for reviews and previews.

RealmShift

"an inventive and action-packed story"

"a gripping, thought-provoking tale"

"a novel I am loath to put down. A most surprising read. Quite a ride"

"fast-paced and engrossing"

"RealmShift is phenomenal. If it’s not already on your bookshelf it should be."

MageSign

"a fast-paced ride through a visceral reality"

"a fast paced supernatural adventure that will leave readers rethinking how they view the Cosmos"

"a gritty tale of blood rituals, mystery, and mysticism… grabs hold of the reader and doesn’t let go"

"fantastic qualities … horrific at times... I highly recommend it"

"Alan Baxter takes the reader right to the edge and then pushes us over. And I thank him for it."

Ghost Of The Black

"Excellent pacing"

"I’ve found myself not wanting to stop reading"

"Everything about it is bang on"

"very, very readable."

Wise Words

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot." - Morpheus, The Sandman - Dream Country (Neil Gaiman)

"A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensly right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt." - Mark Twain

"At the beginning there was the Word - at the end just the Cliche." - Stanislaw J Lec

Karen Lee Field’s flash fiction contest

September 6, 2009

By alan

My friend Karen Lee Field has recently done a complete overhaul on her writing website. She combines her interests of writing, reading, genealogy and history on the same site. To celebrate the overhaul, Karen is running a flash fiction contest. The prize is a $25 Amazon voucher and an electronic copy of the fantasy anthology, Speculative Realms. The winner will be decided by public votes, and one lucky voter will also receive an ebook of Speculative Realms.

The contest is a themed one. You need to write a story of 500 words or less, using at least three of the following words:

murder, mystery, fire, gates, cat, warlord, gold, dwarf, planet, ship

All the details and submission guidelines are here. So have a go and see if you can win an Amazon voucher. I’ll be entering.

13 Responses to Karen Lee Field’s flash fiction contest

Fandy on September 7, 2009 at 6:38 am

Thanks you so much
J. M. Strother on September 7, 2009 at 4:04 pm

Thanks for the heads-up on this. I tweeted it earlier today and will give it some serious consideration myself.
~jon
alan on September 7, 2009 at 4:55 pm

Good stuff – the more entries the better.
Katherine on September 8, 2009 at 1:50 am

thanks for the info–I wasn’t able to access the link though, it’s been hacked
alan on September 8, 2009 at 2:37 am

Oh man, that sucks. There are some fucking idiots in the world. I’ll let Karen know. Thanks for the heads up.
Katherine on September 8, 2009 at 3:03 am

I checked and it looks like this hacker:

[deleted]

has gone after Karen with a vengeance. If you try to log on to her new site, or even the old one, you get his bwah ha ha message with a thanks to [deleted].
alan on September 8, 2009 at 3:06 am

Thanks Katherine. I’ve deleted the names from your comment – I’m not going to give these fuckwits any press. Hopefully Karen can get it sorted quickly and hopefully she hasn’t lost too much content.
James Frost on September 8, 2009 at 3:38 am

Idiots – I presume that Karen is reporting this to her ISP so they can trace those responsible, and also identify how the site was hacked.

Your ISP should also have a full backup of your site from yesterday – just make sure you close the security hole once it is restored in case you are hit again straight away.
alan on September 8, 2009 at 3:44 am

Thanks James – I’ll make sure Karen knows this stuff.
J. M. Strother on September 8, 2009 at 2:21 pm

Is it a self hosted WordPress site? There was a reported WordPress hack this past weekend. The article I read said it goes deep into the database and the only way to recover from it is to do an XML export of your content and then reload it into a new instantiation of a patched WordPress. Sites hosted by WordPress were not effected.
~jon
alan on September 8, 2009 at 2:45 pm

Hmm, not sure. Karen’s site is back up again now though.
Karen Lee Field on September 8, 2009 at 5:15 pm

Firstly, thanks Alan for mentioning the competition on your blog. It’s very much appreciated.

As for the hacking, I’m at a loss. There has been so many people tell me about it, but I didn’t see it for myself and the site is as normal this morning. I’m doing a security check anyway. The more I read about hackings, the more I think I should create new databases and upload a previous backup to be safe. The hacker might have returned things to normal … just for now. How am I supposed to know?
alan on September 8, 2009 at 5:42 pm

That is weird! Hopefully your ISP was on the case quickly and fixed everything up. As you run WordPress software, I would recommend installing the WP-DB-Backup widget, which will give you weekly backups of your content. I would also suggest going through all your coding in the Editor pages and copying that to Wordpad .txt files (or similar). That should prevent you from ever losing too much.