I'm pleased to report that a much-polished and improved version of my science fiction short story Ad Eyes is available now for free in Foil & Phaser'sDivide and Conquer eBook anthology of science fiction and fantasy!
Ad Eyes is a disturbing story the war for advertising attention taken to scary new heights, as Terry finds himself fighting to take his eyes off of just about every ad he comes across in his daily life.
The anthology contains a number of other fantastic works of sci-fi and fantasy as well. It's the product of Foil & Phaser's NaNoWriMo collaborative workshop effort, and all of the collected stories are well worth your time and attention.
As I've been posting The Ship of the Unforgotten to Wattpad, I've come to realize I never created a cover for it way back when I originally wrote it. I'm correcting that oversight now. Here's a preview of the very early work-in-progress.
This time around I'm not using any externally sourced elements, this is all my own work from scratch.
Okay, enough dithering around and procrastinating on the launch. Here's episode 1. I've gotten lots of feedback to make it better than it was when I started, and I hope to get a lot more now that so many more of you can hear it, but I'll have to apply those new lessons to future audio books.
This was both a terrifying and kind of awesome project to work on, and I hope you enjoy listening to it!
Speaking of future audio books, I'd love some feedback on what stories you'd like narrated next. Determination is a good candidate, being another short one, and I could always return to the Prices stories if you want to get into some steampunk. I could tackle some of the longer stuff like The Ship of the Unforgotten, but stories that long will have to be broken up across many episodes.
Take a listen; it's pretty quick, a little over 7 minutes long, and let me know what you think!
This SHOULD be going out onto iTunes as well, thanks to Squarespace, but being a total newbie to all of this, I have no idea how long that's going to take. As I did with the episode 0 preview, I'll be putting this up on YouTube too.
I love living in the future. I really do. One of my favorite things about this future we’re in is how huge geek culture has become and how it continues to explode with great content, like Felicia Day’s brand new Geek and Sundry channel over on YouTube.
The Sword and Laser
Geek and Sundry first came to my attention by way of The Sword and Laser, a fantastic fantasy & sci-fi book club/audio podcast/GoodReads forum hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt. Some weeks ago, they announced that they were bringing S&L to video as part of Geek and Sundry, so of course I had to check it out.
Sadly, The Sword and Laser won’t be airing on the G&S channel for another couple of weeks, but G&S itself launched today and they’ve got a bunch of other shows that are well worth checking out.
I’m the One That’s Cool
Firstly, Geek and Sundry is Felicia Day’s channel, so you’d better bet The Guild is represented. They’ve gotten together and made another music video, this one about the injustices many geeks had to endure in their formative years at the hands of “cooler” peers, and the cultural reversal that has left geeks increasingly popular lately. It’s a fun song and video, though by far the most serious of the releases they’ve done to date, dealing as it does with issues of bullying and abuse.
The Flog
Felicia has another show, this one a weekly solo effort. The Flog debuted today, where she talks about stuff she’s into, highlights cool things she’s found around the internet lately, and goes out and tries things she’s always been interested in, sometimes for the first time. In her debut episode she goes out to learn the basics of blacksmithing. Now I’m no stranger to blacksmithing and crafting in general—I wield a mean pick in Minecraft—but she was doing this in the real world for once, not in a video game. She forged a real iron fire poker, and has it up for auction to benefit the FDNY Foundation. Pretty awesome stuff.
Table Top
Felicia got Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Eureka & The Big Bang Theory) to host a show all about table top gaming. Yes, they still make games you don’t play on computers or consoles! This one is the longest of the shows I sampled at half an hour plus individual one to two minute interviews with each guest player afterward. It’s well worth the investment.
For the first episode, Wheaton has guests Grant Imahara (Mythbusters), Jenna Busch (Girl Meets Lightsaber) and Sean Plott (Day[9]TV) on set to play Small World, a German-style fantasy board game that’s something like Civilization meets Settlers of Catan with some Dungeons & Dragons thrown into the mix. You watch them play, get a feel for the game and how much fun it can be, get some instruction on the rules and some tricks for good play. It looks like it’s going to shape up to be a really fun show. It’s supposed to air every two weeks, alternating on Fridays with The Sword and Laser.
Dark Horse Motion Comics
The last show I checked out today was Dark Horse Motion Comics, where they take actual comics and give them just enough animation to kick them off the page and into the video realm, with voice acting, sound effects and ambient background music to present the stories in a whole new light. Whether this one is for you will depend a great deal on whether you’re into the comic being adapted; this first one, The Secret, is maybe not my cup of tea, but I could easily appreciate how the format would (and will) appeal on a series that I’d be more inclined to follow.
Geek and Sundry isn’t the only such channel to pop up. Chris Hardwick, aka the Nerdist, has something similar in the works. I’ll undoubtedly be checking that out shortly too.
