Category Archives: Podcasts

Frim Fram Alyx with Ossenfay

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And, yes, shafuffa on the side.
Tomorrow I’m co-hosting Geekly Pleasures with Jules Sherred, whose review of Blue Magic contains one of those paragraphs that really does make the whole writing lifestyle seem like an endless round of hearts and ponies:

I have never been more thankful for a character than I am for the character of Ev Lethewood. Without going into extreme detail, Alyx did a superb job of illustrating what it like to be a trans man. It is always a wonderful thing when the LGBTQ community is represented in literature in a matter-of-fact fashion, instead of salaciously.
From Geeky Pleasures (share this quote)

I wanted exactly this out of Ev’s storyline. To reach someone, in that way, on that level. Part of me was terrified I’d failed. Seeing this was a joy and a relief.
Things of me: I’m in a bubble of unprecedented super-busy, all tied into the release of Blue Magic. My inbox is full of interesting and exciting things, including travel stuff: I will be in Portland, reading at Powell’s, on the evening of May 7th, and I will have other events to announce soon. There was FanExpo and my own launch and I’ve joined Pinterest and started a newsletter (join button’s on my site) and you’ve all seen the guest blog links. Plus fiction-writing, teaching, tax season stuff, and all the usual… it’s been a whirlwind.

I’m very happy to say I’ve gotten over a thousand words in on the current Gale and Parrish story this week, despite having a meeting at 6:30 OMG ayem Tuesday and being quite bloody-minded about going outside for a walk every single damned day.

Spring in Vancouver is not to be missed. It’s cool and rainy out as I write this, and the double-flowering plums are spectacular right now. They are brighter and more vivid in the gray; bright sunshine is lovely, but it washes them out a bit. In another week or so they’ll start to edge past their prime, and the slightest gust of wind will fill the air with pink confetti. The tulips are in bloom everywhere. The days are longer and noticeably warmer, the trees are leafing up, and the birds are bubbling over with song in the mornings. Soon there will be ducklings and baby Canada geese to coo over. And, if I’m lucky, baby herons. Here’s about two percent of the heronry in progress:
All Imported-24

Adventures in podpeeping…

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Vancouver currently smells of horseshit, leading me to suspect that this is the time of year when a savvy gardener’s thoughts turn to fertilizer.

Me, I am going after a different kind of enrichment… the always lovely brain on legs known as Linda Carson has turned me on to TED talks and I have been inhaling one, chosen more or less at random, every day.

Like the millions of viewers who have already figured out that these vids are pure gold, I’ve found that twenty minutes a day is an awfully cheap price to pay to get one’s mind stretched. It’s always been one of my more cherished beliefs that any topic is interesting if the speaker is both knowledgeable and passionate. TED pretty much proves me right. They cover a wide range of subjects, ranging from politics and science to art and design. The speakers are at the top of their various fields, and many of them are supremely entertaining. There have been lightning calculators, Mentalist-style maestros of misdirection, and yesterday I watched Chris Anderson explain crowd accelerated innovation. Here’s the trailer Linda used to hook me, featuring snippets from ten of their most downloaded talks:

The practice of watching these has somehow led me back to loading up CBC podcasts, a habit I’d dropped, so I am also happily mushing my way through a backlog of Vinyl Cafe stories and expect to inhale some as-yet uncracked Quirks and Quarks. These are audio, better suited to a hike or my various commutes.

The delivery system for all this material is my teeny-tiny iTouch. Kelly has written a Favorite Thing Ever luv pome about hers, so I won’t rhapsodize. I’ll just say, it is both handy and dandy. In addition to the podcasts, I’ve added one other app to the mix, recently: I loaded up iBooks. (Hey, they offered me a free illustrated copy of Winnie the Pooh … who was I to say no?)

I would’ve expected the teeny tiny iTouch screen to be a barrier to my first foray into proper ebook reading. I read a friend’s novel on my gadget, using a PDF file, and there were teeny-text challenges. No surprise–the screen is, what? Two by three inches? But the iBook interface has a bookshelf, which I find charming, and its files are far more readable than that self-loaded PDF. And I have never actually read Winnie The Pooh, believe it or not. So far, the virtual book does seem surprisingly me-friendly, and may even turn me into a bus reader.

But if it did, when would I write blog posts?

In the meantime, Thursday’s verbiage: 923 words, for a total of 10747.

Urban Fantasy Spotlight and a hint of smut…

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Tor.com’s Urban Fantasy spotlight continues and there are goodies on offer–if you post a comment here by Tuesday, you can win a grab bag of books (including, possibly, mine). There’s an editorial round table discussion on the heroes and heroines of paranormal romance, a story, “Olga,” by C.T. Adams and many other intriguing and delightful goodies.

I’ve spent this morning experimenting with my various electronic gadgets, by way of podcasting my own novelette for this TOR.COM spotlight. “The Cage” is eight thousand words long and takes over forty minutes to read, so naturally I did a few shorter dry runs, testing out bits and pieces of equipment. For one of these tests, I used the six-minute snippet that I read far and wide at Broad Universe Rapidfire Readings in 2009. That’s right, folks, I am finally making good on my promise to record and post the Indigo Springs sex scene. If you don’t mind a few spoilers or you’ve already read the book, you can listen to it by clicking here.

I do have a Rapidfire-sized snippet of Blue Magic, too, and I will post that in the not too distant. It’s not nearly as (cough) romantic.

It’s hot out. I live near a busy street, and I’ve had the windows shut as I made recordings, so that there wouldn’t be too much road noise. A side bonus of the fact that it’s ninety-plus degrees in my office is that the cats didn’t feel a need to contribute–Rumble, in particular, punctuated my last podcasting attempt rather ferociously.

Now I’m going to crack some windows and try to get this place ventilated before I venture out in search of library books and fresh fruit.