It’s my turn to host the Australian Spec Fic blog carnival for this month, so following is a round up of all kinds of interesting spec fic related interwebby goodness. If I’ve missed anything, add a link in the comments or email me and I’ll update the post.

First off, Eneit Press interviews Gillian Polack as part of Women In Horror Month.

That segues nicely to Gillian Polak’s own LiveJournal entries which include some thoughts on characters and Good books and equal opportunity neglect. A cryptic title, but a very interesting post.

Here, Graham Storr annouces the release of TimeSplash. A novel with a single word title containing two capital letters? The man is clearly a genius.

Throughout the last few weeks a bunch of very savvy folk have been putting together snapshot interviews of Australian spec fic writers. Links to all 90 or so 2010 Snapshots have now been collated into one place for your perusing pleasure.

Horrorscope, the Australian Dark Fiction Weblog has been busy. Here’s a review of the Horror Stories of Robert E Howard. Here’s a review of The World Is Dead, a review of Zombie: An Anthology Of The Undead and Horns, by Joe Hill.

Also from Horrorscope, a rundown of the 2009 Bram Stoker Award nominees and the 2009 Australian Shadows Awards finalists. Not only that, there’s the Table of Contents for Midnight Echo #4. Midnight Echo # 5 is now open to submissions.

At Delimiter Kim Falconer talks about ebooks.

Here’s a review of the new “superhero” movie, Kick Ass, over at The Furnace.

The fabtastic convention that is Continuum happened at the end of February. This time it was Continuum 6: Future Tense. You can read my report of the con here. One of the guests of honour was the truly inspiring Mark Pesce. Mark wrote a short story for Continuum, called Both Your Houses. You can find that story here.

Brisvegas resident Joanna Penn posts here about lessons learnt from Doctor Who. And who couldn’t learn a thing or two from the good Doctor?

Talking of Doctor Who, here’s a photo by Cat Sparks of Trudi Canavan’s pantry. Why would I post that here? Look at the photo and try to contain the awesome.

And talking of Joanna Penn (my segue skills are unrivalled!) she was kind enough to interview me for a podcast on March 4th. We cover a lot in the half-hour podcast, including writing about supernatural themes, playing with religious mythology, writing fight scenes and more. And it even comes with a warning!

And talking of podcasts (yeah, I know, you’re blown away by my skills) those legendary ladies of the genre Alisa, Tansy and Alex have started a new spec fic podcast via Twelfth Planet Press called Galactic Suburbia. The first episode has just been posted with hopefully many more to follow.

On the publishing front, Tehani Wesley has announced her new project, FableCroft Publishing, and has put a call out for strongly Australian spec fic for a reprint anthology and Liz Grzyb has released the ToC for Scary Kisses, which is now available for pre-order via Ticonderoga Publications.

This one isn’t Australian, but it’s a bit of positive reinforcement for fantasy writers everywhere. On March 5th, Publishers Weekly announced that Harper Teen paid seven figures for a debut YA trilogy based around a retelling of the Greek tragedies.

The Outlandish Voices podcast (where new and established writers read their stories for the masses) has moved to a better hosting arrangement at Podbean, so you can rate and comment on the stories now.

And what’s a blog carnival without a bit of self-pimpage? I wrote a review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy here and the Bitten By Books website wrote glowing reviews of both my books, which is always nice. Here’s their review of RealmShift and here’s their review of MageSign.

Lastly, I updated a couple of new links on my Markets For Writers page. Let me know if you’d like to see other links on there.

And don’t forget to leave a comment with anything else relevant (or completely irrelevant, I don’t mind) that I might have missed.

EDIT: Very important post I missed from Cat Sparks’ LiveJournal regarding Dudcon III and the Ditmars.

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Some of you may remember a while ago that I recorded one of my short stories for the Outlandish Voices podcast. The story in question was Crossfire, originally published in The Oddville Press.

Anyway, Outlandish Voices has moved to a new home. You can now find it at Podbean. Outlandish Voices has podcasts of spec fic stories by emerging and established authors, usually read by the author themselves. Now, in its new home, each story is posted seperately and you can rate and comment on each one. There’s some good stuff there, well worth a listen (my contribution notwithstanding).

You can find the main site here.

You can find me reading Crossfire here.

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I love it when my books get reviewed. I really love it when they get positive reviews. It makes me do little happy dances around my study when they land 5 star reviews. Or, in this case, 5 out of 5 headstones. For both of them! Bitten By Books is a site that provides book reviews for all types of paranormal fiction, urban fantasy and horror. They’ve recently posted reviews of both my novels.

For RealmShift, the reviewer said things like:

“The novel is an action-adventure, an exploration of spiritual constructs, and a rousingly satisfying tale.”

“The writing is taut and seamless, and the storylines flow into a climatic finish.”

and

“RealmShift is a mesmerizing novel that will both entrap and entrance the reader. It is a book to be read slowly in order to discover and savor the subtle messages and twists in it.”

You can read the whole review here.

For MageSign, the reviewer said:

“MageSign is a thriller, a mystery, a love story and a thought-provoking examination of the relationship between religion and humanity in all its glory and shame. Alan Baxter takes the reader right to the edge and then pushes us over. And I thank him for it.”

You can read that whole review here.

Sweet.

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From March 7th to 13th it’s Read An Ebook Week. The movement has a website here. Ebooks are becoming more mainstream by the month and the launch of the iPad has certainly helped that along. Even though the iPad is far from what it claims to be and little more than an iPhone that you can’t get in your pocket.

Regardless, the ebook is on the up and up. Let me state again, as I have here many times before, I’m a bibliophile. I love books. I love the papery weight of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. I love loafing back on the couch with an actual book. I especially love seeing my own work in books. But I’m also a huge fan of ebooks. The two are not mutually exclusive. Ebooks give you the chance to explore new work, new authors, books you may never have spent money on before, because you can fit loads of them on a small device and pay a lot less than you would for a regular book.

To celebrate Read An Ebook Week, my novels RealmShift and MageSign are available from Smashwords at half price. They were only US$2.89 anyway, but now you can get them both for US$1.45 each. That’s two for the price of one. To get the discount you need to use the coupon code RAE50 at the checkout. You can find the books here. Scroll down for various titles.

Read an ebook this week. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.

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I was interviewed recently by Joanna Penn, of The Creative Penn website, for a podcast. Joanna blogs, podcasts and video blogs on all aspects writing, publishing and promotion. In this podcast she asks me about all kinds of things, from the nature of writing with religious mythology and the trouble it can cause, to the nature of blasphemy and offence, to writing fight scenes, indie authorship and more. It’s surprising how much stuff we cover in the podcast, which is only a bit over half an hour.

I love the fact that the post introducing the podcast carries a warning!

This fantastic podcast roams over some interesting topics so I hope you enjoy it!

Warning: There is some questionable language and talk of horror, violence and religion so please don’t listen if you might be offended.

Yeah, that’s my kinda podcast. Talk about author branding.

So, head over to this post and download the podcast if you’re interested to have a listen. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

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I’ll be hosting the Australian Spec Fic blog carnival in March, posting up a loads of stuff on March 15th. If you have any posts you think are relevant, please let me have the links. It can be anything spec fic related, about writing, books, movies, TV or anything you can find even a vague relevance for.

You can leave links in the comments section here or you can use this fancy Google document form thing that collates everything into a neat spreadsheet for us. Spread the word and hit me up with links to include.

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I was very pleased to read a new review of RealmShift over at Horror Bound today. Among other things, the reviewer said stuff like:

“You’ll be hooked. And then, you’re in for a fast-paced, white knuckle ride.”

“Alan Baxter excels at writing action.”

“All in all, Realm Shift is a worthwhile read. At the very least, you’ll have explained to you, in depth, an interesting theory for why the gods exist. At best, you open this book, and you’ve punched your one-way ticket aboard a runaway hell train on a raucous ride you’ll want never to end.”

Blimey. I’m happy with that. You can read the full review here.

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You may remember this post about the Snapshot of me done as part of the 2010 Australian SpecFic Snapshots. It’s basically 5 questions answered by as many of us as the people behind it could find. Mad fools that they are, they managed to find 90 people to interview this year. A truly sterling effort.

You can find all 90 Snapshots linked here, including many far more interesting people than I. Visit Tansy’s site for the links, but below is a list of who you’ll find there:

The Australian SpecFic Snapshot 2010: Marianne De Pierres, Richard Harland, Karen Miller, Margo Lanagan, Ben Peek, Narelle Harris, Paul Collins, Damien Broderick, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Angela Slatter, Dion Hamill, Garth Nix, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Trudi Canavan, Thoraiya Dyer, Keith Stevenson, Juliet Marillier, Gillian Polack, Jason Fischer, Alisa Krasnostein, Tehani Wessely, Amanda Rainey, Justine Larbalestier, Rowena Cory Daniells, Glenda Larke, Adrian (K.A.) Bedford, Kaaron Warren, Nicole Murphy, D.M. Cornish, Deborah Kalin, Jonathan Strahan, Alan Baxter, Gary Kemble, Lezli Robyn, Kate Eltham, Robert Hoge, Will Elliott, Trent Jamieson, Felicity Dowker, Jack Dann, Lee Battersby, Peter M Ball, Nyssa Pascoe, Lucy Sussex, Andrew McKiernan, Amanda Pillar, Deborah Biancotti, Kim Falconer, Gabrielle Wang, Kim Wilkins, Paul Haines, Karen Healey, Stephanie Campisi, Stuart Mayne, Christopher Lynch, Simon Petrie, Alison Goodman, Russell Blackford, Rhonda Roberts, Ben Payne, Christopher Green, Kylie Chan, K.J. Taylor, Robbie Matthews, Kirstyn McDermott, Russell Farr, Simon Haynes, Kate Orman, Cat Sparks, Sean Williams, Penni Russon, Robert Hood, Tracey O’Hara, Cassandra Golds, Dirk Flinthart, Kathleen Jennings, Tessa Kum, Helen Merrick, Jenny Blackford, Martin Livings, Marty Young, Lisa (LL) Hannett, Nick Stathopoulos, Lorraine Cormack, Edwina Harvey, Ian McHugh, Matthew Chrulew, Shaun Tan.

I know!

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Yes, you read that right. One of the mailing groups I’m on was shocked by this recently, so I thought I’d share. A young Twilight fan wrote a letter to the website latinoreview.com. I had no idea there was a Latino Review site, but there you go.

This letter writer does nothing for the reputation of “young folk today”. She’s a die-hard Taylor Lautner fan and quite, quite dumb. Who the fuck is Taylor Lautner? Yeah, I wondered that too. Turns out he’s the guy that plays the werewolf in Twilight. I thought Twilight was all about sexually confused sparkly vampires or something, but apparently there are werewolves too. Anyway, this dumb teenager tries to rip Universal a new one by writing to complain about how they’ve shamelessly ripped off Twlight with this new Wolfman movie. (Yes, the remake of the 1941 movie, The Wolfman with Lon Chaney Jr and several others since).

I’ll just repost her letter in its entirety:

To whom this may concern:

This movie was a complete waste and I feel that it offends ALL Twilight Fans around the world, that including myself. For one, it was a COMPLETE remaking of the Wolf Pack from the Twilight Saga: New Moon. It gives the werewolves a bad name and makes them look like some deformed mutation of a rabid dog. I actually started to like werewolves after seeing Jacob Black and all his awesomeness on the big screen at the movies. That was until I saw your crappy remake of what you call to be a “were wolf”. I don’t see how you live with yourself for making it the way you did. If I made this movie, I would be ashamed to even admit that I owned it. How can a werewolf be killed with a silver bullet? Better yet, have you saw the transformation of the man that is “supposed” to be the wolf? He sits in some chair and his entire body turns in to some mutated freak. If you would watch the transformation of Jacob Black, (Taylor Lautner) he doesn’t come close to looking as fake, cheap and or mutated as the wolf man. You tell me, who looks to be the better werewolf. Your stupid Wolf Movie didn’t even make the top Movie for the charts; Valentines Day WITH TAYLOR Lautner! Get that this is MY oppinion and I felt I wanted to express it because I saw that your email was on your site. I wanted to let you know this is what i thought of the wolf man that sucks.
FREAKIN LAUTNER DID!

The Poser of who could never be even if they tried : ” Aka : Rabid poser Werewolf “The Wolf Man”
[She then includes a pic from the new Wolfman movie.]

OR My favorite: Taylor Daniel Lautner aka Jacob Black
[Followed by a pic of a pretty boy and a dog.]

TEAM JACOB- cuz hes a REAL WEREWOLVE!

Regards: Kayla Patterson (kayla—-@—–.com) Feel free to reply

And oh yes, they replied. There are over 500 comments and a lot of those are from idiots too. The letter itself, regardless of the content, hurts my brain. Are they still teaching English in school? Do kids still go to school? I’m guessing this one doesn’t.

Go here to read the whole post, along with Kayla’s pics. Seriously, young people today!

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I’ve been Snapshotted. Snapshat? There’s a Snapshot of me. Whatever.

You can find it here.

Basically, it’s an interview that was conducted as part of the 2010 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction, blogging interviews with Aussie spec fic writers from Monday 15th February to Sunday 22nd February. They’ll all be archived at ASif!: Australian SpecFic in Focus. You can read interviews throughout the week at:

http://random-alex.livejournal.com/
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/

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