Archive for November, 2009

You may remember a little while ago I asked you to go and read a few flash fictions and vote for mine if you liked it? Here’s the post in question. Well, you’re all crap because I didn’t win. However, to look at it another way, you’re all brilliant because I came second. Turns...
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My friend Michael over A Nadder put me on to these and I did enjoy them. I have to say, I am in pretty much total agreement. Firstly, from the You AUGHT To Remember blog (wherein I’m hoping, by the capitalisation, that the spelling mistake is deliberate) we have a Cease & Desist letter...
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I was walking from King’s Comics to Galaxy Books this morning before heading back to Freecon and saw this. It gave me a chuckle. Hundreds and hundreds of years of systematic indoctrination, persecution and abuse? They might need more than an hour to fix that.
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No posts for days, then three in a row. I am the bus poster. Just wanted to let everyone know about Freecon 2009 this weekend. This is a small and completely free SF convention held in Sydney each year. This year it’s at Bankstown library (a two-minute walk from Bankstown Railway Station, toward Keating...
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Funny. I’d just published the previous post about characters, then off I went to check my Google Alerts. I found a review of RealmShift by Karen Lee Field. I know Karen from a great writers messageboard that sadly no longer exists and I usually read her blog. I’m rather honoured to discover that RealmShift...
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I saw this via S F Signal blogger John De Nardo’s Facebook feed today and it made me laugh. The 10 Most Clichéd Character Types in Sci-Fi: 10. The Robot Who Wants To Be Human 9. The May-Or May-Not Be the Devil Guy 8. Pure Energy Beings 7. The Accidental Time-Tourist 6. Genetically Superior...
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Just so you don’t think that I’m being plainly racist here, my British heritage makes me genetically obliged to post this. It’s something I can’t avoid, I was culturally committed from the moment I saw it. Here’s a Chinese taxi driver with a no holds barred approach to his work: refuse to carry frenchmen...
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Summer colds really suck. Summer colds especially suck when you also suffer from hayfever. I’m currently moping around the house, coughing my guts up, sneezing, getting through tissues like a man possessed and generally feeling very sorry for myself. I also have a headache. It pisses me off because I had stuff planned for...
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My good friend and IT lifeline, James Frost, sent me this. According to The Register, the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year is “unfriend”. As in, “Me and Haley had this huge, like, fight and stuff so I totally unfriended her on Facebook.” The actual entry is: Unfriend: verb; to remove...
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I had an interesting experience last night. By the very generous invitation of Laura Goodin I went to Wollongong and recorded one of my stories for a podcast. Laura produces the Outlandish Voices podcast where short speculative fiction stories from established and emerging writers in the Illawarra region are read, usually by the writers...
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