I’ve updated a couple of things here at The Word today. Firstly, my flash fiction piece The Book, which was published in issue 136 of Antipodean SF, has now been archived so I’ve added the story to the Dark Shorts page here. You can also still see it in the Antipodean SF archives here.

Plus I’ve added a few more links to the Writers, Publishing & Spec Fic sites list on the Links Page. Now you’ll also find there the blogs of Gillian Polack, Pat Bertram and Felicity Dowker. All well worth a look, all spec fic writers of considerable skill and all generally top people. Can’t ask for more than that.

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One of my favourite websites, Editor Unleashed, is running a poll to select the 25 Best Writing Blogs. There are five categories, Fiction Writing, Marketing & Social Media, Publishing Trends, Creativity and Freelance Writing. Each category has ten nominated blogs in an open poll.

And I’ve been nominated. I know, hard to believe, but it’s true. The Word is listed in the Fiction Writing category here. Any of you good readers that enjoy this blog, I’d love it if you could take a moment to drop in over there and vote for me.

You have to be a registered member of the Editor Unleashed forums to cast your vote, but that’s a pretty simple sign up process. Once signed up you don’t need to ever worry about it again, or you can check in once in a while and enjoy a really interesting and vibrant writing community. If you register in order to vote you’ll get an email to confirm your registration – you need to click back on the link in that email before you’ll be able to cast your votes.

Vote in the other categories too while you’re there. If you don’t know the blogs in the other categories, have a look at them. There are some really top blogs nominated and I must say, I’m rathered honoured to be listed among them.

Thanks in advance for any votes.

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I had a very pleasant surprise this morning. Jonathan Crossfield contacted me on Twitter to let me know about a post on his blog listing the top 50 Australian blogs on writing. I thought that sounded like a pretty useful resource. Imagine my surprise to discover that this little corner of the interwebs that I call my own came in at number 9.

As Jonathan says, “Many people have recommended blogs to me for inclusion on the list over the last two weeks and not all of them were included. Sometimes, they weren’t sufficiently about the act of writing. Even though the blog owner may be a writer, if the topics of the blog did not cover advice and observations on life as a writer, it wasn’t included. A blog by a writer that only discusses their daily non-writerly activities could not be considered a blog about writing. Sometimes the blogs hadn’t been updated for months and therefore could be considered to be inactive. Some blogs discussed books and reading but not writing and therefore did not fit the mould.”

So, not only do we now have a list of 50 really interesting and useful blogs (some of which I already follow and some of which are a very nice find), The Word is also included among them. And it’s not just based on peoples’ opinions. Jonathan has ranked the list of blogs using things like the Technorati ranking, the Page Rank and so on. So I guess I must be doing something right. And I would also like to throw a shout out to my good friend James Frost, in chilly Scotland, for his help with website support and SEO. I couldn’t do all this technomological malarkey on my own.

Check out the post at Jonathan’s blog and have a look at a few of these sites. There’s some that are really worth your while.

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