My annual Christmas story for Escape Pod: Solitary as an Oyster! Television ghost hunters get an odd assignment on Christmas Eve.

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• 00:00:07 J.C. Hutchins, author of 7th Son: Descent, presents ISBW
• 00:00:21 ISBW #137
• 00:00:50 GoTo Meeting Message
• 00:01:39 Congrats to all listeners who finished NaNoWriMo!!! State of the Mur: one project completed and sent to agent, working on short stories, blogging for Storytellers Unplugged (go read the December 6th post on FEAR), had book signing earlier in December.
• 00:04:19 Promo: Erin O’Briant’s podcast novel Glitter Girl
• 00:05:12 Today’s topic: Stop Thinking (confidence and self-motivation: see also Carrie Kei Heim Binas’ blog post, What would you do if you knew you could not fail?)
• 00:13:15 Promo: Friday Fables
• 00:14:16 Interview: Gail Carriger

• pseudonyms
• recommended reading: A Thousand Miles Up The Nile

• 00:38:43 Promo: J.C. Hutchins & the print debut of 7th Son: Descent – serialized novel at BoingBoing, audiobook, and other content also available online.
• 00:40:22 Feedback: developing characters based on real life; starting one’s first foray into fiction writing with a novel; Mur’s recording software; translating RPG concepts into fiction; looking for opinions on Dramatica Pro; NaNoWriMo experiences & keeping one’s writing a secret; listener Paul blogs about NaNoWriMo; advances (don’t quit your day job); iPhones and podcasting; feeling like a writer/like a success; feedback to WorldCon; planning characters for a novel; future answers for copyright questions!; Name That Color (risk of thesaurus-style word overload); “technical” writing in fiction and finding the right balance for level of detail; are writers’ groups worth joining?

In honor of the holiday, I have something nice running at Escape Pod this week. Not sure when it’ll go live, but it’ll be today or tomorrow. [EDIT- it'll be up tomorrow. For now, go listen to the brilliant James Patrick Kelly's story, Candy Art!] But I’ve been feeling subversive and naughty lately, and had some thoughts about It’s A Wonderful Life. Also running through my head is Neil Gaiman’s wonderful 100 word holiday tale, “Nicholas Was,” and so I decided to write my own. So thank you Neil for the inspiration, and thank you Frank Capra for the material.

And Happy Holidays to everyone.

Zuzu’s Bell

Lucifer despairs on the celebration of His birth.

Lucifer stinks with the feces of the hopeless, the wretched. Daily he bathes in the tears of the woebegone; he hopes to find the one moment where He Above overlooks, disregards, forgets. Then it will be Lucifer’s time.

His back twinges with memories of wings long gone. His wings shattered upon striking Earth Below, but his shoulders remember. Always.

But it is this night when the fiery sky opens. Unholy ichor sprays as white wings burst from Lucifer’s back and he looks up to hear the unexpected.

One silver bell.

(Copyright 2009, Mur Lafferty. Some Rights Reserved. BY-NC-ND)

Super special thanks to Rick Stringer of Variant Frequencies for the holiday card PDF!

One thing that’s been awesome about podcasting is I’ve met so many people who are vastly more creative than I am. Several of them have new products out in the past couple of months, and I thought I’d showcase them here – you get great holiday gifts, and my friends get supported. We all win!

Music- I am a huge fan of funny music, also called dementia (after the DJ Dr. Demento), and have been collecting the albums of people like Carla Ulbrich, Throwing Toasters, Devo Spice, and The Great Luke Ski. I was excited when Luke told me about the new MarsCon Dementia three disc album. From the website:

3 years ago we started the MarsCon Dementia Track Fund Raiser CDs, which is set up to raise money to cover the hotel room costs for those acts who are coming in from out of town, as a way to help take care of at least one of the two big costs involved for them to come out and rock the house.

Here’s what we have for this year:

• The Mars Con 2010 Dementia Track Fund Raiser: 3-CD set – $30.00 (An optional MP3 download of all tracks is included with purchase. Price includes shipping)
• The Mars Con 2010 Dementia Track Fund Raiser: MP3 Download Only – $20.00 (Contains all the tracks from the CD version. Length: just under 4 hours)
• We also still have CD & MP3 sets available from 2009, 2008, & 2007’s Fund Raisers.

Speaking of Carla Ulbrich, she recently sent me her new album, Live From Outer Space, which is flat out hysterical. The album as a whole is funny, but the two songs “Duet with a Klingon” and “If I Had The Copyright (on the word f#*%)” make the whole thing worth it.

Books have been coming out, as they seem to keep doing, and they always make fine presents. I can personally vouch for the awesomeness of the following authors:

Courtney Summers: Yeah, that’s right, I’m not only plugging a YA author, but a NON-GENRE author. I’m growing. I read Courtney’s Cracked Up To Be and couldn’t put it down. She writes protagonists that are mean on the surface with depths that are frightening to investigate, but you can’t not. These are not nice protags, and not nice stories, but they’re engrossing. Her new book, Some Girls Are, just came out. I haven’t read it, but if it’s as good as Cracked Up To Be, then you should buy it.

(Just realized that this won’t be out till early January. So buy Cracked Up To Be and then get this one next month)

(Speaking of books that are coming out right AFTER Christmas, when you’re returning the five copies of Dan Brown books your family bought you and you’re picking up Courtney’s book, I might recommend the mid-grade book Nanovor: Hacked! which is the project I busted my ass to write last June. It’s out in early January. A fun read. I’m just sayin.)

And if you’re going to get into some kick ass narrative nonfiction, you can’t go wrong with Wil Wheaton. While I don’t know him personally (crudpuppies), I am a fan of his blog and own his books. I love his unabashed voice as he tells his stories; Wil could make me more interested in the story of him getting a beer with a friend than half the fiction I’ve read.

I was going to plug 7th Son by JC Hutchins and Makers by Cory Doctorow, but Hutch one-upped me and put out a Holiday PDF featuring twelve amazing authors of both fiction and nonfiction. Download this freebie (direct link) and get a sample of 7th Son, Makers, and several other hot books.

Podcasts: And if you’re not looking to buy anything, then may I recommend some festive holiday podcasts? Matt Wallace and Variant Frequencies are podcasting Matt’s novella “Hath a Darkness” set in his brilliantly dark Failed Cities Monologues world in December. And I have the inside word that both the Tor.com podcast and Escape Pod will be running Christmas stories this year (I’m not saying by whom!), so be sure to download those next week. And Grant Baciocco is doing his yearly Advent Calendar video podcast, which is fun and family friendly.

This has been in the works for months, and will finally launch next week:

I will be the host and producer for the upcoming official Tor.com story podcast! We’ll be taking the original fiction published at Tor.com (edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden) and I’ll be cleaning up existing audio narration, narrating, or finding narration myself, plus adding news and discussion from the Tor.com website into the podcast. We’ll be featuring new content one week, and a story from the archives the next, so we’ll eventually work through all the stories on the site. Tor.com features some of the best short stories published today, and I’m honored to be able to bring those to podcast.

We launch this coming Tuesday. (I’ll have RSS links after it launches.)

Stick with me here. This is half tongue-in-cheek, half thoughtful devil’s advocate. It’s pretty clear I think censorship is one of the most offensive things ever.

I just read the fabulous essay (apparently I’m behind the times, as it was written in 2007) on Vonnegut’s Asshole about, well, Vonnegut’s asshole. In short, it tells how a ranging censoring teacher confiscated author Eric Spitznagel’s copy of Breakfast of Champions - mainly because of the drawing of the asshole – and how that made him read the book (when his father bought him his own copy) more carefully than ever to understand just what the teacher was afraid of.

I never had such a kind teacher to push me to read so carefully.

My hometown was small enough to have one grade school. My county was small enough to have one high school. My parents used to joke that the Democrat party was an underground movement in our area. I’m from the Bible Belt. My friends and my pediatrician thought I was going to hell because I didn’t go to church.

And yet I came up against no censorship in school. None. Not even D&D.

I can’t remember how old I was, but I do remember it was before I was in the advanced English classes in high school, but we had to do a book report. None of the books on the list turned me on, and I’d found The Picture of Dorian Gray and thought it sounded interesting. A guy’s picture absorbing all of his evil? AWESOME. Homosexuality an important subplot? Deliciously subversive. Not on the suggestion list? Possible objection! This story had so much promise to make life interesting. I pictured the headlines: YOUNG GIRL CHALLENGES CENSORSHIP — No! Better: THE COUNTRY CHEERS AS PATRIOT GIRL DEFENDS THE FIRST AMENDMENT.

I defiantly told my teacher that I was going to do my report on The Picture of Dorian Gray. She nodded and said fine.

Dammit.

I read it. I enjoyed it. And it held enough of the “weird contemporary shit” that I currently love to write that apparently it influenced my writing. Thanks, Oscar. But I did not have that moment of, “Holy shit, they’re really upset. These books must be powerful. This written word thing is a weapon.”

I’m a writer. Of course I know on an academic level that books are powerful. I can tell you the books that changed my life. But I don’t know on that visceral level, of having to fight and win – or steal – that opportunity to read. The most rebellious thing I did with books was in kindergarten: my school was so small that we had a blended K, 1, and 2 class. I read through the kindergarten reader, then, because I was bored, the first grade reader. When I got caught reading the second grade reader, wedged behind a bookshelf to hide, I got in trouble and wasn’t allowed to read ahead of my grade anymore.

Ah, the days when they really encouraged learning and ambition in school…

Look at it this way- one of the base lessons of any fiction is that conflict drives a story. When things are peaceful and calm, that makes for a boring story. When things are bad, when conflict happens, that’s when people decide change is needed, and they do great things.

I’m not saying deny kids books to protect their fragile little minds and delicate sensibilities. I’m saying deny them books to make them insanely curious and want to read, learn new ideas, and change the world. If we just give them the right to read anything they want, if they have the knowledge of the ages at their fingertips, there’s no way we can build revolutionary minds.

Maybe.

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I Should Be Writing is also sponsored by Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die software!

• 00:00:07 ISBW #136
• 00:00:37 Sponsor message from GoTo Meeting
• 00:01:27 State of the Mur: novel edits are taking priority over NaNoWriMo.
• 00:03:40 Promo:Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die software
• 00:04:49 Main topic: For parents. Priorities, being a writer, being a success, being a role model, and following your dream.
• 00:13:43 Promo: J. Daniel Sawyer and Book 2 of The Antithesis Progression: Free Will (and Other Compulsions)
• 00:14:55 Interview with J. Daniel Sawyer
• 00:30:13 Promo: The Metamor City Podcast
• 00:31:54 Interview with Chris Lester: visit him at ChrisLester.org or find him on Twitter
• 00:52:47 Promo: Digital Magic
• 00:53:45 Interview with Pip Ballantine

Detailed show notes provided by Carrie Kei Heim Binas

Chaos. The battle. What happens after the battle.

It’s been a hell of a ride. Thank you for your support.

There are tons of pithy statements regarding actions and words: Show, don’t tell. If you’re gonna talk the talk, then walk the walk. But the best phrase I discovered was in Melanie Rawn’s sunrunner series where the queen admonished her son that if he has to remind people he’s a prince, he’s obviously not much of one.

I only rarely participate in Twitter’s Follow Friday. For the non-twitter users, you post on Friday your favorite people to follow, spreading the word around. It’s flattering and nice, but honestly I don’t see my follow numbers spike on a Friday, so I’m not sure how effective it is. For the hell of it, last Follow Friday I looked at the #ff hashtag to see what strangers were saying. I was astonished to see several people say “please follow me.” For one thing, only people who a) follow them, and b) look at the Follow Friday hashtag will see their plea. For another thing, they give you no incentive to do so. Do they really want me to follow them out of pity?

The way you get people to follow you is to a) follow people and b) write tweets worthy of others’ interest. That’s about it.

I recently went through my list of followers and added a bunch that looked legit, for the hell of it, just to see how the conversation would change. I was surprised to realize that most of my new followers were “Social Media Experts” who tweeted only about social media and were utterly sterile and vapid. (Yeah, I know several people who’ve been complaining about social media douchebags, but I didn’t really grok what they were talking about till now.)

It hit home again. You don’t need to tell people you’re an expert. Do expert-level work. You don’t need to SAY you are king. You’re just king. You don’t SAY “follow me on Twitter!” You make content worth following. This applies everywhere: twitter, blogging, writing, movies: anywhere there are experts.

Beware the person who says they’re king. If they’re known more for their boasting than for what they’re boasting about, don’t listen to them. If they have to remind you how awesome they are, instead of showing you constantly with their content and their actions, then walk away. Look to the people who are doing, not talking. That’s where you’ll find the kings.

This episode is longer than usual as our heroes and their sort-of allies head into the Dark to see what they can find there.