I had fun recording last night’s episode - or rather, recording this Thursday’s episode last night. It’s going to be a short one, but a good one. And I’ll make it up to you next week with a nice long episode.

I spent my weekend at The NC Writer’s Network conference where I was speaking on blogging and podcasting in relation to self-publishing. Cause that’s what this is, you know; podcasting is self-publishing. Which is funny, cause in old media self-pub is sad, it’s vanity press, it’s terrible. In new media it’s exciting and ground breaking. Maybe because you’re giving it away, maybe because it’s so easy to get it into people’s hands. Still, the bottom line is the same: the reader chooses what’s good and what’s bad. It’s your decision, not an agent’s, not a publisher’s, not a book distributor, not the clerk at the book store who decides to turn you cover-out instead of spine-out. They say new media is letting authors have more choices than ever, but we need to remember that the power lies in your hands: you, the reader/listener, decides who rises and who falls. And I’m so damn grateful for your time and enthusiasm in regards to this book.

We’ve had a slew of art and photos lately! Listener Joe Mieczkowski drove up to the conference yesterday to see my panel, which was awesome because I finally had a friendly face in the audience. Everyone was very nice at the conference, don’t get me wrong, but I was clearly the WEIRD SF AUTHOR, which was starting to grate on me - what I write ain’t literary. Joe mentioned doing exactly what my Creative Commons license encourages, which is printing out the PDF and handing it out during his NaNoWriMo write-ins, and to prove it he later sent me some pics (see above, and our photo page).

Jared Axelrod, the creative machine, has even more icons for us (Wanda’s icon, if she’d have one, would be the diner logo, and I’m giving a sneak peek at the logos for two upcoming heroes, the heroine Heretic and the hero Tattoo Devil), as do Michael Spence (in response to Scott Breakall’s “Keepsie’s Got Me!” icon) and Brian Mahony. (images are large for resizing)