My thanks again to James for helping me get this website sorted out after the horrible crash of two weeks ago. You’ll see there’s a new theme in place. Rather swanky too, I think. We’ll be working on customising this over the next few weeks, so I hope you like it. Our travels around...
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Books By Alan
Click on book covers for reviews, previews and purchase options.
RealmShift
A race against time and the Devil
"RealmShift is phenomenal. If it’s not already on your bookshelf it should be."
MageSign
Believe in the blood 
"a gritty tale of blood rituals, mystery, and mysticism… grabs hold of the reader and doesn’t let go"
The Darkest Shade Of Grey
You can tell the story.
"...stunning supernatural noir..."
Ghost Of The Black
"Everything about it is bang on"
Write The Fight Right
“The best way for a writer to learn what’s really involved in brawling, short of going down the pub and starting something.”
Monthly Archives: June 2010
New theme and radio silence
Writers Of The Future Honourable Mention
For the first time ever I entered a story in the Writers Of The Future competition. The thing takes a fair while to turn around, with entries going into a quarterly judging period. Winners of each quarter battle it out at the end of the year. My first effort just scored me an Honourable...
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Horror discussed on The Book Show on ABC
Earlier this year Kim Westwood, Paul Haines and myself were interviewed for ABC National Radio. Paul and I were discussing horror and whether it is flavoured by Australian culture, while Kim led a discussion on the nature of dystopia in speculative fiction. You can listen to or download the interview here. I haven’t had...
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Movies on a plane
Long haul travel is always good for catching up on missed films. On our recent flight I watched: Alice In Wonderland – meh. I was fairly underwhelmed by this one. I really hoped I’d enjoy it more. Sherlock Holmes – strangely, I thought I wouldn’t like this, but I loved it. The black magic...
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Travelling the world while shit hits the fan
First off, my heartfelt thanks to my web guru James, who saved this site when the upgrade to 3.0 smashed the theme format. Not only that, he even dropped a post to let you all know what was happening. Thanks Jim! I’m currently in Edinburgh, having just arrived 34 hours after leaving home. We...
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New theme
The Word was upgraded to WordPress 3.0 this morning and unfortunately this broke the theme we had been using previously – apologies to anyone who couldn’t access the site earlier. Have put a temporary theme in place for now, will be working on customising this over the next few weeks.
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Baggage anthology from Eneit Press
Baggage is a new anthology of short stories, published by Eneit Press and edited by Gillian Polack. You may remember Gillian being mentioned on here before – she was kind enough to officiate for me at the book launch of MageSign late last year. This anthology that she’s put together is a pretty awesome...
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Patrick Stewart knighted
It’s a particularly special day when the Captain of the Starship Enterprise is knighted by the Queen of England. From Levar Burton’s (Geordie LaForge) Twitter page, we get this exclusive picture: .
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Dark Pages preview #2
In the ongoing series of previews from the Dark Pages anthology from Blade Red Press, here’s an excerpt from the second story in the collection: Heart of Ice by Martin Livings Lidja sits astride the deacon’s sodden corpse as he writhes, his erect penis cold and wet inside her. Sweat runs down the young...
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Let’s get Peter Watts to Aussiecon
This is a perfect example of what I love about the Australian spec fic community. My good friend and awesome author Cat Sparks has come up with a damn fine plan, and I can only endorse it wholeheartedly. I’ll let Cat’s explanation stand unedited: Many of you will be familiar with this story already...
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Cabal by Clive Barker
Clive Barker is a horror legend, simple as that. This is the man that brought us movies like Hellraiser and graphic novels like Tapping The Vein (the comic versions of the Books Of Blood). He also wrote the massively imaginative novel Weaveworld. I don’t know anyone that’s read Weaveworld and didn’t like it. Comment...
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Book review – Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
I’ve been reading a lot of short stories over recent months and it’s been a while since I got stuck into a proper novel. On deciding that it was time to read long fiction again I turned to this brick of a book I picked up in a second hand book store some time...
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Lost – it’s finally over
After six mind bending seasons, Lost is finally over. I’m sure I’m about the slackest viewer there is when it comes to watching this show, but if you haven’t seen the finale yet and are still trying to keep any surprises fresh, then don’t read on – there will be spoilers in this post....
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For all the writers out there that think they work hard
I count myself among the slackers in comparison to this lot. Writing is an often thankless task, slogging away at improving our craft and, hopefully, eventually developing a decent level of skill and recognition. But I don’t think many of us work as hard as the folk listed below. I saw this over on...
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Dark Pages preview #1
Blade Red Press is very proud of its first anthology of dark fiction, Dark Pages. Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing here (and in various other places online) excerpts from all the great stories in this excellent collection. If you haven’t got yourself a copy yet, these previews are sure to convince you...
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The Word
Welcome to the website of author Alan Baxter.
I write dark fantasy, sci fi and horror, ride a motorcycle and love my dog. I also teach Kung Fu, hence the Warrior Scribe tag above. A friend once referred to me that way and I liked it, so it stuck. Learn all about me and my work by clicking About Alan just below the header.
Our world is built on language and storytelling. Without stories, we are nothing.
The Word is a place to learn more about me, my stories and the words of others. Click the links along the top for all kinds of stuff, search the sidebars for loads of other stuff, click on book covers for reviews and previews, enjoy the blog and don't be shy to share your words, in comments or send me an email:
alan [at]alanbaxteronline[dot]com
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