Random Bits and Links of Potential Interest + Ranting Goodness

Thanks for the fan art!
Thanks to everyone who has been coming to this blog and thanks Tobias Buckell for actually paying attention to all the times your name pops up on the net and dropping by to leave a comment. That was really cool. And yes I will continue to listen to your Podcast sessions!

Now for some other stuff here. I’ve had a lot of thoughts going through my head lately about this blog and about WISB. One of my thoughts involves this newfangled thing called Podcasting. TW has been putting together a Podcast for the site. I don’t know why they thought of doing this, but more power to them. The idea got me thinking about Podcasts and I started Googling them. I had already heard of I Should Be Writing and The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy (which I am listening to now and catching up on), and happened to find this one I previously mentioned called Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing. I thought for a moment that Podcasts were just these dorky things that idiots did that didn’t really amount to anything, and I was completely and thankfully wrong. I’m hooked. It started with Adventures and moved on to Survival Guide and will move to others as well. So, my first idea was this whole Podiobook thing. Podiobooks are basically just audiobooks but in Podcast format. Some damn good authors have done it this way (John Scalzi for example, and I’m sure others too), and I thought of turning WISB into one. This is still only a thought. I don’t know if I’ll ever do it, but it’s such an interesting idea and something that might be a lot of fun. One of the things holding me back is the fact that WISB is young adult fantasy. I would want people to play the various voices of the characters–perhaps some people tripling up–because I certainly could not do a Triska.
The other idea involves WordPress. I’ve been with Blogger for almost a year now, but so many writers are going to WordPress because it is such an easy system with a lot of features that Blogger doesn’t have yet, not normally anyway. I don’t know if I’ll move. I’ve noticed that WordPress tends to have more down time than Blogger, but when I look at the features I can use in the standard templates it is somewhat overwhelming.

I’ve also got some links of interest.
The first is something called Literature Map, which I may or may not have linked before. I’m not entirely sure how it works because I’ve only fiddled around putting author’s names in, but give it a whirl. It gives you authors that might be similar to your entry. For an idea of how amazing William Gibson is, there isn’t a name that really sits close to him on that site. The central idea is that the closer a name is to someone, the more likely you are to like that author in comparison to your original selection. Check it out. I’ve enjoyed it and maybe you’ll find a new author you like!

The second link for today is this thing called AutoCrit. Now, I cannot say for certain how well it really works from a literary perspective, but I did enjoy using the free function for it just to see the percentage of usage in some of my writing. Give it a shot. I’m curious how helpful it is to other users. I found it rather interesting and intend to make some use of the free function for a while and perhaps I’ll try the full function some day (which isn’t free of course).

That’s all for today. Another chapter should be going up tomorrow I think.