Thanks for dropping by. You’ll find the podcasts above in the menu - the link takes you to a page with descriptions of Sculpting God, the Reprobates Hour, and the other podcast I’m a regular guest on. Also, take a gander at the preview page for my new novel Predestination (and Other Games of Chance) here.
Sit down, stay a while, leave feedback, grab a drink and a cigar. Mi casa, tsu casa!
I’m down to the very last of the revisions on Predestination. It ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, and should be a fun ride. Next week, we start recording - and I start the revisions on book 2 and the rough draft of book 3.
Cover art is coming along nicely, and should be up in the next week or two.
Regarding Predestination, if any of you reading are going to BayCon this Memorial Day weekend, look for me there. I’ll have preview CDs of Predestination, artwork, and some other goodies.
When you mix cocaine and heroin, you get a concoction that was once upon a time called a “speedball.” Two highly euphoric drugs married together to marinate your synapses in life-destroying pleasure — what could be better?
Well, how about two consecutive months of two articles per month in LinuxJournal?
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Last month, you may have noticed my initials scrawled across two articles, the “Podcaster’s Shootout” comparison between Skype and Gizmo, and the more hardware-oriented review of the Teak 3018.
Well, this month the state of IT writing got even worse with the publication of the modest little volume you see at left. Inside you’ll find my comprehensive review of CeltX screenwriting software, which I’ve recently used to write the script of a miniseries entitled Down From Ten. |
What can I say? I’ve been busy. And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Well, my fellow revolutionaries, I must confess I’ve been more than a little delinquent. Therefore, following the classic politician’s formula, I offer up my confession in the passive voice:
Articles were published, but I did nothing.
Podcasts were produced, but I remained silent.
Copious words poured forth from my keyboard, and yet I failed to update my word counter.
Today, and maybe over the next two days, I’ll be catching up. I’ve been so buried here I can barely see straight — I wanted the life of a professional writer and producer, now I’ve got it. We’ll see how long I last 
Actually, honestly, I’ve never been better. Life is good, and there is mondo cool shit coming down the pipe for you, my loyal readers.
“There’s nothing worse than having an itch you can never scratch.” -Leon, Blade Runner
Dr. Seuss wrote marvelous childrens books filled with clever word plays that kept them interesting for the adults that had to read them over, and over, and over. His books were like crack for two year olds who were learning their way around the language.
Infected, by Scott Sigler isn’t really the kind of thing you’ll want to read to your two year old unless you want her to jump off the apartment balcony to her death, but, like Suess, Sigler delivers a healthy dose of suspense-filled narcotics to adults who (if they’re smart), are always trying to learn their way around the world. After all, contra Disney, the world is not filled with singing meerkats, hearts and flowers, and happily ever afters. Most of what the world is filled with is, frankly, quite disgusting.
Infected is the story of former college linebacker Perry Dawsey, now a systems engineer, who has a couple of problems. He’s given to intense fits of rage, which he has learned to control through long and careful dicipline and which he feels profoundly guilty about. He also has an itch - seven itches, to be precise. Little pimples with black centers that just…won’t…stop…itching. There’s nothing worse than having an itch you can never scratch, especially when you’re over six feet and two hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle, given to psychotic rages, and can snap bones like fireplace tinder.
It’s also the story of what might be the ultimate in weaponized nanotech. Somewhere, someone released nanotech spores across the world which eventually fell to earth and landed on thousands of people. Finding a suitable environment, they do what spores everywhere do - they grow in the soil they rest on. Like any parasite, they cleverly use their host’s body to advance their own ends. Unlike other parasites, they can think, and talk, and they can give instructions to their host. Those instructions often involve killing people. They’re spreading fast, and a pair of crack scientists are doing their best to figure out what it is before more people die on the hands of their parents, spouses, and children at the point of a kitchen knife.
For Parry, it all starts with a little itch that he ignores. As the parasite’s lifecycle progresses, he shuts himself up in his apartment and battles the chorus of alien voices in his head and with the psychological demons that his ironclad self control had managed to supress for years. In a character arc worthy of Robert Bloch or Franz Kafka, we see the tendrils of Parry’s control unwind, one by one, as he attempts to keep himself sane, to find a way to remove the parasites, and to keep his self respect and self control intact.
While the olympian struggle rages in a small apartment building, the scientists across town discover, bit by bit, the nature of the parasite unfolding under their microscopes. Their struggle for discovery and Parry’s struggle for self-posession ratchet each other up to a fevered pitch of stomach-churning suspense as we, the readers, succumb to the creeping dread that something very, very bad is going on.
Infected is not for the feeble-minded, or the feeble-stomached. It’s a strong dose of acid against a strong constitution. Sigler’s use of hard-core biology, parisitology, and nanotechnology are so well-researched and spot-on that you can’t walk away from the book without a keen awareness of how edible we large organisms really are. The world is filled with parasites whose lifecycles are not very different from the nanotech beasties that Parry’s got under his skin, and out skill with nanotech as a civilization is quickly rising to the level where such weaponization is inevitable. There’s a lot of crazy bastards in the world, and a lot of them have a lot of money and a sincere desire to see a lot of other people die.
But every inch as disturbing as the biological and geopolitical implications of Sigler’s soul-scratcher, his characterizations consistently hit far too close to home. Unlike what one most often sees in books - even horror books - most people are not warm and fuzzy creatures. Consistent over Sigler’s body of work are well-drawn characterizations of upsettingly realistic people. Not everyone is a Nietzschian superman, not everyone is redeemed, and the good people are not always the good guys. In Infected, self-interest throws the reader in on the side of Perry, and pity keeps you there, but a keen awareness of the man’s unpleasantness, unlikability, and his burgeoning psychopathy keep him at arm’s legth as long as possible, until the reader is forced, inch by inch, to admit how much of Perry truly is everyman. He is a throghouly average fellow with a frustrated gift, turning a his dicipline, character, and a certain breed of integrity just a few degrees off prime into something twisted, terrifying, and monstrous.
I’ve enjoyed every one of Sigler’s podcast novels so far, but of the ones he’s completed, Infected is my favorite. It does in microcosm what his larger novels do in macrocosm. Claustrophobic, intelligent, pulse-poundingly suspenseful, it draws the reader forward with a feeling of dark inevitability, taking a “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” tour along the seam between everyday neurosis and psychopathy, and ending with a climax that will doubtless leave the poor author crushed to death beneath a leigon of fans stampeding his home with cries of “Sigler, you bastard, where’s my sequel?!!?!”
Not for the faint of heart, weak of stomach, or fragile of mind, Infected nonetheless is top drawer fiction. Highly recommended!
I’ve just come across an
What is Podcasting? excellent video that illustrates and describes podcasting better than pretty much anything I’ve seen. So, if you’re new to the revolution, pick up a chair and come on in!
The new Apologia is up - this time the roundtable tackles the thorny question “What possible basis can one have for an ethical code?”
This is one of the better Apologia episodes we’ve done, and will leave you scratching your head either with thought provocation, or in a desperate attempt to figure out what the hell we’re talking about anyway.
Enjoy!
This week in The Industry Standard, Ian Lamont published an article called “Why Podcasting is Failing,” which proports to show why Podcasting is, failing, at least for the moment. In short, he cites 1) an overcomplicated delivery system, 2) lack of ability to properly monetize podcasts, and 3) slower-than-predicted rate of adoption as a consequence of #1.
His points on point on #1 is well worth listening to, but they’re hardly original, and there are an increasing number of ideas floating around for the so-called “Podcasting 2.0″ delivery system.
But, even as it stands, is podcasting really a failure, or is it failing as a phenomenon? I think not. Rather, I’ll wager heavily that Ian Lamont’s radio background is impeding his prognostication abilities. He commits a basic category error when evaluating podcasting as a medium. Podcasting is not a failing medium. It is, As Seth Harwood recently said in a Q&A I filmed and helpt conduct with him on Google video, a medium without a business model. All that exists at the moment are small-scale ad sales and donations to defray costs, except in the case of podcast fiction authors, who also have the Sigler business model: build a community that generates enough of a buzz to make a run at Amazon’s bestseller rankings and attract big publishing deals.
The radio format as it exists today is based around three practical realities:
1) radio production has historically been stratospherically expensive
2) after the advent of television, radio’s audience profile changed and long format fiction and similar in-depth long-form interest shows lost audience, while music and short-segment interview and news shows gained audience share.
3) as a consequence of number 2 and an increasingly transient urban population, the programming on radio - particularly talk radio and talk/music hybrid programs - must reflect the rhythm of the workday to remain lucrative.
Because of this, over the last forty to fifty years the radio business has consolidated around the commute rhythm - exciting, ostensibly edgy content in the morning drive time giving way to banal, background-noise content that demands little from its audience for the duration of the workday, and back to a more laid back but engaging format at the end of the day.
But podcasting is not radio, nor should it be. Although it does work as an excellent way to time-shift radio programs, it does something far more useful and important: It provides a platform for a variety of formats and format experimentation, from underground music programming to the miraculous resurrection of the once dead-in-the-U.S. radio drama by groups such as Greg Taylor’s Decoder Ring Theater, to the innovative loss-leader distribution of fiction innovated by Mark Jeffrey, Tee Morris, and Scott Sigler. There have also been a number of other formats tried with various degrees of success - audio blogging, a’la “Tag in the Seam,” business tutorials, a’la The Survivor’s Guide to Writing Fantasy and Answers for Freelancers, and, of course, there are a lot of formats and podcasts that simply don’t work. The low barrier to entry means many - perhaps most - podcasts will suck. They’ll never make it past a few episodes, or attract more than a couple dozen listeners.
Will podcasting find a business model? No. What will more likely happen is that different sorts of podcasts will find different business models that work for their targeted demographic. Some will doubtless be advertiser supported, some will be hobbies, some will be loss-leaders, some will be
maintained by patronage and swag sales, and there will probably be a few more ideas rolled out by innovative podcasters over the coming months.
There is another market force coming into play that also will lower the entry bar for podcast customers. At the moment, the aggregate podcast audience is a tiny fraction of the potential audience (i.e. those who own Personal Media Players). The reasons why are not hard to divine: listening to a podcast requires a podcatcher, a PMP, and a little technical acumen - IF you want to listen to it on your earphones while you’re at the gym. Unfortunately, most people do most of their audio listening in the car, and earphones in the car are a big no-no. If you want to listen in the car, you must either buy a short-range FM transmitter, get a car kit tape adapter, use external speakers, or replace your in-dash receiver with a model that accepts aux input. All four of these, for the average Joe, are unacceptably troublesome and/or expensive.
These barriers to in-car listening are disappearing. Car makers are starting to offer in-dash receivers with Aux-in, and an increasingly large share of the PMP market ships with a minijack Aux cable. This little market force, gathering steam, will open the podosphere up even more. If/when Podcasting 2.0 arrives, it will further streamline the delivery stream.
Podcasting’s central problem is that it is retrofitted onto RSS, a brilliant technology that had not yet become ubiquitous and may never see near-universal adoption on the client side. However, podcasting’s roots need not determine its future, and as podcatchers become less cumbersome or (better yet) bundled in with browsers or email clients, the barriers for entry will continue to fall away. Its rise isn’t as meteoric as the adoption of YouTube or the iPod, its path is so far much more analogous to television. The cultural potency of this method of distribution is already proving itself, and it will grow far more obvious in the coming years. This isn’t a statement of faith, but a statement based on a basic incentive-based assesment of Podcasting on its own merits.
Contra Ian Lamnot, Podcasting is not failing. It is merely failing to be radio.
Be sure to tune in for this week’s Jack Palms episode for the Story So Far reading by your own resident literary abominator. Also check out the Q&A video on the Jack Palms feed, put out by my company ArtisticWhispers Productions as a favor to an excellent author.
Hey guys, big stuff today.
First off, the new episode of Sculpting God is up on the feed. For this episode, I take you way, way, way back to the very beginning of the world, to tell you the REAL story of what happened with a certain apple in a certain garden. From the lips of the woman who was there to witness it all, you’ll hear the story of Lilith, the world’s first woman and first feminist. Listen to this one without your kids in the room; it’s sexually explicit.
Secondly, and in the long run perhaps more important, there’s only a few days left to pick up Scott Sigler’s Infected
If you haven’t heard the podcast, you’ve been missing out. I’ll be posting a proper review in a couple days when I have time, but for now suffice it to say that even if you don’t like horror, you’re probably going to enjoy this book. Check out the Amazon reviews and get your copy - and try to get it before the 14th of April so that your purchase will count towards the New York Times Bestseller list. If Scott can make the list, it’s going to mean good things for ALL podcast authors - Sigler, Harwood, Lafferty, Hutchins, Wallace, myself, and all the others who are creating excellent free content for all of you guys out there in podcastland.
If you don’t want to go to Amazon, hit B&N.com or go to a local brick-and-mortar store and look for the book with this disturbing cover:
Sculpting God
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103,202 / 125,000 (82.5%) |
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8440 / 50,000 (16.9%) |
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67783 / 125,000 (54.2%) |
