Living the Fictional Dream

Podcasts… the short story equivalent of an audio book. Snippets of fiction read aloud that can be listened to on the website or downloaded to your iPod or iTunes to listen to later.

I’d never really thought about this before, but it’s a cool idea. And, from a writing perspective, how amazing would it be to hear the words you write read aloud? Very, is my thought!

I took a screen writing class while earning my master’s degree. As part of the class we wrote two-page scenes and the professor brought in two actors to perform them. Watching my words come to life like that was amazing… Listening probably would be great, as well.

The other good thing about fiction podcasts from the writer’s point of view is that they seem to love reprints (or, at least, the ones whose guidelines I looked at did). It’s not often in the print and e-zine world that you can sell the same story twice!

I’ve been researching short fiction podcasts (with the help of some recommendations from my friend Stephanie), and I’ve come up with a few that seem interesting. I haven’t listened to all of them yet, but the ones that I did listen do had some great stories. If you’d like to try out a fiction podcast, you could start with one of these:

• Pod Castle — fantasy.
• Escape Pod — science fiction.
• Pseudopod — horror (pay attention to that warning on the first page).
• Drabblecast — speculative fiction/weird tales.
• Well Told Tales — horror, sci-fi, crime/hardboiled, pulp.
• Clonepod — sci-fi/fantasy.
• Bound Off — literary fiction.
• The Great Beyond — sci-fi/fantasy (though this one doesn’t seem to be updating very regularly).

If you do check some of these out, let me know which ones are your favorites.

This has been a great week for me! “The Dragon Thief” was published, and I’ve had two more stories accepted — one by A Thousand Faces and one by Perpetual Magazine. I’m really excited by both of these acceptances. The story I sent to ATF was one that I came up with on the spur of the moment, and ended up working out better than I had ever hoped. The one accepted by PM is a story I wrote quite a while ago and had about dispared of ever finding a home for. And the PM editor said such nice things in the acceptance email. What a great week!

And in honor of what a good week this has been, I’m going to share more links with you. Hopefully, y’all will find something here that piques your interest!

First, if you like flash, you need to go check out “Visions of Hummus-cide” at Bewildering Tales by Stephanie, one of my writing group pals. If you weren’t a hummus-convert after Buffy the Vampire Slayer (”Attack the Mayer with hummus. … He’ll never see it coming.”), this story will bring you over to the cause.

Next up is the mid-June issue of All Things Girl. The update includes part two of their interview with Stephanie Meyer (author of the Twilight series and The Host — which, if you haven’t read them yet, you definitely need to).

And here’s a fun one for all you writers out there — The Random Title Generator. If you’re out of creative ideas, try some of these automatically generated titles on for size. Perhaps you’ll create your next great story after being inspired by titles like “Shakespeare, As Written by a Dinosaur,” “My Friends Call Me Fuzzy Banana,” and “Always Share Your Moonlight”!

Finally, if you want to find out what’s going on in the world of television, you should check out my two favorite TV columnists over at TV Guide’s website: Matt Roush and Michael Ausiello. When Matt recommends something, I always know to pay attention, and Michael always has the latest scoops and a smattering of spoilers. However, apparently Michael is actually leaving TV Guide, so you’ll have to check him out there fast!

And I’m out… for today. Happy clicking!

Stephen has equipped my blog with an analytical software. I can look at it and see how many visitors the site gets, where they’re from, and how they got here (e.g., came directly, clicked a link on another site, through a search engine, etc.).

The two most interesting things about these statistics are (1) the searches people run that bring them to my site (”Strange Horizons” and “Penderwicks” are two of the most recent) and (2) where visitors are located. Apparently sharing links and reviewing books are good ways to get yourself noticed on search engines.

The map feature is the one I really like, though. You can drill all the way down to the specific cities, and they seem fairly accurate. Though, there is no McGregor on the list — Waco and Woodway appear, but no McGregor. I’m sure those in McGregor have been folded into the Waco/Woodway tally. Perhaps McGregor is too small to have its own IP address tally or something? I don’t know how these things work.

Some locations, I know who the viewer must be. **waves hello to Deana in Arizona and Katie in Colorado** But others, I have no idea. The site has a significant number of hits from Minneapolis/St. Paul and Kansas, which was surprising. And there have been hits from New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vancouver, and the U.K., among others.

While all these particular statistics are probably interesting only to me, they got me thinking about what a small world the Internet has made. Today you can have a good friend who lives in Australia or S. Korea and keep up a good relationship through blogs, chat, and email. It’s not like when I was a kid and it was hard to keep up a friendship to someone who moved to another city in the same state or another state entirely. I remember waiting six weeks for mail from my friend when she went on a trip to France.

The last time I was at home, my dad told me that he’d run into a couple of my high school teachers and given them my blog’s URL. **waves hello to Mrs. G. and Mrs. H.** That’s another way that the Internet can bring us in touch with people, in this case, people from our past.

Part of it is word of mouth. Part of it is the magic of the Internet — search engines, referral links, etc. But the Internet really does bring is into contact with each other in ways that we weren’t before. And it’s through writing. Sometimes images, of course, but mostly writing. I write stuff on my blog, other people write stuff on their blogs, and then we read it. It’s kind of like creating that “vivid fictional dream,” but we’re creating it through writing about ourselves, writing about life.