A week in the sun can do a lot to a person. You can either get incredibly bored, or if you have a good book and a comfortable spot in the shade you can enjoy yourself. For me, last week involved the latter, I was flying home from England and…
Listening to a sequence of sounds has no obvious survival value for humans. Yet according to a 2001 study by neuroscientists at the University of Montreal, music has the same effect on our brains as sex and good food. Why? It could be because with music we get whatever emotion…
Who is Alan Baxter? Alan Baxter is a British-Australian author who writes dark fantasy, horror and sci-fi, rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. He is the author of the dark urban fantasy trilogy, Bound, Obsidian and Abduction (The Alex Caine Series) published by HarperVoyager…
No matter what your vocation in life, music can inspire you. It can lift and comfort. It can embrace and acknowledge. It can nullify your existential loneliness in a way unique to any other art form. It can unite us and connect us, make us think differently about situations and…
Now that the new year is shaping up, it’s time to set some goals for the year… What do you want to achieve before 2016? What are your priorities? For me, I’ve been planning a new novel – a fantasy this time – which I’d love to finish before 2016.…
The writing process is how a writer (consciously or subconsciously) sets about writing what they do. Every writer has their own process, and I’ve talked before about the similarities and differences between writing as a pantser or as a planner (see here). Still, while I was teaching one of my…
In January this year, I asked a bunch of writers what their writing goals were for 2013. Was their focus going to be novels, short stories, non-fiction… what? I was interested to see what everyone was planning to achieve, so conducted a poll on my Facebook page. Here are the results…
