Archive for the 'Podcasts' Category
March 14th, 2013 by jdsawyer
It is with great 
pride that I announce the release of my short novel Ideas, Inc., which Alasdair Stuart of…well, everywhere…called “Effortlessly funny, cheerfully dark, and tremendously strange” before he went on to say a whole lot more in this amazing review in SFX.
Like the shorter Lantham novels, this is a story designed to give you a rip-roaring, white-knuckle adventure with plenty of laughs and scares in a single, breathless evening. Of course, you’re free to take longer reading it, but I warn you: Once you pick it up you won’t want to put it down.
Available now in paperback
And in ebook through Smashwords, Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and a few other places as well.
The author of Suave Rob’s Double-X Derring-Do brings you a farce of the tradition of P.G. Wodehouse and Douglas Adams.
Best friends Caleb and Lenny hate each other. Stranded in the middle of upstate New York with two flat tires, one spare, no cell reception, and no idea what to do, they figure they’re pretty much screwed. Fortunately, they broke down right in front of a place that deals in ideas. For the special one-time fire-sale price of seventeen bucks, they can get a pack of seven completely original, brand-new, ultra-premium, never-before-used ideas. But will it get them out of trouble before they’re forced to talk to each other again?
Find out in this hilarious all-night adventure yarn that reveals the terrible truth behind the worldwide pigeon cabal!
Pick your poison, watch your back, and remember: the next bright idea just might get you killed.
Read the first chapter free here as a EPUB or PDF.
September 20th, 2012 by jdsawyer
If you’re just joining this abomination-in-progress, I recommend starting back at Day 1, where you will find the rationale (such as it is) for this madness.
Day 5
First Tuesday in quite a while where I haven’t been cloistered with other writers doing writerly things. Feels vaguely dirty. Decided to atone by indulging in an unnatural act involving two bottles of club soda, one plate of shellfish, and a willow tree. Managed to escape in time to avoid impertinent questions raised by a neighbor.
Started recording session by creating graph for tracking progress, am dismayed to discover that I’m only 15000 words in so far. Decide to deliberately break day up into 1.5hrs on/1.5hrs off sessions to keep voice fresh and rested, aiming for a 25000 word day. Began recording 11am, finished final shift at 10pm. Total words recorded: 25468. Rock!
Decided to celebrate with excursion to hot tub. Nearly fell asleep. Startled awake by strange gathering of neighborhood felines exhibiting pack hunting behavior. Fifteen of them surrounded the tub and started mewling in a distinctly predatory manner. Effected heroic escape by leaping out over one, rolling on the concrete, running naked into the house, and returning armored with soggy shorts and t-shirt (as had forgotten to dry self) and did mighty battle with towel that I had, foolishly, left out of reach of the tub. Sustained only minor injuries, to hands and feet. Suspect I may have damaged voice by mewling profanity in cat-eese. Ended night by retiring to living room with large scotch and BBC mystery shows.
Stop By tomorrow, for The Tale of the Croaking Director
September 18th, 2012 by jdsawyer
This is the third installment in the Free Will Studio Diary. To catch up on the ongoing adventure, start here.
Day 4
Monday. Original ambition to do 25,000 words in a day thwarted by a conspiracy of other folks wanting to use the house. One fellow in particular took a bit of convincing, but thankfully managed to avoid an encounter with the police while burying the body underneath the spice garden out back. Unfortunately, presence of corpse attracted neighborhood cats for a meowing orgy, ruining the peacefulness of the aural environment–cannot help but think I’d have been better off letting the guy read his book in peace.
Fortunately, I had unexpected company today as partner opted to call in sick due to virulent allergy to bureaucracy. Seized opportunity to do massive (and massively overdue) schedule management rap session. Massive paramilitary assault on office supply store netted a lifetime supply of dry-erase markers and only one bullet wound–huzzah!
Managed to quiet down neighborhood cats by judicious application of potassium cyanide and salmon, which meant that I didn’t have to thaw any dead cow for the evening’s barbecue. Hot tubbing and astrophotography followed dinner, and then finally some peace and quiet, during which over 10k words of Free Will spewed forth into the microphone. Downside: voice out of shape, and now cannot talk. And still not done.
September 17th, 2012 by jdsawyer
This is the second post in an ongoing series detailing my week in a borrowed recording studio. The previous entry can be found here.
Day 3
Day 3: Spent morning imprisoned in a church, forced to document an archaic bonding ceremony due to filial obligation. Managed to escape without acquiring a new soul–go me! On the downside, contracted migraine due to excessive photography under direct sunlight. Upon emerging from cave, recorded lunar chase sequence and Presidential standoff–total audio now stands at four hours. Should pass the 100 page mark (of 750 pages) tomorrow or Tuesday. Back in the groove, have five hours of recording scheduled for tomorrow. I can hear the music and the voices again–podcasting beckons me once again.
Come back tomorrow to learn what happens when I try to record 25000 words in a single day…
September 17th, 2012 by jdsawyer
One of the dubious features of life in an apartment is that you’re at the mercy of the folks who live around you when it comes to noise. A couple of years ago, I acquired some new neighbors who, in spite of being thoroughly decent human beings, came equipped with toddlers, and those toddlers have lung and attitude like a soul singer could only dream of.
After about six months of this, I thought to myself: “Self, why don’t you just record at night?”
So, I tried that, only to discover that the kid seemed to have my studio under surveillance. For two years, I haven’t been able to record for more than twenty minutes without having to shut down due to screaming neighbor children. It’s so bad, in fact, that all of AWP–house, studio, and business office–is in the process of buying a building and moving (which also eats up a lot of time).
Meanwhile, the lack of ability to reliably record has been driving me slowly mad–and a friend noticed. Heading out of town for a few weeks, he offered me the use of his library to record in while he’s gone. So, this fall, for three weeks, I’ve got reliable quiet for recording, and just for fun I’m going to keep a diary of things here.
Here’s Day 1:
Day 1: Fought my way past piles of moving boxes to get to the old studio and pack up the equipment rack, recording rig, and mic rig. Upon arrival at [redacted]‘s house, discovered large, fire-breathing cat guarding the door. Deployed emergency stash of anchovies, then realized I had left the key at home.
Obtained entry to house through use of cunning and unscrupulous means acquired during high school adventures in gangland, Brought portable mixing board on the grounds that the big one doesn’t fit in the car. Spent three hours chasing down the noise in the new room and applying acoustical treatments to make it whisper quiet. Finished night by loading script breakouts onto the e-reader, practicing my elocution, and receiving a pedicure from a friendly neighbor. It must be nice to have neighbors that have hobbies that don’t involve squalling infants.
Not a bad first day. Day two, though, is where things really started to heat up.
Day 2: Started laying down tracks today, getting back into the reading groove. Warmed up on the first five chapters of And Then She Was Gone, then shifted to Free Will once I had my eye in. Have decided to devote the studio time to this one until it’s done. Laid down two hours of good narration audio. Waylaid halfway through recording session by rabid realtor demanding emergency meeting, had to brave long canyon full of smoke-breathing steel creatures to make meeting, whereupon was expected to sign away my soul for the fourteenth time during this house hunt. Finished day with no soul, and good audio. I count it as a win.
Tune in tomorrow, when the adventures really heat up!
Edit: The next installment is now available. Find it here.
July 25th, 2012 by jdsawyer
The Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour was my first podcast, and I still get emails asking for new episodes–in fact, I have five unreleased episode at various stages of completion sitting on my hard drive. Unfortunately it’s one that keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the priority list since life has been utterly insane the last couple of years.
However, Richard Carrier was kind enough to point out to me that all the links at the show page are broken. Turns out the old WordPress Podcasting plugin just plum don’t work anymore. Since I’m not going to have time to re-do the site for a couple weeks (or, more likely, a couple months), I’m posting the direct links to all the shows here.
Here we go.
Episodes
Episode 1: The Reprobates Introduce Themselves Download
Episode 2: Molecular Biology 101 with Dr. Zachary Moore Download
Episode 3: Richard Carrier talks Worldviews, Morality, and Naturalism Download
Season 2 Episode 1: Cunning Minx talks Polyamory and Ethical Non-Monogamy
Season 2 Episode 2: Scott Sigler talks Podcast Fiction, Horror, and Guerilla Fiction Writing
Season 2 Episode 3: Greydon Squared talks Skeptical Rap
Season 2 Episode 4: Robert M. Price talks about The Paperback Apocalypse
Season 2 Episode 5: Dr. Zachary Moore talks about the state of the art in cancer research
Season 2 Episode 6: Scott Sigler returns to talk about his book Nocturnal
Season 2 Episode 7: Dr. Robert M. Price talks Lovecraft and Horror
Season 2 Episode 8: Dr. Michael Shermer discusses evolutionary economics
Season 2 Episode 9: I discuss podcast fiction with fellow authors Seth Harwood and J.C. Hutchins
Season 3 Episode 1: Philippa Ballantine and Tee Morris cause their share of trouble
Season 3 Episode 2: Mur Lafferty on Heaven
Season 3 Episode 3: Richard Carrier talks Ancient Science contra Rodney Stark
Season 3 Episode 4: Richard Carrier continues his talk about Ancient Science and Rodney Stark
For those of you who haven’t heard ‘em yet…enjoy! 
June 14th, 2012 by jdsawyer
By popular request, here are the Rules of Scotch, as defined in Down From Ten. According to Carol in the book a good scotch:
1) Must be unpolluted (served neat–no water or ice)
2) It must be individualistic (single malt only–no blended scotch)
3) Must be bold (i.e. distinctive flavor character)
4) Must be as mature as you can possibly afford, and under no circumstances may it be aged fewer than 12 years.
5) Follow these rules, and you will never have an unpleasant experience, except through overindulgence.
Of course, in the book, the entire thing is couched in an elaborate and highly disturbing dirty joke which makes it much, much more memorable.
Stripped of the joke, though, they are a good guide for choosing good scotches in the absence of other evidence. More advanced Scotch drinkers know that there are some spectacular 10-years out there, but there are also some really awful ones. The same is true for blended scotch–some of them are wonderful, most are mediocre, and a few are god-awful. 12-years and up, single-malt with a good sense of itself is the most reliable way to go.
Enjoy!
Thanks to Puck Malmud for the prod on this one
May 16th, 2012 by jdsawyer
If you’re not the kind of obsessive geek I am, you might have missed that yesterday the first major accomplishment in de novo life extension through gene therapy got published. This project has been going on for a while, but up until yesterday, all therapies and attempted engineering have either caused cancer or other degenerative diseases, or just flat not worked in any significant way that’s applicable to humans, because they relied on flipping genetic switches that evolution flipped for us millions of years ago. Now, though, a one-shot gene therapy has been discovered that that successfully increases life-span and health-span by 13-25% in adult mice, and it’s a kind of therapy that humans can actually benefit from (i.e. it does something that our biology doesn’t already do for us).
Reading the (above linked) article late last night got me thinking along lines I’ve posted on before. We’ve all started saying things like “we’re living in the future” because we’ve now got toys that look (and sometimes act) like tricorders, and we have video conferencing and Internet access and other cool stuff, but the world around us often feels quite prosaic, if tumultuous and threatening. And, really, most of the stuff we look at as “new and shiny” are incremental, rather than revolutionary, improvements. They’re welcome and they’re fun, but do they really change the game all that much?
Well, last night I made a list of revolutionary developments in technology (and its applications), business, and science in the last four years. Some look minor, others are hard to wrap one’s head around. In no particular order, here they are:
Artificial Life — life forms invented from scratch by humans. One of the current application projects involves making biological computers.
Lab-grown organs (this first one is actually from 2006, but it’s still way cool) and printable organs
Vaccines manufactured in goat’s milk
Spider silk engineered into goat’s milk for enviro-friendly fibers and body armor.
DuPont begins the process of transitioning from petrochemicals to bio-engineered plastics and chemicals — This is one of a handful of big things that needs to happen to end the fossil fuel era. Details scattered throughout this lecture.
Private space tourist flights — Now open for business.
Private space flight — SpaceX makes the first supply delivery to the international space station later this month.
Asteroid mining — Now open for business. A moderate asteroid contains over a trillion dollars worth of Iron, Nickel, Gold, Platinum, Titanium, and Rare Earth elements (which won’t be rare once the payloads start arriving). The maturation of this industry means 1) Serious reductions in the costs of spaceflight (due to ice extraction and the creation of orbital fuel stations, thus reducing the water and fuel spacecraft have to carry out of the gravity well), 2) The abandonment of terrestrial mines for everything but coal, salt, and similar minerals (no more open-pit mines and their environmental, economic, and human costs), 3) The radical increase in the material wealth of the entire planet as the materials that our everyday tools and luxuries are made of plummet in price, opening up new opportunities for people all over the world to invent new things with materials previously available only to the very wealthy, 4) A serious reduction in greenhouse gasses and demand for coal as smelting and refinement are carried out in space (better and cheaper) instead of on earth, 5) As a side-effect, the creation of an orbital power generation infrastructure that can create surplus electricity (mostly solar) for sale back to Terrestrial markets.
The Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the world’s most advanced ground car, the research for which is already spawning revolutionary changes to the world’s automotive industry, to the advantage of both consumers and the health of the environment, such as the following item:
The Volkswagen XL1 — A ~300 Miles-Per-Gallon car that hits the market in Britain late this year. Initially planned as a limited test marketing, the next decade will see more and more of this kind of thing, even if the XL1 doesn’t achieve high-volume production status.
The first successful test of the X-51 Waverider, a scramjet capable of going from Sydney Australia to Los Angeles in 90 minutes. This was followed shortly by the unveling of a competing prototype, the Zero Emissions HyperSonic Transport.
The first efforts to build the space elevator are finally underway — they may not succeed, but even if they fail, it should be an instructive failure. Check it out here.
First earth-like extrasolar planets are discovered
Pollution control and toxic cleanup through mushrooms has now been discovered and is beginning to be adopted.
And, the one that started us off today:
Mouse lifespan extended 25% with a single genetic treatment after the mouse is already mature.
—
This is just what I could come up with off the top of my head. It doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what I’ve seen and read about in the last four years. It’s gonna be socially uncomfortable dealing with the move to abundance materially, socially, and in terms of lifespan, but holy shit, the future snuck in the back door while we were all worried about mortgages.
April 6th, 2012 by jdsawyer
Okay, here we go. I’ve got the major and minor open roles collated for Free Will. If you’re interested in being a part of it, download the following PDFs, look over the information, and contact me about the roles you’re interested in.
Major Roles
Minor Roles
It’s already shaping up to be a great production. Our cast already contains such folks as:
Stephen H. Wilson
Miss Kalendar
Tee Morris
Philippa Ballantine
Christiana Ellis
Chris Lester
Nobilis Reed
Scott Sigler
and many, many more…
Casting calls on Monday will post for the Clarke Lantham books.
April 3rd, 2012 by jdsawyer
So, as many of you might have noticed, we occasionally produce audiobooks through ArtisticWhispers Productions. Those of you that have may have also noticed that we haven’t put a new one out (or, at least, anything resembling a complete one) in about two years.
The hiatus is over. As of this past weekend, the following books have all moved out of the pre-production stage and into the production stage.
The books currently in production are:
Throwing Lead
And Then She Was Gone
A Ghostly Christmas Present
Smoke Rings
Free Will
Being In Production
Being “In Production” means that the project is currently being recorded. Some bits of pre-production might go on concurrently, for example…
Casting
All of the fiction books will be full-cast productions in the classic AWP style. Here are the numbers on the roles available for each book (bearing in mind that, since this is audio, actors can double, triple, or quintiple up on roles):
And Then She Was Gone needs 27 roles filled. 9 of these have five lines or fewer.
A Ghostly Christmas Present needs 14 roles filled, 4 of these have five lines or fewer
Smoke Rings needs 21 roles filled. About half of these are roles with fewer than five lines.
Free Will needs 118 roles filled. About half of these are roles with fewer than five lines.
What Happens Now
Starting later this week, I will spool out the open casting calls. These books will be available commercially, so if you wish to participate, in addition to having the ability to record clean audio and (for the more involved roles) the willingness to take live-direction, you must be willing to sign a contract detailing the release of your voice for commercial purposes and entitling you to payment.
Payment for these books, because they’re the first commercial round, will be on a deferred fee basis + royalties. Because payment is involved, you will need to include your Tax ID number on the contract and, when payment comes due, fill out the relevant tax forms.
Watch This Space
These are the first five of an anticipated 9 productions this year, and there will be a similar number next year. I’m looking to build a stable of actors I can work with medium-to-long term.
What Does This Mean for the Podcast?
The podcast returns with Free Will (rebooted) in late spring/early summer. I’m aiming for Balticon, but might overshoot or undershoot by as much as three weeks, depending on how briskly casting goes.
Free Will will be approximately 60 episodes long, and will start out as a bi-weekly podcast, ramping to weekly once the entire production is wrapped. As such, it will run for 13-19 months before we reach the end. Since such a long story full of cliffhangers will drive some of you around the bend, the full audiobook will be available for purchase by DragonCon, if not before.
Additionally, the initial chapters of the other books will drop in the feed so that you who subscribe can hear what’s going on in the productions that aren’t delivered to you on the feed.
And, of course, Dealing In will return, as I sense we’ll have quite a lot to talk about as the story unfolds.
Future novels will podcast after Free Will wraps, but there will always be more content available than what’s going through the ‘cast. You all have spoken loudly, and we here around the Bay have heard your cries.
Stay tuned! More in a couple days.
Update: Free Will casting call has posted. Find it here
