Balticon 46 was a BLAST! I had a very good time, saw a lot of old friends, made some new ones, and managed to survive all my panels! In addition to a lot of good memories, I came home with a lot of recorded audio. It is going to take me a while to sift through everything, so I’m going to be releasing it in pieces.
In fact, I’m going to be starting a new feed for content coming out of Balticon. This post is going to be the first part of that feed. If you’re actually subscribed to the Master Feed, you’ll still be getting this content there, but if you just want to pick up the Balticon Goodies, you’ll want to subscribe to the Balticon feed. Once the feed is set up, I’ll edit this post and it will go here: feed://swimmingcatstudios.com/category/balticon/feed/
This feed won’t be advertised in iTunes, you’ll need to come here to find it and subscribe. It’s just our little secret. I’ll also be starting another new feed, but there will be more about that, after the cut. [click to continue…]
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Audio Drama,
Balticon 46,
Master Feed,
Panels,
Podcast,
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Swimming Cat Studios
Oh, wait, I think that is supposed to be “What I’m doing at Balticon 46!”
No, on second thought, I think I may have gotten it right the first time.
Bit by bit, my schedule for Balticon 46 has come together, and now I am finally ready to share it in all of its titanic glory! And this year really is titanic. Somehow, when I said that I was willing to do up to 3 panels a day, it got interpreted as 3 panels for each day. Yes, I’m doing twelve panels this year! Plus a reading! The worst part? When I looked over the panels to see what I could back out of… I couldn’t find anything. All of my panels are either things I’d already agreed to do, cool subjects, or a chance to branch out into new areas and break out of the “comfort zone”. So, if you want to see where I’ll be at this year’s Balticon, just click the link and get ready to make some notes. There’s a LOT!
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Tagged as:
Audio Drama,
Balticon 46,
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Steampunk,
The Shrinking Man Project,
Voice Work
Today we have another trip on the Wayback Machine! We’re going back just a little over a year from now, to April 20th, 2011. This was right when I first hit the plateau that I’m still struggling with. It also happens to be right before I discovered that I had a blood clot in my right arm. I’m surprised that it took until now for me to begin to wonder if the two are related. I shall have to do some research.
For now, enjoy the show, and a glimpse into the past.
Show notes included below.
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Master Feed,
Podcast,
The Shrinking Man Project,
The Wayback Machine
And, in what seems like a blink of an eye, another week is gone.
But it has been productive. Northern Mist went through editing in what seems like a blink of an eye. I must admit that the editing process was vaguely disappointing. I was expecting more feedback. For once I’m experiencing the desire to continue hammering at a story to polish it further. It has been a new experience. That nagging feeling that says, “I can do better.”
But production schedules will not wait for me. So I have to move forward. [click to continue…]
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Tee Morris,
The Cross of Columba,
The Wayback Machine,
WIP,
Writing
Before I get into the review, I have a confession to make. This review is way, way, WAY over due. Last summer I had written a few reviews of books that I had read and enjoyed immensely. This led to my being approached by several people and asked to do reviews on their books. I quickly went from having no reviews to do to having several to do. At the same time, my voice work exploded. I quickly became overloaded. At the time, I decided that the best way for me to clear the backlog was to focus on one thing, batter at that, and keep at it until it was done. Well, some things went easier than others. And then Life happened. The result is that this review is finally being written some four plus months after it was originally intended to be written.
Free Will (and other compulsions) is the second book in J. Daniel Sawyer’s Antithesis Progression series, which manages to combine science fiction and noir elements into a fascinating future setting. The first book in the series is Predestination (and other games of chance). If you’ve read Predestination and enjoyed it, you’re sure to want to pick up Free Will, and no doubt look forward to the next time J. Daniel Sawyer publishes a book with a short title (and a long and contradictory subtitle). At the time of this writing, Free Will is only available in electronic formats, but is available for Kindle
, Nook, and a variety of other formats via Smashwords.
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Tagged as:
Books,
Goodreads,
Reading
For those of you, yes, both of you, who have wondered about the mysterious project code-named “Northern Mist” that I’ve been working on, I can now reveal a little more about it. I’ve kept quiet pending word from the author who invited me to write in his world that I can begin talking about the story. Well, I haven’t officially gotten that word, but my author has talked about things on his own site, and I don’t see any reason I can’t echo what he has said.
[click to continue…]
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MoPO,
Philippa Ballantine,
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Steampunk,
Tee Morris,
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WIP,
Writing
An interesting thing happened yesterday.
Last week, I got together with the Galley Table crew and we recorded an episode of the Galley Table talking about PayPal’s latest shenanigans in trying to censor online content by threatening to withdraw their services to online booksellers like Smashwords. PayPal’s take on things was that a) they didn’t want their service to be associated with morally questionable content, and b) they were being pressured into it by the credit card companies that they do business with. We called bullshit. The products that PayPal wanted to censor (and worse!) are sold every day in brick and mortar stores using those credit cards. Nobody bats an eye. For that matter, much worse things are sold on e-Bay, PayPal’s parent company, and paid for via PayPal. If PayPal wants to censor content, why not start with e-Bay?
So last week we recorded, and Episode 61 of Galley Table went live yesterday. And do you know what happened?
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Smashwords
It is past time I put out some kind of writing update. Well past time, in fact, since I’ve done a fair amount of writing since the last update, although I haven’t gotten much written lately. The last time I had checked in here about my writing progress, was back on February 26th, over two weeks ago, and at that time I’d written about 1000 words on “Mist”, bringing it up to about 1800 or so words. I followed this up by stealing some time on the ride in to work by writing during the carpool into work for about 300 words a pop. This got “Mist” up to about 2500 words. Not really great progress.
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Tagged as:
Balticon 46,
The Cross of Columba,
WIP,
Writing
, and the place that various fantasy tropes take in the book.
