To tide you guys over this week, and for those of you who might not have heard it, here’s the show where Philippa Ballantine, Chris Lester, and I podjacked Podioracket. Much silliness ensued — enjoy!

First, the appearances. You can find me on recent episodes of Podioracket, The Dead Robots Society, and doing voice work as the German Army in Philippa Ballantine’s Weather Child. You can also hear my fantasy story Buried Alive In The Blues, for which I also did some of the voice work, on the excellent (if racy) anthology series Erotica A La Carte.

For those of you who enjoy my Open Source madness will be pleased to hear that there are new LinuxJournal articles – one is a review of the Indamixx portable recording studio, and the other, which hasn’t yet published, is a review of OpenGear’s new KVM management console. I’m currently stalking a couple more regular writing gigs, so if the internet gods smile upon me, you may be seeing quite a lot more out of me in this vein in the coming months.

Podcast monkeys, you may have noticed the new buttons on the right side of the page – each podcast feed now has an iTunes one-click subscription link, as well as the normal RSS buttons. There’s also now an Uberfeed, which will give you everything I podcast (except Apologia, which you can get here).

You also may have noticed that I’m now podcasting my new novel Down From Ten. This is a comedic country house mystery with elements of romance, horror, and science fiction around the edges – it’s a change of gears from The Antithesis Progression. It’s also listed on iTunes now, so if you’re listening and enjoying it, please leave a review and tell your friends.

I’m also the subject of, and participant in dialog to, a blog series about the doctrinal foundations of Christianity by Scott Roche on the Spiritual Tramp blog. If you like my arguments on Apologia, you’ll definitely find this one entertaining.

I’ve also recorded MORE Reprobates Hour episodes, which, along with all the other special features I have on my hard drive, I’ll hopefully start spooling out here again this month.

As far as writing projects go, Free Will is picking up steam and is now officially on schedule for a November release. I’m also working on a couple more secret projects, which hopefully I’ll have news about soon here.

Finally, I hope to have some good news on sales in the next couple weeks, so watch this space!

The first book in the series, Predestination, deals with rigged poker games. Do you play? What did you learn from personal experiences that played a key role in creating scenarios in your book?

I’m actually pretty rusty, but at the time I wrote the first draft I played a lot, and had been playing for years. I got started when I was about ten, when an uncle of mine who was a low-level diplomat explained the nature of his job to me by saying “If you know how to play poker, and you know how to play chess, then you have the basic skills it takes to do diplomacy.” I was the kind of kid that viewed that sort of statement as a challenge, so within about two months I had a regular poker game going in my garage with my siblings and other neighborhood kids – we played for M&Ms or other types of kid-gold because we weren’t allowed to play for money. I kept on playing right through college on a daily-to-monthly basis, but since college it’s been hard to find people willing to play for stakes I can afford.

Read the rest here!