Podcasts about Girl Genius

We Will Miss Val. 3-Toed Sloth. Morons in the News.   Talkback Caller. Sunday Night Football. Everyone Needs a Laugh.   Talkback Callers. Can You Believe This? Val Kilmer.   From the Vault. Reasons People Don’t Go to the Movies.

In this week's episode, we take a look at how research can both help and hinder writers, and offer tips for effective research for fiction. This coupon code will get you 25% off DRAGONTIARNA: OMNIBUS ONE at my Payhip store: DRAGONOMNI25 The coupon code is valid through April 14th, 2025. So if you need a new book to read for spring, we've got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 245 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 28th, 2025, and today we are looking at some of the challenges of research for writers. Before we get into that, we'll do Coupon of the Week, an update my current writing and audiobook projects, and then Question of the Week.   First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Dragontiarna: Omnibus One at my Payhip store, and that is DRAGONOMNI25. This coupon code will be valid through April the 14th, 2025. So if you need a new ebook to read for spring, we have got you covered.   Let's have an update on my current writing projects. I'm currently 70,000 words into Shield of Battle, which I believe will put me on chapter 16 of 24, so I'm about two thirds of the way through the rough draft. I'm still hoping to have it out towards the end of April, if all goes well. I am 7,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption, which will be the sequel to Ghost in the Assembly, and hopefully that will be out sometime after Shield of Battle.   In audiobook news, recording is underway for both Shield of Deception and Ghost in the Assembly. Brad Wills will be recording Shield of Deception and Hollis McCarthy will be recording Ghost in the Assembly. So I am looking forward to both those audiobooks and that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects.   00:01:25 Question of the Week   Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question, do you read comics books or graphic novels, Marvel, DC, indie manga, whatever? No wrong answers, obviously, including “I don't read comics.”   Ryan says: I don't read comic books, they just don't appeal to me. I prefer world building through writing as opposed to images, and I think you don't get the same feel for characters in a comic as you do in a novel.   Justin says: Once upon a time, I did read comics. It's been a long time since I knew of the mainstream comics interested me, sadly. I have read some manga in the last year, but any associated light novel wins handily. There are a few web comics to keep up with. I have bought books and merch from the Foglios for Girl Genius and Tayler for Schlock Mercenary, but even then, it's been years since my last purchase.   Juana says: I love Batman. End of story.   John says: I enjoy graphic novels, mainly for the art. Most recent read was The Wizard of Earthsea graphic novel, which is a true work of art published just this month.   Randy says: Marvel/DC stuff, not much anymore. I can sit down and read Peanuts, Pearls Before Swine, etc. collections anytime, probably not the “comics” you meant.   Jenny says: Rat Queens! So good!   Gary says: I don't read comics.   Bob says: Nope. Used to devour DC and Marvel as a kid. Wish I still had some of them. Probably worth big bucks now.   Tom says: I used to be a Marvel Zombie. Seriously, I have 20-30 long boxes filled with comics. I had to kick the habit though. Nowadays it's mostly just a few TV show based series. Would love to read some Frostborn graphic novels though!   And finally, Tracy says: I don't read comics.   For myself, I agree with many of the commenters where my answer is I don't read comics. It's not out of snobbery or disdain for the art form. It just doesn't speak to me or hold my interest. Of course not all art speaks to all people at all times. I was curious about this topic because I see people discussing comic books online all the time, but apparently the industry is in bad shape financially with multiple bankruptcies and closures and so forth. So I was wondering if comics were kind of more of a vintage art form that is less popular with younger generations as the older generations start to die off. But you never know. Things always are on a wheel and come around again.   00:03:36 Main Topic of the Week: Writing Adjacent Activities: Research   So now back to our main topic or to start with our main topic, research challenges for writers. As I mentioned two episodes ago, I'm working on a new podcast series about what I call writing adjacent activities. What do I mean by this? I'm talking about tasks that seem like they're part of the writing process but really belong in a different category. These tasks are important, but they can also be a pitfall if you spend too much time on them or don't use that time correctly.   In this series, we will focus on a few of these tasks and how they can benefit or hinder your writing process, even though they seem like good uses of time and may be beneficial. In this episode, we'll talk about research for fiction writing. How much research is necessary and how does research help? When does it get to the point where it becomes a pitfall instead of an asset? What are some things that work well for me when researching matters for my books?   First of all, why should writers even have to research in order to write a work of fiction? Why can't we just make up details since the characters and the plot are also made up? Why research?   Research can help provide crucial information for the plot. For example, of a spy novel set in World War II focuses on the Canadians battling the British is inaccurate to the point of farce. Knowing which countries were Axis and which were Allies is an important piece of research that should have been done for that story in advance of writing it. There's a British TV series called The Goes Wrong Show about a group of inept actors putting on bad plays that's quite funny, and one of the episodes has them putting on a play that is widely criticized for its lazy historical research, which includes such things as Winston Churchill being a prime minister during the Vietnam War. In the show, of course, this is played for comedy as part of how bad the actors are, but you don't want to do this in real life.   Research prevents factual errors that can distract readers. Some of the biggest examples of this are military terminology, the British peerage system, and information about weapons like guns. All of these things have very distinct details that avid readers in a certain genre will notice and be upset about if they're incorrect. You'll notice that successful thriller writers tend to put a lot of time into researching and lovingly describing various pieces of military hardware in their books.   For a genre like historical romance, the distinction seems unimportant to a modern American, but to a debutante in Regency England, the difference between marrying a baron and a duke is immense and the titles can't be used interchangeably in a work of historical fiction. For example, the duke and baron would be addressed differently and enter a room in a different order, but more importantly, in a status conscious marriage market like the debutante season, a duke would be a highly sought after potential husband while a baron might be less of a catch, especially if the family is not so wealthy. This detail changes the characters and plots completely. To return to the firearm examples, for one of the famous errors that sometimes new writers do is a character puts a silencer on a revolver, which doesn't work because you can't silence a revolver. Much of the noise comes from the rear of the weapon when it's fired in addition to the muzzle flash and muzzle noise, so there are little details like that (both for weapons and the British peerage system) that you do need to watch out for.   Research can give you ideas or add depth through details. For example, someone writing a romance novel about two rival managers in a theme park could discover that this particular theme park has an intricate underground system of tunnels that includes storage areas and staff break rooms. The writer realizes this would give good opportunities for the characters to have a conversation or confrontation in a more private place than outside of a busy ride. What are some good sources for research? Not all research is going to the library and looking at books that haven't been checked out in 10 years or so. Sometimes research for writing fiction is about checking or learning basic facts like street names, what the word is for cat in Spanish, or what a certain chain store was named in 2008. Making these details up only makes sense if the places and languages are completely fictional. Where more academic and in depth research comes in is when a high level of informational accuracy is required by genre convention, like in thrillers, historical fiction, a legal drama, or a medical thriller.   One of the criticisms of the relatively recent Disney Plus show She Hulk was that although She Hulk's profession is a lawyer and she spends all of her time doing lawyer things, none of the writers had a background in law and it seemed like their legal advisor was quite hands off in their approach. They tried to write around it instead, and the results were disappointing to both fans of the source material and new viewers because as I've often said before, you don't need to be totally accurate, but it needs to feel accurate. Anyone watching the show would know that the American legal system works nothing like the way it's portrayed, not even in the abstract.   One of the additional complaints about the show is that they missed the chance to showcase the character by barely showing them doing any actual work or to only show it as a farce, making She Hulk seem more frivolous and unlikable without her defining trait of being a really good lawyer. Trying to write around factual information is usually not the best solution, and it could hurt the reader's feeling of immersion or cause them just to feel annoyed.   For genres that require a high level of information accuracy, try starting with the general overview books and then looking at more specific information as needed. You don't need to become an expert in every piece of medieval weaponry to write a historical or a fantasy book, but you do need to know the basics in order to have the characters use them in a convincing way.   As I've said before, I often talk about how verisimilitude is the goal in writing. You need to know and share just enough to make the reader feel convinced and have the characters be able to act in a believable way in the world there inhabiting.   Often writers are advised to use YouTube for research because it's free and usually easy to understand. However, YouTubers usually don't cite their sources and incorrect information often gets reshared this way. That said, it can still be useful. For example, if we go back to our example of the theme park romance novel, the writer could find YouTube footage of what the line looks like for a certain ride without having to go see it in person and determine from the footage if a child could really climb over a railing to escape their parents, for example, if that was one of the plot contrivances the writer wanted to put in the book.   I would strongly recommend you don't use a LLM program like ChatGPT for research, and if you do, you should cross-reference and double check its answers for accuracy because ChatGPT essentially makes stuff up. Unlike a search engine ChatGPT essentially guesses at its answers instead of retrieving them. For example, if you ask ChatGPT who the spouse of one reality star is, it confidently lists her brother as her husband because the names are very frequently paired and they had the same last name, ChatGPT made a guess and that guess was quite wrong. It's also important to note that it's not trained on recent information. It won't, for example, be able to tell you on what date a movie is going to come out in two weeks because it may not have access to that information yet, and it might instead give you the premiere date for previous films or guess at a date.   How much research is necessary and when is it a pitfall instead of an asset? Too much research can keep you from starting to actually write. It's a real temptation if you enjoy research to spend months bogged down in every possible source of information. It's also good to take a step back, look at your book's outline, and determine what's truly needed. When you're writing, you can add a note, “research this” and note about what fact you need to look up and then keep going. It isn't a great idea to stop writing every time you need to look up a specific fact. Doing that can often lead to research spirals that take too much time and then you lose your writing momentum.   Having researched too much can also drag down the plot with a lot of info dumps. We've all encountered books where the writer very clearly put in a lot of research into a very specific topic, so they were going to put all that research into the book, even if it was to the book's detriment. It's natural to want to use as much of your research as possible, but in reality, the only research that is good for the reader is what benefits the plot or adds to the feeling of verisimilitude without stopping the plot in its tracks.   What are some things that have worked for me when researching subjects for my books? Because I write fantasy and science fiction, I tend not to do that much research. Usually it's if I need to look up a specific fact to increase the verisimilitude. I had to do that quite a bit with Silent Order because that's science fiction and therefore a bit more fact-based. So I wanted to make sure I had things like the speed of light in kilometers or the amount of kilometers in a light year, for example, make sure that I had those numbers accurate. However, when I'm writing and there's something I want to look up later, I tend to literally just type “look this up later” and then keep going in the book.   This actually happens quite a bit in the Cloak Games and Cloak Mage series because while that's set in a fantasy setting, that fantasy setting is a version of our own world. I do need to look things up reasonably frequently, like where this town is located or how long you would take to fly from Chicago to Boston, for example. So very often I will just type “look this up later”, and then in the editing process, I will actually look that up and make sure that I have a good information source, not ChatGPT, and then add that fact into the book as necessary.   One thing I would recommend watching out for is that if the entire plot of the book hinges on a certain fact, like for example, say that you have in your book, the entire plot revolves around the fact that on average it takes about seven to eight hours to drive from Milwaukee to Detroit, it's a good idea to look it up and make sure that is actually true. If for example, you, let's talk hypothetically, if you weren't familiar with the geography of the United States and you had the plot being that it takes only three hours to drive from Milwaukee to Detroit, your book will not work because anyone remotely familiar with the American Midwest knows that if you are driving from Milwaukee to Detroit around the southern side of Lake Michigan, it takes at least seven hours and depending on traffic conditions, it can easily go much higher very quickly. So if you do have a fact around which the entire plot of your book hinges, it's a good idea to research that fact first and make sure that's accurate, so you can avoid the scenario where you write the book and then people are laughing at you because you wrote it only takes three hours to drive from Milwaukee to Detroit.   So to sum up, research in fiction is very different from in the academic world, but that doesn't mean that's not important. Like so many things in life, it's all about balance. You don't want to go too far down the research rabbit hole to the detriment of finishing your book, but you do need enough information to maintain verisimilitude, but not an excess of detail that will derail the plot or keep you from finishing the book you want, just enough that it makes sense.   An example for that for me would be one of the plot lines in Cloak of Spears which revolves around nuclear fusion. The book sold pretty well and people liked it, but I did get a email from an expert in nuclear fusion saying that the way I had described things is not actually how nuclear fusion works, and the fact of the matter was that thankfully for that book, it didn't matter because the actual intricacies of how nuclear fusion works is beyond my grasp and frankly beyond the grasp of most people. So I'd included enough verisimilitude to that the book worked for most people, but it was not enough to fool an actual expert in nuclear physics. So that brings me to a Abraham Lincoln quote I remember where he says, “you can fool some of the people some of the time and the rest of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.” And that is true with research and fiction. You'll want to do just enough to get verisimilitude so that you can fool most of the people, but you can't always expect to fool everybody. If you are writing about something which has subject matter experts, you may find that you'll have the subject matter experts writing to you and pointing things out. But what's important is that you do it well enough to fool most of the general audience, if not the subject matter experts.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Special edition! We talked about seeing Girl Genius: Adventures in Castle Heterodyne at PAX West this year. Based on the long running, award winning comic, Rain Games has teamed up with the comic creators to bring it to life as a cool puzzle adventure game. We talk to Kenneth Engelsen, project lead, to hear more … New Overlords Interview: Girl Genius with Kenneth Engelsen of Rain Games Read More » The post New Overlords Interview: Girl Genius with Kenneth Engelsen of Rain Games first appeared on NEW OVERLORDS.

Tonight we're talking to Phil Foglio, co-creator of Girl Genius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_Genius) which is a comic series which has won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story three times, has been nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist and twice for Eisner Awards, and won multiple WCCA awards. Girl Genius has the tagline of "Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!". It follows the main character Agatha Heterodyne through an alternate-history Victorian-style "steampunk" setting. although elements veer from what is usually thought of as steampunk. Kaja Foglio describes it as "gaslamp fantasy" instead to suggest its more fantastic style.Then we hear from Kenny Engelsen, lead developer at Rain Games working on Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne. Girl Genius™: Adventures in Castle Heterodyne is an action-adventure set in a Steampunk interpretation of old Europe. It blends comic-book visuals with a stylized 3D environment. The steampunk inspirations Rain has shown its aptitude for throughout previous games are once again on full and dazzling display. The game takes inspiration from early 3D Zelda titles, as well as classic PlayStation 2-era titles like Ratchet and Clank. It will scratch that itch for Retro-Action and also provides a variety of environmental puzzles and challenges.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4268760/advertisement

Final Day of PAX has come and gone and so the biys have their final round up of the trip with impressions on Super Mario Wonder, Cricket: Jae's Really Peculiar Game, Girl Genius, Umbra Claw and more!

Comedian April Clark and sub cohost Grace Freud (Girl God) join to discuss the downsides of being a child genius and skipping high school, presidential dogs biting people, auditioning for America's Got Talent as a 10 year old, and why counting to 11 must be stopped.  You can watch full video of this episode HERE! Join the Patreon for ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and MORE. Follow April on Instagram & Twitter Follow Grace on Instagram & Twitter See Girl God perform in Chicago on November 5: https://lh-st.com/shows/11-05-2023-girl-god/ Listen to The Girl God Experience podcast here For all other things Girl God, visit: https://girlgod.co/ Get tickets to our live podcast recording in NYC on October 2 here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/694744879637 Follow Gianmarco Soresi on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, & YouTube Subscribe to Gianmarco Soresi's email & texting lists Check out Gianmarco Soresi's bi-monthly show in NYC Get tickets to see Gianmarco Soresi in a city near you Watch Gianmarco Soresi's special "Shelf Life" on Amazon Follow Russell Daniels on Twitter & Instagram E-mail the show at TheDownsideWGS@gmail.com Produced by Paige Asachika & Gianmarco Soresi Video edited by Dave Columbo Special Thanks Tovah Silbermann Original music by Douglas Goodhart Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy Sailor Thursday, Bunheads. This week, Devon recounts her harrowing battle with illness and her recent escapades in Vegas seeing Kelly Clarkson, and Sanrio's ever-present power. They then get into their regular coverage of the eighth episode of Sailor Moon, “The Girl Genius is a Monster: The Brainwashing Cram School of Horror” where they continually improv their new hit song, "Cram for Me!" and Beau even gets emotional on mic! Gasp!Follow us on social media, Bunheads!Sailor T insta

Bli med i episode 85, hvor vi snakket om: Metal Jesus Rocks får se på Sega Dreamcasts Development kitGirl Genius, en web tegneserie som startet i 2002 får et spill fra det Norske spillselskapet Rain GamesEr Mr.X i Norge enda? hvem vet. Ikke han i alle fall! I hvert fall ikke for 20 år siden!og i år igjen kommer hvithaien til Norge!Ukens klipp er om taco! Og etterpå tar vi for oss hvordan vi selv spiser taco! Her er en link til vår Discord:https://discord.gg/PtGQXPxHer er en link til vår Facebook side:https://www.facebook.com/groups/1354995248349403/Ha en flott uke! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's show is sponsored by Dreamhost! If you want to own and control your own work with a website, Dreamhost can help you get started.Phil Foglio joins us to discuss his long and storied career as an independent cartoonist! Best known for co-creating "Girl Genius"  with his wife Kaja, Phil talks about his breakout hit, "What's New with Phil and Dixie," his milestone NSFW series, "XXXenophile," developing the Gaslamp Fantasy genre, and the philosophies that have helped him navigate several decades as an independent comics creator.Fun Fact! Phil, Dave, and Brad are all nominated for the National Cartoonist Society's Silver Reuben Award for Best Online Longform Comic!ON THIS WEEK'S SHOW...Special Guest Phil FoglioComicLab LIVE at San Diego Comic ConUPDATE: Google DomainsYou get great rewards when you join the ComicLab Community on Patreon$2 — Early access to episodes$5 — Submit a question for possible use on the show AND get the exclusive ProTips podcast. Plus $2-tier rewards.Brad Guigar is the creator of Evil Inc and the author of The Webcomics Handbook. Dave Kellett is the creator of Sheldon and Drive.

In 1923, Barbara began her most extensive project yet – a complete novel. Finally, in 1926 – after many drafts and a house fire that destroyed one of them – she finished the book. She was only 12 years old. But Barbara's story had no ending. There was no final chapter because, to this day, no trace of her has ever been found.Check out our updated website and sign up for our newsletter at AmericanHauntingsPodcast.comWant an episode every week, plus other awesome perks and discounts? Check out our Patreon pageFind out merch at AmericanHauntingsClothing.comFollow us on Twitter @AmerHauntsPod, @TroyTaylor13, @CodyBeckSTLFollow us on Instagram @AmericanHauntingsPodcast, @TroyTaylorgram, @CodyBeckSTLThis episode was written by Troy TaylorProduced and edited by Cody BeckSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/american-hauntings-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

As if winning the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee and holding three Guinness World Records weren't already huge accomplishments, now Zaila Avant-Garde is adding the title of author to her name. She stops by and chats with Melissa about “It's Not Bragging If It's True: How to Be Awesome At Life” which is out now, and the upcoming Children's Book, “Words of Wonder: From Z to A,” which is out June 27th.

As if winning the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee and holding three Guinness World Records weren't already huge accomplishments, now Zaila Avant-Garde is adding the title of author to her name. She stops by and chats with Melissa about “It's Not Bragging If It's True: How to Be Awesome At Life” which is out now, and the upcoming Children's Book, “Words of Wonder: From Z to A,” which is out June 27th.

TechCrunch's Rebecca Bellan led today's interview, and she spoke with Contrary Capital founder and partner, Eric Tarczynski, and AtoB co-founder Harshita Arora. AtoB's integrated financial platform is like Stripe for transportation, according to Harshita, but that's only part of what makes this startup interesting - Harshita herself is 21. She started this journey when she was 14 and wrote a best selling app when she was 16. She has a great story to tell.On this episode you'll hear:Red flags VCs are keeping an eye out for when looking at teamsHow the VC and startup world reacts to the Girl Genius versus the Boy Genius.The pain points of the trucking industry, and why a fintech product aims to solve them.As always, Matt Burns closed out the show with a round of Pitch Practice and audience questions. If you want to check out the full video of today's conversation, head to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for more TechCrunch Live!The TechCrunch Live Podcast drops at 6:00 a.m. PT every Monday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast,Spotify and all the casts.

Join Rev. Emily E. Ewing (they) and Rev. Kay Rohloff (she) and special guest Rev. Elle Dowd (she/they) to explore new and nerdy connections to the scripture for Baptism of Jesus, also known as the second Sunday after Epiphany, which falls on January 8th this year, including our deep dive into the Holy Spirit! The scripture we refer to for this episode can be found here. You can find Elle on Twitter/Insta/Snap @hownowbrowndowd and on Tiktok @elledowdministry and @elcayoungadults. We talked about our episode on the 6th Sunday after Pentecost last year with Rev. Nic Peñaranda and God's Holy Darkness, which she illustrated. We also talked about our episode on Biblical Cussing for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost in 2021. Kay mentioned this Girl Genius appearance to the whole world. CN: we talk about anti-queer sentiment, conversion therapy, and suicide when discussing the deep dive. To support Nerds At Church, you can become a Patreon Supporter at any tier for extra perks and bonus content including uncut guest episodes, Live Q&As, merch, and more. If becoming a paying supporter isn't possible right now, please leave us a review instead — it helps sustain the show and spread the word! Check us out on Facebook & Twitter at @NerdsAtChurch to connect! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nerdsatchurch/message

Hey Everyone! Welcome to the Season 1 Finale of Girl Genius by yours truly! I am feeling so excited and accomplished about finishing this season. I wanted to end the season discussing a few things I am currently working on as well as what you can expect from Season 2 of Girl Genius. This episode is about Reclaiming Your Life and Removing Distractions by taking 3 Steps! I hope this season has been inspirational and impacting for you guys! Enjoy today's episode.

Hey my girl & guy geniuses! On this episode of Girl Genius, we'll be discussing the topic of Removing Yourself From Situations That Trigger You to Backtrack! I was inspired to create this episode after watching a YouTube video by Marissa Breann. I want to be a reminder to you that Your NOW Decisions Affect Your FUTURE Circumstances! ACT ACCORDINGLY! Identifying your triggers can be a GAME CHANGER! How can you improve if you don't know what the root of the problem is? I hope this episode is both inspiring and eye-opening. Thanks for listening!

Hey guys! On this episode of Girl Genius, we'll be discussing 6 Ways to Get Closer to the Happiness You Desire! All we truly want out of this life is happiness right? What would life be if we never felt happiness? I hope this episodes helps someone who has been feeling sad, depressed, angry, etc. 

Heading to a small town after surviving a bit of trouble on the road, the heroes of science encounter a rather self-righteous and annoying opponent. The post Girl Genius: The Mist of Misadventure Ep 1 appeared first on Fandible Actual Play Podcast.

Hey Girl Geniuses!! On this episode of Girl Genius, I'll be unpacking the topic of "Everyone Does Not Deserve Access to You." I recently came to the realization that I am a rare person and everyone is not deserving of access to me. I am such a generous, transparent and caring person which I know is meant to be shared with the world but I recently realized that my transparency must come with boundaries. In this episode, I highlight a lot of my experiences with allowing others to have access to me when they may not be deserving. I hope this resonates with you! Stay tuned for more!

Numbers never lie, and Miss Mariah Carey's numbers tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth! That's right—on this episode of Black Girl Songbook, host Danyel Smith is honoring vocal genius Mariah Carey and her inspirational rise up the charts, second only to The Beatles for most no. 1 hits EVER. Danyel talks Mariah's timeless music, brilliant collaborations with hip-hop artists, and her Christmas takeover. Danyel also sheds light on the difficulty of Carey's high-heeled rise and the industry's attempt to shut her out, as noted by the '96 Grammy Awards snub. Plus, Marvet Britto, former publicist for Carey, joins Songbook to discuss Mariah's contribution to music and her impact on culture.        Host: Danyel Smith Guest: Marvet Britto Producers: Trudy Joseph and Donnie Beacham Guest Booking: Allyson Turner Story Consultant: Taj Rani Sound Design: DJ Steve Porter Production Supervision: Juliet Litman, Chelsea Stark Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey listeners! On today's episode of Girl Genius, we'll be diving into this simple but powerful quote, “You are NOT Behind in Life.” As life unfolds, I realize that you are never behind in life. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. You need to get through this part of your journey for a reason. When you get where you desire to be, this moment will make sense. I felt someone needed this reminder because it's so easy for us to give in to the comparison game. Stop downplaying your accomplishments & progress! You are moving forward!!

Sailor Mercury is here! Jadeite's new business is...floppy disks? Plus, SHOCKING NEWS: Luna can type on a computer, the GameStop is actually secret Moon Business HQ, and Ami's accent is going to haunt your dreams!

On this episode of Girl Genius, we discuss setting boundaries within your friendships that align with who you currently are. Boundaries are an important part of maintaining healthy relationships. Where do you stand when it comes to setting boundaries? We learn, change and grow constantly and it's important to acknowledge that our boundaries should too.

Hey listeners! I am so excited about this episode of Girl Genius. In this episode I am very transparent about my journey and process. I truly believe that vulnerability and transparency is very inspiring and that is what I aim to be for my audience. In this episode I touch on a few points including: Anxiety, Depression, Reflecting on Past Success, Practicing Gratitude and Preparing for the things you have been praying for! I hope this episode of Girl Genius is Inspiring, Motivating, Empowering & Informing. Stay tuned for more!

During this episode of Girl Genius, I'll be discussing some controversial questions regarding Valentine's Day as well as Black History Month! Hope you enjoy!

On this episode, join your Girl Genius to discuss where I've been during my hiatus from my Podcast, Luxury for Black Women, & last but not least, SELF CARE! I hope you enjoy & stay tuned for the next episode!

Episode Notes Show Title: “BLACK GIRL GENIUS” Listen + Subscribe NOW The Piper Carter Podcast on #DetroitIsDifferent Episode #114 Available on all streaming platforms including: Apple Podcast | Google Play | Stitcher | Spotify I HeartRadio | 3 generations discussing Hip Hop, Social Justice, Politics, Tech, Arts & Culture. Cohosts: Deja + Brittany March + JYR3H This Week: INTERVIEW: Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown, Hip Hop Feminist Scholar, Musician, Professor and the Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Founder of SOLHOT (Saving Our Lives, Hearing Our Truths) a collective Brown founded to celebrate Black girlhood by meeting Black girls face to face and heart to heart.

Lis and Nathaniel take a wild ride through the sci-fi fantasy world of the hit webcomic Girl Genius, the brainchild of Phil and Kaja Foglio. The TOUGH LIKE A GIRL Podcast is a Council of Geeks Production! Follow the TOUGH LIKE A GIRL Podcast: Subscribe via iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/punch-like-a-girl/id1161149489 Follow us on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/ToughLikeAGirl1 Like our FACEBOOK page: https://www.facebook.com/toughlikeagirlpod This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com Follow Fire & Water on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our Fire & Water FACEBOOK page: https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts

On this episode, join your Girl Genius to discuss the topic, “Growing Up Black.” We'll talk about Black Parenting Do's & Don'ts as well as religion and its role in the Black Community! I hope you enjoy!

In this episode, you'll get to learn a little more about your Girl Genius & you'll get a taste of who I am. This episode is short & sweet! I hope you enjoy!

From Technovation to Kode With Klossy, Luna and I reveal a multitude of opportunities for women in STEM to combat the gap in the field. We also explore the world of hackathons and tips on learning programming for the first time. Stay tuned for this and more on this next episode! From The STEM Up Website: https://fromthestemup.media/ Power in Youth Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/power_in_youth/ Power in Youth Slack: powerinyouth.slack.com A Little Goes A Long Way book: https://www.amazon.ca/Little-Goes-Long-Way/dp/1659630770 Technovation: https://technovationchallenge.org/ Girl Genius: https://girlgeniusmag.tech/ Kode With Klossy: https://www.kodewithklossy.com/

In this episode, I chat with Shivali Gulati, founder and executive director at Girl Genius Magazine. She has reached over 460,000+ girls world wide and helping them get involved with STEAM through her nonprofit. We talk about the story behind Girl Genius, the gender gap in STEAM, how to overcome imposter syndrome, and popular misconceptions about STEAM. Take a listen!Check out Girl Genius Magazine on Instagram @girlgeniusmag and sign up for their free workshops!

High school senior, Shivali Gulati, founded Girl Genius in 2018. Girl Genius is a nonprofit striving to connect, empower, and inspire female changemakers passionate about STEAM worldwide. In this episode, Livi and Shivali, discuss what sparked her passion for STEAM, STEAM vs STEM, the creation of Girl Genius, and the main topic: how to lead by creating an open, well-communicated, inclusive, and empowering space for your team.More about Shivali Gulati at:The most recent issue of Girl Genius Magazine!! : https://issuu.com/girlgeniusmagazine/docs/issue_ivWebsite: https://girlgeniusmag.tech/Instagram: @girlgeniusmagMore about the host, Livi Redden, at:Website: https://todayisthefuture.buzzsprout.com/Instagram: @todayisthefuture_ & @livireddenEmail: liviredden@gmail.com

This week, Keeghan shows us his thing, Girl Genius. Join us as we talk about masturbation, comic history, freedom in narrative, clothing choices, what makes us stick with media, and, perhaps inevitably, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In today's episode I chat with Shivali Gulati, a high school senior from the Bay Area passionate about equitable computer science education and bridging the gender gap in STEM. She is also the founder of Girl Genius, which has reached 470,000+ girls from 46 states & 75 countries through their magazine issues, virtual events, and social media campaigns. We talk about dealing with the Bay Area pressure, how she got involved in tech, and her advice on tackling imposter syndrome. Enjoy the episode! SHE CHAT'S IG/TWITTER: @shechatpodcast // GIRL GENIUS' IG: @girlgeniusmag // SHIVALI'S IG: @shivaligulati_ Intro/Outro Music ⇩ Study And Relax by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5764-study-and-relax License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

It's our first guest! Let's welcome Eric (on twitter as @_kaburi_) to talk about their favorite color pair: Blue and Red. All things Izzet (and outside of Izzet.) This is the start of a series we're planning where we'll talk about each of the color pairs and how they work together (and sometimes don't). Sadly, there were some connection issues in this recording, and the sound is a little accelerated in places, and rather "clicky." Our profuse apologies for this. We're doing our best to make sure it doesn't happen again. Izzet Commanders: https://edhrec.com/commanders/ur Mark Rosewater's Izzet article: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/creative-differences-2006-02-27-0 Girl Genius: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ Rhystic Studies Theros video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H981fHM6Li8 Podcast (@OneManaShort) by Eric Landes (@ProggyBoog) and Russel Lee (@RogueArtificer) Edited by Jake Travers (@WCPower9) Music by Eric Landes

Main Fiction: "Permanent Residency" by Filip WiltgrenBy day, Filip Wiltgren is a mild-mannered communication officer and lecturer. By night, he turns into a frenzied ten-fingered typist, clawing out jagged stories of fantasy and science fiction, found in lairs such as Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Grimdark, Daily SF, and Nature Futures. He can be found at wiltgren.comNarrated by Cheyenne Wright.Cheyenne Wright is a freelance illustrator and concept artist. He is the color artist on the three-time Hugo Award winning steampunk graphic novel series Girl Genius, and co-creator of many other fine works; Including 50 Fathoms and the Ennie award winning Deadlands Noir for the Savage Worlds RPG. He has also produced graphics for Star Trek Online, the Champions MMO, and t-shirt designs for T.V.’s Alton Brown. Cheyenne lives in Seattle with his wife, their daughter, and an ever growing stack of unpainted miniatures. In his spare time he is teaching himself animation, and narrates short stories for a variety of audio anthologies where he is known as Podcasting’s Mr. Buttery ManVoice™.Fact: Looking Back at Genre History by Amy H Sturgis See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sailor Noob is the podcast where a Sailor Moon superfan and a total noob go episode by episode through the original Sailor Moon series!A change comes just in time this week as we're introduced to a new ally in Sailor Moon's fight against the Dark Kingdom: Sailor Mercury! There's a new girl in school and Luna is worried that she may be their next enemy, but when an evil cram school starts draining the energy of students, Usagi will face a pop quiz where failing means death!Kal asked and the show delivers in this episode, as we learn about a new Sailor Scout, Luna's mysterious boss, and rumors of a princess! During the show, we discuss cram schools in Japan, rice cakes, the "rabbit in the moon" myth, "western-style" rooms, and the origins of the terms "yoma" and "shabon". We also talk about the school of Harajuku, Japanese Mike Brady, winning with soap, "Poochie worries", spoiler poker face, and Mika getting turned down for cram school.Once bitten, twice books!We're now on iTunes and your listening platform of choice! Please subscribe and give us a rating and a review! Arigato gozaimasu!https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sailor-noob/id1486204787Sailor Noob is a part of the Just Enough Trope podcast network. Check out our other shows about your favorite pop culture topics and join our Discord!http://www.twitter.com/noob_sailorhttp://www.justenoughtrope.comhttps://discord.gg/HkCxvAp

Our guest this week is Carla Sinclair. Carla is an author, freelance writer and editor, and co-founder of boingboing.net. She’s written 5 books, including Girl Genius, which will be released in November. For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/carla-sinclair-author-of-girl-genius

Ed, Producer AL, Del, Ross and Russ take a look at Foglio's Girl Genius,Jack Lothian's beautiful short, Tomorrow. And very briefly, The Wicked and The Divine. As well as the usual chaos. The Bookworm & Brave New Words are Truly Outrageous Productions for STARBURST Magazine.

This month we’re reading Steampunk! We talk about the history of the genre, umbrella fights, boring white men, colonialization, graphic novel adaptations, werewolf sex, good vs bad worldbuilding, and Matthew made a spreadsheet and did some math (of course…). You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, or your favourite podcast delivery system. In this episode Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | RJ Edwards Books We Discussed This Month  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley Boneshaker by Cherie Priest Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter The Difference Engine by William Gibson,  Bruce Sterling Clockwork Canada: Steampunk Fiction edited by Dominik Parisien Soulless by Gail Carriger Soulless: The Manga, Vol. 1 by Gail Carriger and Rem Other Steampunk (or “Steampunk”) Books We’ve Read (or tried to…) Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio  The Glass Scientists by Sabrina Cotugno Airborn by Kenneth Oppel The Sea Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia edited by Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng Discussed in Episode 014 - Historical Fantasy Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente  Everfair by Nisi Shawl Our Lady of the Ice by Cassandra Rose Clarke Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger Discussed in Episode 013 - Spies and Espionage Bronze Gods by A.A. Aguirre The Stowaway Debutante by Rebecca Diem Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann “If I wanted to read Batman fanfiction, I could probably find better fic on the Internet for free.” - Goodreads review The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman Other Media We Mention Vampire: The Masquerade Chap hop Fighting Trousers - Professor Elemental The Black Tides of Heaven by J.Y. Yang Rat Queens The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton Links, Articles, and Things S.S. Librarianship  Aether (classical element) Timeline of *Punk fiction subgenres Fantasy of manners Sad Puppies Bakka-Phoenix Books - Sci-Fi/Fantasy bookstore in Toronto Gaslamp fantasy Intro to Speculative Fiction by People of Color Atrocities in the Congo Free State Suggest new genres or titles! Fill out the form to suggest genres or titles! Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email! Join us again on Tuesday, August 20th we’ll be discussing The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Then on Tuesday, September 3rd we’ll be discussing the non-fiction genre of politics.

After establishing my scale of 1-5, the following webcomics are reviewed: Penny Arcade (penny-arcade.com), Girl Genius (girlgeniusonline.com), and Young Protectors (https://webcomics.yaoi911.com/). If you are interested in having your webcomic reviewed, please drop me a link at jamaisj@gmail.com.Please support WCRI by pledging at our Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/twosparrows).

When you start “doing” monitoring, there are a few questions that you get asked over and over again. Technically Religious member Leon Adato came to think of them as “The Four Questions” (of monitoring), as a kind of inside joke reference to the Four Questions that are asked during the Passover. The joke became an epiphany, and the epiphany became a book. With Passover upon us, Doug, Kate and Destiny talk with Leon about the book, the process of creating it, and how it gave him a chance to link his religious and technical experiences together in a unique way. Listen or read the transcript below: Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Destiny: 00:24 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Destiny: 00:48 Hey, I just got this great new ebook this week. Doug: 00:51 No, no, no. I got this great new book. Kate: 00:53 Wait a minute. Did Leon send you a copy of his book, too? Leon: 00:58 Hey everyone! Destiny: 00:59 Did you set up a whole podcast just to talk about your ebook? Leon: 01:04 Maaaaaaaybe? Doug: 01:06 Wow. That is both lame and kind of brilliant. Kate: 01:09 aaaaand we're off! Leon: 01:11 Okay. I admit it, I admit it. But it does fit, right? Technically Religious is a podcast about the merger between our religious lives and our technical lives and the book, you know, The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Going to Get Asked is kind of that right? Destiny: 01:32 Definitely. Doug: 01:33 Which came first, this podcast or the book cause it sounds, it's a real similar kind of a set up when you think about it. Leon: 01:44 The answer is both. Uh, The Four Questions has been something that I've talked around and about for over two and a half years. And as a joke it's just sort of an inside joke I've been talking about since I've been doing monitoring. Um, because it is a thing, at least in my head, it's a thing. So the podcast really came out of conversations with Josh Biggley and myself about religious synergy and again about the overlap between our religious and and technical lives. And the decision to write the book probably started about two years ago. I've been working on it on and off. So they both sort of arose from the same desire to share that worldview, but they came out in slightly different ways. Destiny: 02:32 and I think they came out because of in our work life. And you know, in general we write a lot and you've seen the questions and you've seen a lot of the user interaction and customer needs. And I feel like it's kind of a good thing because you've waited just long enough to understand those needs so that you can answer them. Leon: 02:48 Right when I, yeah, I started to have like a full, a full story and some of the talking, honestly, some of the discussions I've had in synagogue, I'm trying to explain what do during the week to people. Um, that also sparked a lot of ideas. And so the four questions is really, like I said, this inside joke because during Passover, which is actually the holiday, we're in the middle of when this podcast is airing during the, the service or the, the meal, the youngest kid at the table asks these four questions, it starts off "why is tonight different from all other nights?" And, but there are these four sort of iconic questions. And as I was working in monitoring for questions kept coming up over and over and over again. And so I started to, you know, just jokingly refer to them as the four questions. And if the person I was talking to his Jewish or had friends who were Jewish, they were like, "oh yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it." And, but then I realized that there's a lot more parts of Jewish philosophy and the Jewish culture that fits both it and monitoring, especially around the idea of questions of skepticism of, you know, really inquiring past the pat answers, you know, really debating for the sake of making things better, not debating for the sake of winning. So those were all ideas that fed into the idea of the book. Destiny: 04:11 It's pretty interesting. I like the idea, the skepticism because like for any religious aspect, everything is skeptical. From an outsider looking in period. And anytime we ever talk about monitoring and we'er at work / at an event is there's always skepticism. Like, "I need a solution. There's no way you can provide it." Right? Like "I know you, I know what you guys do, but you're not going to be able to help me." It's like we're... Yechh... New Speaker: 04:37 "You sales people are all the same." And that's why I tell them there's actually no salespeople allowed to go to conventions for our company. We're actually all engineers, so you know, and they're like "whaaaaaaat???". Yeah. And so we're like, yeah, "oh, I was totally, yeah, I wouldn't have believed that either. Here, let me show it to ya." Kate: 04:52 I was just going to say it's also, uh, we talking to customers a lot of times. Um, there's a, a skepticism of the data that they see, which I think is really the, you know, you should never just blindly trust anything, but it's definitely there as well. Destiny: 05:07 How Paranoia. Yeah, I know all about that. Never trust the data. Right. But we run into that all the time where we'll have people that are like, hey, I need the data about this. I want the RAW data. And then there's an argument, is this the raw data? "Is this just what you're giving me? Why are you giving me the data? Why don't I have full access to the data? I don't understand." And then that creates a whole other realm, right? Because there's always a skeptic. Kate: 05:35 Yeah. Why is it different than I expect it to be? Leon: 05:37 Right. And that feeds back into sort of the, the conversationsq that drove the book, which was, um, you know, you need to be prepared for those questions. Again, one of the lessons, one of the lessons for Passover is that there's this story about the four children and there's the scholarly child, there's the skeptical child, there's the uh, quiet, we're stupid child. Uh, and then there's the silent child. And uh, everyone thinks like, oh, you have to decide which one you are. Are you the scholar? The one, are you the rebel? Are you the whatever? And actually when you get right down to it, it's, it has nothing to do with who you think you are. It's that if you want to try to teach people anything, you need to be ready for those four archetypes in every combination of those archetypes. You know, to you, you don't get to pick your students. You don't get to pick the people who are going to ask you questions. And if you're not ready for all of them, if you're not ready to actually just do cheerleading for the silent child, because they actually don't know what question to ask there, they're just sort of sitting back and like, "I got nothing for you." If you're not ready for that, that really rebellious, skeptical child, you know, to to put you on the spot about everything. If you're not ready, then you're not ready. And I think that is monitoring engineers especially, but IT people generally, we also need to wrap our heads around that. Like the person who comes into the meeting room and says, "I don't believe any of your data." They're actually your friend, you know? And the reason, the reason why I say that is because again, during the Passover conversation, the skeptical child, everyone says, oh, well, you know, he shouldn't be here. No, no. He chose to show up. That's the thing. The opposite of love isn't hatred. The opposite of love is apathy, you know, so the skeptical child showing up and saying, "All right, you just, what is all this to you? What? I don't, I'm, I'm on the fence. I'm not even on the fence. I'm over the fence here." But they showed up. You know, when they say, "I don't believe that this redundancy, you know, redundant design is going to work. I don't believe that this is really secure. I don't believe that. You know, you're really going to catch this problem." Whatever it is, they're actually your friend. They're actually there to make everything better. They may have social issues that don't allow them to communicate in a way that may be pleasing to you, but they're still there. Doug: 08:02 And that's what makes The Four Questions work so well. Because in essence, what you're, you're what you're telling, whoever's reading the book, and there's a lot of people who this book is going to be good for, but basically you're just saying, you gotta be prepared for these questions and there's nothing, they always say a lawyer never asks a question they don't already know the answer to. Well, this is sort of the flip side of that. You basically need... you're going to get asked these questions so you better know the answers to them when they, when they, when they come across your bow and if you do, all of a sudden your credibility goes right through the ceiling because you're prepared. You're not blindsided. It's not a, "let me get back..." well, you might have to say, "Let me get back to you on that." But if you're at least expecting the question, you know that it's coming and you don't look like deer in the headlights. Destiny: 08:52 I think that's important for anybody, right? Like if the employee versus the manager / CTO like yourself, Doug, it's one of those things up. If you know The Four Questions, it makes you a good interviewer, right? Like I know how to do this. It also makes you the good interviewee because you know the questions of which that are going to be asked. And you also know as the goal attendee, right? Like you're the goal guy, you're the CTO, you're needing these things to be answered by your lower level and you should be able to have the trust in the, you know, the actual confidence in them to be able to provide those when they lead up to you, they had the correct summary. Leon: 09:25 Right? I just want to clarify one thing though, which is that it's, this is more than the four questions regardless of the book or not. Uh, you know, um, is the four questions are there not only as a CYA but also because if you think, well, how would I answer this question? You are naturally going to start designing your monitoring solution in a way that is more robust and more redundant and more comprehensive than you might otherwise. So it's really about making the solution better. Even if even if you're not worried about, you know, people putting you on the spot, even if you're not worried about, you know, maybe maybe everyone in the company loves you and loves monitoring and loves everything about it and they're all super fans and they cheer and sing for you as you walk through, you have your own theme song when you enter the office... is it getting a little deep in here? Destiny: 10:15 Okay, we're not talking about me. Doug: 10:19 Oh it's all rainbows and unicorns and I don't think so. Leon: 10:22 Right. Okay. Kate: 10:22 I really to visit this company. Doug: 10:22 What color is the sky in your world? Leon: 10:22 But even there's , right? Exactly. So even so the point is is that if you think about these ideas and say, well how would I answer that? You're naturally going to make a better solution because of it. Doug: 10:37 Yeah. I was thinking less of a CYA, although CYA, it can be important sometimes, but as you were saying, when you're asking those questions, you are thinking through how does this thing need to be built and as a result you will be ready then when the questions come, cause you will have built it correctly in the first place Destiny: 10:55 It's not even correctly. It's just more of a, you're giving thought. And I think that's something that we don't do hardly anymore. We just, we don't think about the end game. And that's like what ADHD, right? They're the ones that run up the tree and don't remember how to get down. So it's like, you know, right. It's like I would just want to go up. Yeah, I just want to go up the tree. I don't care how I get down. I just want to get down there, you know, up the tree. And so it's Kinda like the same thing. A lot of times when I've talked to people they want to do monitoring and they will go full force ahead, turn everything on, have everything going and then they're like, what did I just do? But they're not ready. They don't, they don't have the questions to ask. They don't understand the entities of which they are monitoring. They don't know what the goal is for the company by even having these metrics. And some of the times it's like, it's overwhelming. They'll turn on a freaking fire hose of events in a sim tool. And they're sitting there [and I'm] going, Well, are you gathering logs?" "Yeah." "Well, what does it look like?" "There's lot of, well, there's a lot going on here." Like, you know what I'm saying? Like that's the thing though. It's if you don't have questions like Doug was saying and you don't have a direction, you don't have a confidence of where you're heading to, you've got this huge, just abundance of data. It doesn't matter if it's Raw, it doesn't matter if it's accurate. You have no idea how to actually get to the information that you actually need and that's pertinent to you and it's just a plethora. Kate: 12:30 You end up trying to drink from the fire hose. Leon: 12:32 I want to be clear about that. That's not the end it feels like it's going in right when they turn on the fire hose. Drinking isn't the part... No, it's much more uncomfortable than that. Right. It's really, um, and that actually goes straight to the, one of the chapters is called a, I called it "The Prozac Moment,"q which is actually the second stage. The first stage is, you know, turn it all on and it's, you know, the turning on the fire hose of data and then they have this moment where you basically have to intravenously applied Prozac because they're like, "It can't all be this bad!!" A) Ad Populum Theorem, Doug, uh, it can all in fact be this bad. And B) you know, you did ask for that. Destiny: 13:20 Well, and I think that's something that talk about those that it can all be that bad. And I've seen a lot of people, and I know you have to, and I'm sure Doug and Kate has, where people have turned things on and it is bad. And then you have the people that are like, "Let's just put that back under the rug." You know what I mean? Doug: 13:38 "We did not see this. " Destiny: 13:39 "Yeah, let's take 10% of this and evaluate it and look really good, but let's ignore the 90% of it until, I don't know, a review comes around" like, like let's just, they don't want to handle it all at once because it's overwhelming, but they don't actually implement a correct plan on how you stage, that categorize it. Is it low, medium or high? They just are like overwhelmed. "Oh my God, my review is coming up. I have things that are monetarily going to be associated with this data that's now represented. I need to control it." So what they actually do is turn off the fire hose. They only allow certain little things to come through and you're in a bigger mess honestly because you're just getting that much more behind. Leon: 14:26 So something I'm curious about and you know, I'm, I'm too deep into it to really know. But you know, obviously this is a book that has some religious stuff in it. So my question is, what was your take on that? Like good blend or it was way too much. It was blunt force Judaic trauma or you know, how did, how do you respond? How did you respond to it as you were reading it? Kate: 14:47 I'll tell you a little origin story of my atheism because it's kind of relevant to that question. Um, when I was much younger, uh, in college I was going to a nondenominational church, um, because I wanted to impress a guy and the pastor gave a sermon about how God wanted to get into the hard drive of your mind and reboot it. And that was the moment when I said to myself, yeah, I'm an atheist now. Leon: 15:17 So that's perfect. I, I probably would've been right there. I would be second in line out the door with you. Kate: 15:26 Then I'm mixing technology metaphors with religion has as sort of been like an instant "no" for me. Um, but I will say like, I really appreciated the fact that, you know, I could read the way you had everything laid out. It was really easy for me to, to sort of separate it and say "This is an interesting, like his bit of history and of fact," and I can stick to the technology part and I didn't feel like they were too, you know, meshed together, if that makes sense. Doug: 15:56 I came at it from a sort of the other side because I'm less interested in the technical and the monitoring side. Yeah. Just the way I am. But I found the, I found the religion really fascinating because as an evangelical Christian, we are grafted onto the Jewish scion, at that's what we believe in, we won't want to go any further than that. But so knowing the basis of the, uh, of the Passover, which is, um, let's face it, a very important, um, Jewish, right. And a lot of our symbolism and Christianity comes from that whole, the whole Passover image. Um, it was, it was great both getting more detail on the actual Passover itself, but then I thought the questions were really nicely tied into the technical side without it's being, it's not beating you over the head with the Torah. It's just saying, "Here's, you know, here's this question now. How can that work from a technical standpoint without actually making your hard drive, get rewritten and rebooted?" Oh my God, I would become an atheist also. Destiny: 17:08 I think for myself being hugely technical and hugely religious, that on my side of it, the mystery, uh, more of the Passover intertwining with the Jewish as well as the Christianity on my side. Like, I know that you, Leon have done a lot of things with my husband on the Torah and things of that nature and just that extra knowledge slash background of how we all kind of mesh together of where we all decide that we don't agree that, um, but that's like a lot of things though of, of when we go into that realm, when I'm looking at the technology I take from it from not only a Christian like type of the viewpoint of how I see things and how I view things, but also because of my knowledge of knowing you through the years as well as understanding the Torah a little bit better through my husband and your sessions of understanding from the Jewish background that goes way further than Christianity does. So I think there's a lot to be said there that marries religions together. Like there is a stint point, there is a spear of destiny per say. Ah Ha! That, um, I think that all creation period, like whether you're an atheist or anything that comes across there, there are things that we can take from history that's been noted in books, literature itself. I mean even outside of religion that we can tie in together to times to what is happening now. Leon: 18:29 Uh, I'm going to pivot from there. The book is available both as an ebook but also there's a, you can buy a physical actual hold it in your hand and there's been some very strong opinions expressed both within the Technically Religious staff, both folks who are on the, you know, on this episode and not, and then also out in the community for people who've had pre-release copies. So I just want to get your feeling, you know, ebook physical book. Like what, what's your take on that? This is it. This is an IT question. How do you consume your words? Kate: 19:01 I was all in for the ebook from day one, like the format in general. Um, because if you ever, you know, sort of had the college experience where you move a lot of dorms are a lot of apartments, you realize quickly how much having a lot of books can really suck unless you happen to be a power lifter. Or a body builder. Um, so I was thrilled when the notion that, you know, all of my books that I wanted to read suddenly weighed no more than an iPad. Destiny: 19:30 Oh yeah. But that's a good ploy though. And I'd have to say like for me, because I'm constantly in college and constantly like upping myself in certs and stuff. But uh, I was for a long time buying the actual book. I just liked the feel of the paper. I like to be able to highlight and there was something about it just being on my shelf in a tangible, like I could just grab it and touch it and relate to the moment when I was reading it. But I do have to say in the past, probably year, year and a half, and I know that that's actually quick, right? Like, that's pretty quick in my time of I've started to really enjoy ebooks and audio. I can, not that I have a long commute because I work from home, but when I'm doing things that, you know, like if I'm like driving through town or if I'm having a break, I can do the audio now and I'm starting to do that. So I think there is a lot to just where you're at in life. Kate: 20:21 I think going back to my point though, the fact that you moved within that time period has something to do with it. Destiny: 20:26 But I brought everything with me. I brought every book with me and did not get rid of it. But I started to reevaluate and like I said, just even before I moved, just it was, uh, an easier thing probably because the increased travel, I travel a lot now, so a lot of the, it's way easier to continue my studies, continue my learning or if I'm out at an event and somebody suggests something, well I, I want to remember it. So I just like download it, read it, start doing it on kindle or something. You know, like that's just super easy and there's just a lot to it. I just think like I've finally been pushed enough I guess to where I just gradually fell into the ebook market. But I feel like I'm late to the game. Is what I'm getting at. I feel like I'm late to the game. I wish I would have converged or went towards it earlier in life. Doug: 21:14 Yup. Well, since I'm older than dirt, I came, uh, I basically came at this from books. In fact, uh, the, the first thing I did in college was I got an account at the bookstore, which of course got me into immediate, incredible trouble financial as you might imagine, because I've loved books forever. So I had books upon books upon books, and as Kate said, I moved him everywhere. I, yeah, I used to be in better shape, but, uh, finally about three or four moves ago, I basically ended up selling everything, all the books just because I got tired of moving them. I still have... Except for my cookbooks. Of course I still have those. But about four years ago, something like that, I was going to work overseas for six months. You can't take all of those books that you're going to need to read for that period of time. Didn't have access to the library, everything. So I got myself a nook for goodness sakes. Don't ever want to have one of those again. But the thing is I was able to go ahead and borrow books from my public library back home, electronically, read through the whole game of Thrones and about 15 other books for the six months I was there. And I am now a convert. I, you know, on a kindle, I still get books because my wife wants books. Books doesn't want to read them electronically. And just last night I was, I had to take the shade off the lamp cause I realized that the lights in my bedroom or no longer set up for reading in bed because I'm used to having something that has its own little glow. I'm, I'm, I'm a convert. Leon: 22:45 So I have to say from my side that part of it is just the nature of the Jewish beast, um, that, you know, every week for 25 hours, we're completely offline. So, uh, if all of your books and reading material are online, it makes it very difficult for at least that, that one day period. But I dunno, there's, I still, you know, there's something about holding a book in your hand and being able to flip through it and the visceral experience of it, you know, the ability to say, oh, that's on page 34 in the upper right corner, you know, next to the picture of the this or that. There's something about that for me. But at the same time, everything that you have, all of you have already said, um, that, you know, it's just so convenient to have and it doesn't matter where you are or whatever, it's, you know, tap, tap, tap, and there it is. And, okay, so you don't know what's on page 32 because you can do a search and find it in the book or whatever, but... Destiny: 23:45 See and me and my new house, it's one of those things of, it's almost scholary like you know, it has like a, its own sense of essence to it to have books because like where I live in a resort, when people came over to my house, we do have a pretty good like library of books and things that come across there like beautiful books, Alice in Wonderland with all of the beautiful pictures of which that are within there and things of that nature and, and like Girl Genius and like little, you know, comic books and things like that. Like there's things of which that we have that just haven't an own art realm to them. Right. That is almost has its own, it's like a, a class of society in a way. It's like, you know, it's, it's like, "Oh my gosh, you have a library!" right? Like it's like things like that of which that you have to think of. Speaker 1: 24:29 So yeah. So I think that that's, that's definitely a trend is that books have moved from being the thing that have all the words in it. And I don't really care as much about the aesthetic to something that must have both an aesthetic and a, you know, a content value to me because otherwise I can just put the words on a electronic, you know, form and just work through it. I will say that there has been a call for a, the four questions to be moved into an audio book. I could see that that is, that is in the works for those people who, uh, are thinking the same thing as you're listening to this. That is definitely gonna happen in the next, you know, few months or something. Hopefully it will already have happened depending on when you listen to this. Um, so that's definitely a thing. Destiny: 25:15 Does everybody else like audios? Doug: 25:17 I like it when I'm driving. I mean, otherwise I don't, I mean I, it was just funny, I was in radio for how long? And you know, you would think that I would just eat that stuff up. And the reality is I just don't, because it, for me, it only works if I'm concentrating. Um, you know, it's like if I'm working around the house or something, I can't be distracted by the book. So that's not gonna work, you know? But when I'm driving long distances, if I drive from Dallas back home to see my mother in Ohio, we go through novels. I've got a question about all the words. Leon: 25:50 Okay. Doug: 25:51 It's a lot of words. A book is a lot of words. I've started to write a novel like four times. Um, so I mean, you wrote a book, Dude. Leon: 26:04 Indeed I did. Doug: 26:05 You did. Well, I mean, it's a lot of words. You put it all together. You've finished, you sat your rear in the chair and you went ahead and wrote it. How hard is, I mean, do you have any advice for people who want to... IT people who think they want to write a book? Leon: 26:20 Uh, okay. So for all three of them, uh, there's because, because IT people are sort of stereotypically not interested in flat out documenting their stuff, let alone, you know, writing a book. But if you have an idea for, you know, the great American novel, the hard work is, is getting those words written out. The thing not to do, is to constantly second guess yourself. "Is this good enough? Has someone said this before? Is this..." this is your take on a topic. It doesn't matter if you are writing about ping or uh, you know, this is, this is how to set up active directory or whatever it is. It's fine that there are 12, you know, or 12,000 other books on it. This is yours. Um, and there's a lot of things that you'll discover along the way that makes the whole effort worth it. So that's my, my cheerleader. You know, "You can do it, go try!" you know. Um, and sometimes you, you end up writing, starting to write one thing and then realize that there's this other thing, this other topic that was hiding behind it. That's actually way more interesting. So, uh, it is a lot of words, but they're always worth it. It is always, always worth it. And obviously, write something that you find really interesting yourself. Um, if you're writing about Active Directory because you hate it and you know, you're just a masochist, that's, that's, I guess that's a thing, but it's not gonna be easy. Those aside, because that is the work of the work. That aside, everything else is ridiculously easy these days. Um, you don't have to pitch to a publisher. You don't have to. The, the most expensive part of writing this book was the editor that I hired and I very consciously hired her on because I've worked with her before Ann Guidry. Um, she's amazing and she's edited my work in the past and she was incredible. And, and that was where most of the money, went. I'll be honest, the book cost $3,000 to produce, start to finish. Um, it was, you know, a couple hundred bucks for the cover art. Uh, Rob Masek of Masek Designs did the cover for me and he's also incredible. Um, and Ann did the editing. And then there was a little bit of incidental stuff here and there for, you know, the plugin module on the website to do sales and things like that. Destiny: 28:43 But Ann's is really good at helping you stay who you are. Leon: 28:46 Right. She, she like any good editor. She helps me sound more like myself. Destiny: 28:52 Right. And when I did my first ebook and you helped me with it, my first E-book, not a book book, but when I did my first Ebook, she was the one that did the editing on that. And you're the one that helped guide me on like, Hey just make it fun and do things. And I realized real quick the difference in somebody that's editing it for their own gain, if that makes sense. Versus editing it to make sure that it's who you are. But like grammatically correct obviously, but more of your tone, right? Like it was more so like who you are and you know the [sic] related, right? Like white, this is how she wants to say it because that's how Destiny talks, right. You know, like this is, this is how this is done and this is meant to be. And I have the confidence and letting it lie. I thought that was really cool for as an editor for her that she really grasps. Leon: 29:43 Yeah, no, she absolutely got that. And, and which made the investment worth it because I knew that the product, the end product was going to be so much better because of it. Um, in terms of the rest of it, you know, Word, you know, just type, like really no pad would be fine too. I'm a big Evernote, you know, person in terms of tools, I write a lot in that. Um, and as far as putting it together, uh, there's, there's plenty of services I happened to use Smashwords, which gets it distributed all sorts of, all over the place. And then Kindle, you know, Amazon, you have to do on your own, separate from that. And as far as the printing, I used IngramSpark and again, minimal investment. So if you're thinking, oh my gosh, you know, I can't write a book because the production part is really hard, that's not anymore. That barrier to entry is completely gone. Um, so that you can focus as a writer, you know, just doing that part. And I'll tell you a trick and Destiny, you sort of hit on it, which is, you know, if you're thinking, wow, this is too much for me to do, invite some friends, you know, talk about it. If this is a technical topic and you're talking about it at work, talk with the folks and say, "Hey, you know, do you want to do a chapter? Do you want to, you know, contribute some ideas and I'll flesh them out or vice versa?" And you know, three, four, five people. Again, Amazon doesn't care how many author names you put on there. You know, it's not like a, a real flesh and blood publisher says, "No, no, no. We wanted to have the exclusive rights and all of you must sign a contract and your first born child." like nobody cares. Really. Destiny: 31:20 Thank God I've alread got a few! Leon: 31:23 Right, right. You can, yeah. Children to say, yeah, it's, you can put a few up. Exactly. They must be teenagers. So, uh, you know, but you can, you can do that so you can actually spread the load. And uh, on, on this book, on The Four Questions, a friend of mine, a Rabbi Davidovich, uh, who's here in Cleveland, he also, he's got a lot of great ideas. His public speaking is incredible, but he just found that that hump of writing to be a little bit daunting. And so I'm like, yeah, "You're going to do, you're going to do a chapter for me." And so he's got, uh, you know, he's got a whole insert in there. Um, I actually had to bribe him with a pan of baklava and coffee and he was able to, he was saying... It works, man. Doug: 32:11 Oh, well. her baklavah.. your daughter's baklava is so good, I mean really... Kate: 32:16 I would do literally anything you asked of me for a pan of baklavah. Destiny: 32:20 So would Tim. Tim would totally be down. Leon: 32:23 Duly noted. Okay. See, so everyone who's listening, like you just have to know the people around. You just have to know what their bribery level. Um, so anyway, you know, so there's some other ways to go about writing it that isn't the same. And the last piece of advice that I would give is, is if you like writing, but the idea of writing a book is daunting. Don't. Write blog posts, write short essays. You'd be amazed at how quickly they bundled together into an anthology, or that you start to see themes come out. It's like, "Oh, but if I, if I wove this one into this one, if I connected that to that and I just rewrote a little bit of this" and whatever that all of a sudden the book is there. You actually already did it. You just didn't realize it. Um, so those, those are just some, some, you know, other ideas from inside. Destiny: 33:14 So I have a question. If you're going to summarize your book how would you summarize The Four Questions for somebody who has no idea what they are? Like coming in to this podcast right now? Like if they were like, "Okay, I hear a lot about four questions. What the hell is four questions?? What is going on?" Like, what is it? Leon: 33:32 So there's, there's two ways to answer. First of all, the book is really the combination of what Jewish philosophy and history have to say about it. And monitoring specifically. That's the overarching theme. So it's really about monitoring with the Judaic piece as spice or a through line to keep you, as Kate said, "to keep you awake." What the four questions are is a pretty simple, these are the four questions that I've gotten asked over the 20 years I've been a monitoring engineer: Why did it get an alert? Why didn't I get an alert? Uh, what are you monitoring on my systems right now? What's going to alert on my systems right now? And then there's a fifth of the fourth questions. Just like, there's five cups of wine or four, we're not sure, during Passover. There's four - or five - questions and that is "what do you monitor standard" is the last question. So those are the questions. So as far as where you can get it, um, you can find all the links to it on my website, adatosystems.com but you can also find it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Smashwords and those links will lead you to everywhere else that you could possibly want to find it. Doug: 34:39 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Leon: 34:53 It's a very engaging topic. In fact, it's so interesting and meaty that I don't think one book is enough. You're probably going to have to buy two just to make sure you get it.  

K.M. Weiland writes gaslamp fantasy, dieselpunk, and historical superhero fiction--but wait! She also creates bestselling non-fiction guides for outlining, structure, character arcs, and more. www.KMWeiland.com www.HelpingWritersBecomeAuthors.com In this episode, I also pay tribute to Kaja Foglio, who coined the term gaslamp fantasy in conjunction with the Girl Genius universe she writes with Phil Foglio. www.GirlGeniusOnline.com www.Storypunks.World  

Forget #BlackGirlMagic, I am coining #BlackGirlGenius (let me secure my trademark and my bag!). This episode explores my background as a writer, my academic background in communications and Psychology, with specific emphasis on Freud, Jung, archetypal symbolism. and mediumship as a poet --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/LiminalSteele/support

Podcast #044 For my forty-forth Dream Gardens kid lit podcast, I interviewed author Margaret Peterson Haddix about her favorite children’s book, the middle grade novel  Millicent Min, Girl Genius, written  by Lisa Yee. Originally published in 2003, Millicent Min, Girl Genius tells the story of an amazingly gifted but painfully awkward eleven year old girl who’s having a terrible summer.  Her mother … Continue reading Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee: an interview with author Margaret Peterson Haddix → The post Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee: an interview with author Margaret Peterson Haddix appeared first on Dream Gardens.

The discovery of lead in drinking water systems in Flint, Michigan, and other cities around the country has motivated researchers to find new—and faster—ways to detect contamination in water supplies. One scientist who recently invented a way to rapidly test for lead in water developed her award-winning solution between swim team practice and piano lessons.

The long-overdue episode in which Erin and Paulette gush about Veronica McShell, one of ZR's most complex characters. This episode contains spoilers from Season 3 on. Skip ahead to minute 35:20 for a special surprise that is not spoilery (except for minute 43:15 when there is aone tiny and very vague pseudo-spoiler for seasons 5-6) A huge and special THANK YOU to the amazing and wonderful Aislinn De'Ath for her assistance with this episode :) PS: The Louis Vuitton ad referenced late in the episode can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYemsmlKBHg

Main Fiction: "None So Blind" by Joe Haldeman Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman has garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the '70s. He has since won four more Hugo Awards, another four Nebula Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for his novel Camouflage, the SFWA Grandmaster Award, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His other books include The Accidental Time-Machine, Marsbound, and Starbound. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home. Narrated by: Cheyenne Wright Cheyenne Wright is a freelance illustrator and concept artist. He is the color artist on the three-time Hugo Award winning steampunk graphic novel series Girl Genius, and co-creator of many other fine works; Including 50 Fathoms and the Ennie award winning Deadlands Noir for the Savage Worlds RPG. He has also produced graphics for Star Trek Online, the Champions MMO, and t-shirt designs for T.V.’s Alton Brown. Cheyenne lives in Seattle with his wife, their daughter, and an ever growing stack of unpainted miniatures. In his spare time he is teaching himself animation, and narrates short stories for a variety of audio anthologies where he is known as Podcasting’s Mr. Buttery ManVoice™ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“The Breeding Dust” by Dennis Mombauer (Originally published in Outliers of Speculative Fiction.) Silent, angular houses with white plaster, a sand-suffocated well and a couple of stunted palms huddled together on the low ground, a once bustling city that only the ghostly desert wind inhabited now. The sun gleamed down without mercy, hanging in the sky as a swirling ball that made the air flicker, and the small caravan decided to rest in this ancient oasis. The camels were led down the loose sand dunes and racked up in the shadow of the ruined walls, while the men sought refuge in one of the best-preserved buildings. Scattered sunbeams fell in through holes in the roof and illuminated dusty rubble, but it was comfortably cool compared to the heat outside. Everyone looked for a place to sit, drank freshly cooked tea and tried to pay as little attention as possible to the wind, which seemed to carry along doleful whispers from a prouder time. The men agreed to wait for nightfall or late afternoon before they would continue their journey, although a short examination found the well waterless and the rest of the city equally empty, not even home to bones or mummified remains. Dennis Mombauer was born in 1984 in the namesake capital of the Bonn Republic and raised along the Rhine river. He currently lives and works as a theater agent and freelance author in Cologne, and rites weird fiction, textual experiments, and literary essays as well as non-naturalist drama and English poetry acculturated with German. He translates both fiction and non-fiction, and is the editor, co-founder, and co-publisher of Die Novelle – Magazine for Experimentalism. Dennis' publications have appeared in various small- to medium-sized magazines and anthologies. He can be found online at dennismombauer.com. About the Narrator: Cheyenne Wright is a freelance illustrator and concept artist. He is the color artist on the three-time Hugo Award winning steampunk graphic novel series Girl Genius, and co-creator of many other fine works; Including 50 Fathoms and the Ennie award winning Deadlands Noir for the Savage Worlds RPG. He has also produced graphics for Star Trek Online, the Champions MMO, and t-shirt designs for TV’s Alton Brown. Cheyenne lives in Seattle with his wife, their daughter, and an ever growing stack of unpainted miniatures. In his spare time he is teaching himself animation, and narrates short stories for a variety of audio anthologies where he is known as podcasting’s Mr. Buttery ManVoice™. You can find him online at arcanetimes.com. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The prolific, multiple award-winning, New York Times bestselling author, Catherynne M. Valente, took a break at her spooky writer’s island to chat with me about her superhero origin story, earning street cred with readers, and her truly unique process. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting. Start getting more from your site today! Since her first novel — The Labyrinth, published in 2004 — the hybrid author has gone on to pen over 24 volumes of both fiction and poetry across multiple genres (including fantasy, sci-fi, young adult, and horror). In addition to being published and anthologized in dozens of print and online journals, Catherynne has won or been nominated for every major award in her field, including the Hugo Award (for both a novel and a podcast), and been a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She is perhaps best known for her crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making — a book launched by a dedicated online fan community that went on to become a NY Times bestseller. The series — which recently concluded with book five, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home — has been lauded by fellow author Neil Gaiman, and Time magazine called it, “One of the most extraordinary works of fantasy, for adults or children, published so far this century.” The prolific author continues to find innovative ways to connect with her audience, and she recently launched a Patreon project called “The Mad Fiction Laboratory,” where she offers professional and personalized advice on the business and craft of writing, as well as a sneak peek at her multiple works-in-progress. If you’re a fan of The Writer Files, please click subscribe to automatically see new interviews. In Part One of this file Catherynne Valente and I discuss: How to write a novel in three to ten days The story behind her four-month “circus” book tour and the birth of a viral bestseller Her love of performance Previews of her three wildly different upcoming projects The umbrella cover museum that doubles as her office Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes If you’re ready to see for yourself why over 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress — the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins — just go to StudioPress.com How Bestselling Fantasy & Sci-Fi Author Catherynne M. Valente Writes: Part Two CatherynneMValente.com Catherynne M. Valente on Amazon Cat’s Patreon project – “The Mad Fiction Laboratory” James Patterson Teaches Writing Cat Valente on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How Bestselling Fantasy & Sci-Fi Author Catherynne M. Valente Writes: Part One Voiceover: Rainmaker FM. Kelton Reid: Welcome back to The Writer Files. I am your host, Kelton Reid, to take you on yet another tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of renowned writers. This week the prolific, multiple award-winning, New York Times bestselling author, Catherynne M. Valente took a break at her spooky writer’s island to chat with me about her superhero origin story, earning street cred with readers, and her truly unique process. Since her fortuitous first novel, The Labyrinth, published in 2004, the hybrid author has gone on to pen over twenty four volumes of both fiction and poetry across multiple genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, young adult, and horror. In addition to being published and anthologized in dozens of print and online journals, Catherynne has won or been nominated for every major award in her field, including the Hugo Award, for both a novel and a podcast and been a finalist for both the Nebula and the World Fantasy awards. She is perhaps best known for her crowdfunded phenomenon, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, a book launched by a dedicated online fan community, that went on to become a New York Times Bestseller. The series, which recently concluded with a fifth book, has been lauded by fellow author Neil Gaiman, and Time Magazine called it, “One of the most extraordinary works of fantasy, for adults or children, published so far this century.” The prolific author continues to find innovative ways to connect with her audience and she recently launched a Patreon project called The Mad Fiction Laboratory where she offers professional and personalized advice on the business and craft of writing, as well as a sneak peek into her multiple works in progress. In part one of this file, Cat and I discuss how to write a novel in three to ten days, the story behind her four month circus, book tour, and the birth of a viral bestseller, her love of performance, previews of her three wildly different upcoming projects, and The Umbrella Cover Museum that doubles as her office. The Writer Files is brought to you by the all the new StudioPress Sites, a turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It’s perfect for authors, bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those selling physical products, digital downloads, and membership programs. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why over 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress now. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. And if you’re a fan of The Writer Files, please click subscribe to automatically see new interviews as soon as they’re published. And we are rolling once again on this show with a special guest, and Catherynne M. Valente is here today, multiple award-winning, prolific, New York Times Bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, I know you’ve got a lot in the hopper, to chat with listeners about your fantastic work and your process as a writer. It s real exciting to talk to you today. Catherynne Valente: No problem, thanks for having me. How to Write a Novel in Three to Ten Days Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. I m extremely inspired by your story as a writer. I know you ve done a lot of stuff and I kinda wanna chat about, I guess maybe, for listeners who aren t familiar with you and your fantastic journey to where you are today. Can you kind of give us a little bit of your, just your origins as a writer and how you got your start? I know you’ve done a ton, a ton of stuff. Catherynne Valente: My very minor superhero origin story? Kelton Reid: Yeah. Catherynne Valente: My first novel came out when I was twenty five, so twelve years ago, and it was called The Labyrinth. It came out with Prime Books, which is a small press, independent press. I had really only just graduated from college a couple of years before and I had heard about NaNoWriMo, which was just, or nano-WRY-mo, I always say nano-REE-mo, and I know it’s wrong. It had just started. I was only in its second year and I had just graduated and I was working as a professional fortune teller in Rhode Island. Kelton Reid: Wow. Catherynne Valente: In a genuine, tall, gothic tower, called the Old Armory, in Newport, Rhode Island. I hadn’t really been writing a lot while I was in college, because I was in such an academically rigorous program that I just, I had sort of fallen away from it. Most of what I had done, up until writing that first novel, was poetry. And by most I mean all, except for one short story I was required to write for class. I had done poetry my whole life. But I wanted to see if I could write a novel. I didn’t know if I could, but I thought, “What do I have to lose? I’ll give it a shot.” It was October instead of November, and I didn’t want to wait. And I was 22 so I was full of piss and vinegar, and didn’t know I couldn’t do things yet. So I said, “Thirty days is for wimps. I’m gonna do it in ten.” Kelton Reid: Wow. Catherynne Valente: And I did. Which seems fully insane to me now. Between tarot readings I would pull out my laptop, my little, tiny laptop, and work on this book. And of course I hadn’t even thought about publishing it. I just wanted to see if it was something I could do. I submitted it to a few independent publishers, I knew it was too weird for a big New York publisher, and didn’t really get any … I got a lot of rejections saying, “This is the most beautiful thing we’ve ever read, and we’re definitely not publishing it.” So, at 22, I didn’t really know what to do with that. So I gave up for a while and just put it away. And then I was living in Japan, my then husband, ex-husband, was a naval officer, and I started a LiveJournal. One of the people that I got to know on LiveJournal was Nick Mamatas, and he had just published his first book, so I left a comment on his LiveJournal asking who I should be submitting to, not asking him to look at my work or anything, just, Who’s out there that likes to publish weird stuff? He gave me a list and I said, “Yeah, they’ve all rejected me. Except for Prime Books and they’re not open to submission.” He said, “No, they are. They just don’t want to read slush. So send me your book, and if I like it, I’ll send it on.” And I did, and he did. And I actually got an email from Jeff VanderMeer saying, “They’re going to publish your book. I want to write the introduction. So when they email you to tell you they’re going to publish your book, tell them you want me to write the introduction.” So that was sort of how that first book happened. It was all very much out of the blue. My second book, which I also published with Prime Books, was for the Blue Lake 3-Day Novel competition, in which you’re supposed to write a novel in three days, which is really a misnomer, because it’s supposed to be 30,000 words, which is not a novel by anybody’s definition. The prize for that contest is a publishing contract. I did not win that prize, but Prime published that second book. And then I gave them a manuscript, and, in an act of great magnanimousness, my editor said, “This is much more commercial than anything else you’re writing and I’m going to send it to my friend at Bantam.” Bantam Spectra. And that was the manuscript that became The Orphan’s Tales. Bantam Spectra took a year and a half to get back to me. They said, “We really like it, but we want to see the second book in the series. Which should be fine, because your editor says it’s almost done.” I had not begun this book. I don’t know where my editor got that idea. So my last four months in Japan, as I was preparing a transpacific move, was me trying so hard to finish this book. Just about setting foot back in America, I got an offer from Bantam, and that was my first big New York book. That’s sort of how it all got started back in the early 2000s. Kelton Reid: Geez, and that’s not even that long ago, but … Catherynne Valente: No, I mean, it is and it isn’t. It feels like a lot longer ago than it is, and it doesn’t in a very strange way. Time is weird once you get older. The Story Behind Her Four-Month Circus Book Tour and the Birth of a Viral Bestseller Kelton Reid: Sure, it have a hyperbolic effect at times, when you think of it like that. But, you’ve won or been nominated for every major award in your field, which means you’ve written across these different genres, primarily Fairyland novels, which you’re very well known for. You’ve got all these other fantastic speculative pieces, and you’ve published in multiple award-winning publications. You’ve just done so much, so the prolific nature of it is that it seems like you’re working all the time, or writing all the time. Or that may be just my impression, looking at your resume and all the stuff you’ve done. But anyway, the crowdfunded phenomenon, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, is fascinating to me, because it started on LiveJournal, you mentioned LiveJournal, and you crowdfunded it and it became this New York Times Bestselling book, that then Neil Gaiman blurbed. Can you talk a little about that? Catherynne Valente: Yeah, so I had been going on with Bantam Spectra for another book after The Orphan’s Tales, and unfortunately six weeks before that book was supposed to come out, it’s called Black Wednesday in publishing, the 2008 crash had happened and half of publishing in New York was laid off. So my editor called me and said she had been laid off. It actually turned out that Bantam Spectra ceased to exist that day. It was reorganized back into Random House. And so there was nobody there to pick up the phones. We knew, because you kinda get three strikes in New York. You have three books that fail, you’re gonna have a real hard time breaking in again. And The Orphan’s Tales hadn’t failed. It won a lot of awards and was very critically acclaimed, but it hadn’t had stellar sales. So we had a very strong feeling that if Palimpsest, which was the next book, failed, that was it. So I and my partner and a dear, dear friend of mine named S.J Tucker, who’s a singer-songwriter, decided to make it as much of a success as we could, with knowing that there was one person sitting in a secretarial desk at my publisher s. And there was just nobody to do the work. We got a blurb from Warren Ellis and there was just nobody in the office to tell them to put that on the cover of the book. That’s what happened to publishing during this time, and nobody could sell a book. Unless you were already this massive bestseller, there was no way you could sell a book at the end of 2008, beginning of 2009. So we toured from Maine to Los Angeles for four months, selling this book out of the back of S.J’s tour van. We had all these reading concerts. S.J did an album based on Palimpsest, and she would sing and I would read. We picked up performers everywhere. It was the circus. And everywhere we went, people kept asking me about this one part of Palimpsest, because the main character in that book, her favorite novel from when she was a little girl was The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It was not real. It was just meant to be a little character piece in Palimpsest. Which is a very adult book, by the way, with a capital A and three Xs. And the first paragraph from Fairyland is in Palimpsest and nothing else. But, as part of trying to do everything we could for this book, we made an alternate reality game, and one of the easter eggs was an Amazon order page for Fairyland, or of a cover that I had mocked up out of an Arthur Rackham drawing and everything. And so people were like, “They’re all out of stock on Amazon. Where do I get a copy of this?” I m like, “Well, you’ll notice the url still says CatherynneMValente.com. This is just something we post-modern kids do from time to time.” But people just kept asking where they could get it. And when I got home my partner had been laid off from two jobs, or got laid off from two jobs within six weeks of each other. And we had just moved to Maine not even six months before, and didn’t really have the money to move again to a better job. And so I was like, “Alright, well I’m gonna do a serialized novel then, on my website. And I’ll just put up a little donation button, and hopefully we can pay our rent and get some groceries this month.” And I went through my notes while I was looking for something that I didn’t think I would lose anything if I published it myself. Because back then, Kickstarter hadn’t started up yet, or if it had, it would have just started. Kindle was only just beginning to be a thing. There’s very much a feeling that if you self publish something, you were giving up the possibility of a big publisher. So I thought, “Well, nobody would ever publish a children’s book that was so connected to an adult book with a capital A and three Xs. So I’m not losing anything if I do Fairyland. And everybody wants to read Fairyland. I’ve been hearing about it for months now.” So I did. Her Love of Performance Catherynne Valente: Every Monday I posted a chapter of Fairyland and I recorded myself reading it, which actually turned out to be … I did it because I love to read out loud and I’m good at it, I was an actress most of my life, but it turns out that I have a lot of vision impaired readers who, for the first time, could take part in this viral thing, because they could listen to it. And I had a little donation button that said, “Give whatever you think the book is worth. If you don’t think it’s worth anything, don’t worry about it. If you don’t have any money, don’t worry about it, just enjoy it.” And it went viral within twenty four hours. Boing Boing was doing pieces on it, and io9 and Neil Gaiman linked to it. And it just became this huge thing that saved us, in a very very real and tangible way. I remember being at a convention right after it really hit, and somebody in the audience asked, “Well, you realize you can’t go back and change anything, because you’ve already posted it online.” And I said, “Oh, s***.” It had never occurred to me that that was gonna be a problem. I kept a couple weeks ahead of the posting schedule, but again, much like writing The Labyrinth in ten days instead of thirty, I just ran ahead with something without knowing that I couldn’t do it and it worked out incredibly well. It won this Web Fiction of the Decade Award, up against Girl Genius and Dr. Horrible and XKCD and all of these things which are far more well known than me, even in the organization that runs that, even in their roundup, they’re like, “We don’t understand what happened. We don’t know what this is, but apparently you do.” And it won the Andre Norton Award long before it, a year before, it ever came out in print, which is administered with the Nebula Awards for YA. Before it finished posting online, my agent found an amazing publisher for it, Feiwel and Friends, And it debuted at number eight on the New York Times list. It’s genuine magic. I still don’t really have … People ask me all the time how to do what I did, and the answer is, “I don’t even know if I could do what I did.” It was just a perfect storm of people feeling helpless and wanting to help, of me having a lot of cred from having published traditionally for so long, and a lot of adult readers who had never been able to share my work with their kids, and hopefully the quality of the work, and just who picked it up and ran with it. A lot of things had to come together to make it happen, and it was incredible. Kelton Reid: Wow, wow. It’s surely an inspiring story, to say the least. You’ve got this fan community that is dedicated, a large online following, in addition to everything you have out in the world. So, is the best place to find all of your works at your website, then? Catherynne Valente: Yeah, CatherynneMValente.com. Catherynne is spelled funny. Kelton Reid: It’s a great spelling. Catherynne Valente: Thank you. And I’m very active on Twitter at @CatValente. Kelton Reid: I’ll link to that. I’ll link to both. And of course, you’ve got a more recent development that’s not technically publishing, but it is a Patreon project that you just started up. It sounds like The Mad Fiction Laboratory, which you’re offering advice on the craft and business of writing there, which is really cool to see. So I’ll link to that as well. Did you want to say anything about that? Catherynne Valente: Yeah, so we’ve just started this. This is, like, the third day that it’s existed. And basically, it’s every month, I will be, for subscribers, patrons, I will be putting out an essay, as you say, about the craft and business of writing. But a funny one that makes it entertaining. Important to note, because a lot of those things are just so dry. I remember when I was first starting out just reading endless, endless articles about how to write a hit book and how to get an agent and how to write a good sentence. And most of them, like the best you could hope for, is if it was written in a very serious inspirational tone. And I would often feel exhausted after reading it, like, “Oh, I really want to be a writer, but oh man. I just feel so much pressure from ” Even the inspirational stuff just made me feel like failing at being what that person wanted me to be. So I wanted to write these essays that are very funny and lighthearted that still give that information and a little more motivational oomph. But also, patrons will be able to get excerpts of whatever I’m working on that month. So for example, I just released on the feed today, the first chapter of a book I’m working on that’s so secret, it hasn’t even been announced yet, and I can’t even tell you the title. The patrons know the title now and they can see the first chapter. Kelton Reid: Oh, that’s cool. Catherynne Valente: We haven’t even told anyone it exists yet. So a lot of really exclusive material will be available through the Patreon, as well as teaching people what I have learned after 13 years in the industry. So it’s a little bit of me, it’s a little bit of everyone else, and hopefully we can make mad science together. Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. I’m kind of imagining it being like the opposite of the James Patterson Teaches Writing MasterClass where he looks so serious and like, you know, these closeups of his forehead and … Catherynne Valente: Yeah, no, I’ll have bangs so you don’t see any of my forehead. But, I mean, writing is a serious business and it can be incredibly stressful, so I think that making it a fun as possible is the way to get things done. Because if you feel great pressure of creating literature for the ages, and then running a small business, which is what writing is. It’s really hard to come home from work at the end of the day and start up that mountain. Previews of Her Three Wildly Different Upcoming Projects Kelton Reid: For sure, for sure. Well, that’s great. We’ll definitely link to that and point listeners at that one. So you hinted at some secret stuff coming up, but I understand that you have three books coming out this year. Catherynne Valente: I do. They could not be more different, either. So in June, June 7th, The Refrigerator Monologues is coming out. Which is, I like to describe it as, “The vagina monologues for super heroes’ girlfriends.” So it basically takes these tropes of the girl in a refrigerator, which was coined by Gail Simone to describe all of these women in superhero comics who are murdered or maimed and raped and driven crazy and lose their powers, in order to further the plot line of the male hero, rather than that being important because it happened to them. So because I don’t have the right to Gwen Stacy or Harley Quinn or, you know, any of the characters that had this happen to them in comics, I had to just go ahead and create a completely cohesive, superhero cinematic universe of my own. No problem. And so, if you are a big comic book fan, you will have a thousand Easter eggs in this book and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, and if you’re not, they all stand alone. There’s a beautiful comic for each section done by Annie Wu, who’s an amazing comic artist, and I’m so, so excited for it. It’s so different than anything else I’ve ever done. I think I’ve dropped more F-bombs than I ever have in a book before. So I really hope people like that. I also have Mass Effect: Annihilation coming out. I have done a Mass Effect tie in book for the new game, Andromeda, that’s coming out in March. The book’s not coming out in March. The book’s coming out later in the year. And The Glass Town Game is coming out September 5th, which is my next middle grade book. And that one I describe as the Brontë children go to Narnia, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, Ann Brontë, and their brother Branwell. When they were little kids, before they became these famous writers, when they were little kids they were just like any other geeky kids that you know now, and they made this fantasy world that they kind of LARPed, RPGed. They created this world that’s build out of a child’s understanding of British politics and the Napoleonic Wars and Yorkshire fairytales and all of this crazy stuff. And they wrote in world magazines that were published by their characters. It’s incredible. We still have a great deal of it. And there’s just so much there. The idea of The Glass Town Game, Glass Town is the name of this world, is that they actually went there, that it’s a real place that they actually visited as children. That’ll be coming out in September. Kelton Reid: I love that. So you haven’t been very busy. Catherynne Valente: No, not at all, no. Mostly just sitting back and eating chips. The Umbrella Cover Museum that Doubles as Her Office Kelton Reid: All right, well I’m sure that listeners are eager to hear about your day to day productivity. So how much time, per day, are you getting ready to get into the mode or researching stuff before you start to write? Catherynne Valente: It really depends on whether I’m on deadline or not. I’m on a pretty tight deadline right now, so I will say it does take me quite a while to sort of get into the space. I live on a spooky island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. So I have my house, but my house is filled with animals and a partner and a million distractions. So there’s this place, I’m pointing, you can’t see ’cause it’s a podcast, that I’m pointing towards it, out my window, but down by the waterfront on the island is this little tiny building which, during the summer, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, is an Umbrella Cover Museum, or The Umbrella Cover Museum. It’s a museum for the little sacks that your umbrellas come in that you lose immediately and they all end up here in Maine. But she doesn’t live here. She just lives here in the summer, so for the rest of the year it’s my office. So I go down there, and usually I go down to my office and I spend at least an hour making myself coffee, poking around in my notes, posting to Twitter, and then I sort of ease into work. So it usually takes me an hour or so to get into the right space. On a deadline I’ll be down there every day. But when I don’t have a severe deadline, it’s pretty important for me, in my creative process, to have fallow periods where I’m not pumping out word counts everyday. So, I need to be reading other people’s books, I need to be watching new shows and movies and things like that. I never know how that kind of stuff is gonna feed in. That super secret project I was talking about, I ended up binge watching a bunch of British comedy panel shows, and it actually ended up helping me get into the right voice for this project in a huge way without ever meaning to. I just really like British panel comedy shows. And all that stuff is really important, so I don’t take the dictum of, “You must write every day,” completely seriously. For a creative mind, especially if you’re somebody who works on a lot of projects at once, like I do, I think that the time that you’re not working can be as valuable, as far as getting the juices flowing, as the time that you are working. Kelton Reid: Yeah, for sure. That creative process obviously involves those important steps of putting information out Putting information in, excuse me, the preparation and incubation phase, and then you kinda have the elimination and you sit down and you spit it out. Catherynne Valente: You are what you eat. Kelton Reid: Thank you so much for joining us for this half of a tour of the writer’s process. If you enjoy The Writer Files, please subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts to help other writers find us. And for more episodes or just to leave a comment or a question you can always drop by WriterFiles.FM and chat with me on Twitter at @KeltonReid. Cheers. Talk to you next week.

In this episode we interview the creators of the highly popular online comic Girl Genius, Kaja & Phil Foglio.  Phil had to step away soon after we started but my guest host, Puyallup librarian Bonnie Svitavsky, and I continued to talk with Kaja about mad scientists, the Tolkien-like Northwest, gender stereotypes and what makes a scientist.  We end with great advice for aspiring sci-fi writers. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.   Image Courtesy of Girl Genius http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/    

Topic: The Genius Zone: New Project & Updates! To learn more about how to make your business or product go viral click HERE! http://www.girlgeniusinventor.com/getviral -------------------------------------------------------------------------- P R O D U C T - A F F I L I A T E - L I N K S By clicking these links and buying the products you are helping to support my channel The Genius Zone and there are no additional costs to you. I appreciate your support! :) Shop Branded Gear http://www.redbubble.com/people/yourgirlgenius Best Books for Entrepreneurs Think and Grow Rich http://amzn.to/2kNXxfm The Law of Success http://amzn.to/2me28V3 How to Stop Worrying and Start Living http://amzn.to/2kNYdkU The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People http://amzn.to/2m9wCe9 Ego Is the Enemy http://amzn.to/2kO0KeM Before Happiness http://amzn.to/2lHjagz -------------------------------------------------------------------------- S H O R T - V I D E O - D E S C R I P T I O N Welcome to the Genius Zone where I give you business tips, tricks, and hacks in three minutes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- L E T' S - C O N N E C T ! W E B S I T E visit www.girlgeniusinventors.com P I N T E R E S T https://www.pinterest.com/g_genius/ Instagram www.instagram.com/thegeniuszonepodcast/ F A C E B O O K www.facebook.com/The-Genius-Zone-1663540490572600/ I N S T A G R A M https://www.instagram.com/thegeniuszonepodcast --------------------------------------------------------------------- V I D E O - O V E R V I E W --- Exciting things coming from Girl Genius! Vist www.howtohavecourage.com for more info! ---------------------------------------------------------- The Genius Zone: New Project & Updates! https://youtu.be/jVGQ89rHhMo

Help for successful entrepreneurs create, launch, and fund viral consumer products wby changing their business mindset. Topic: How To Fix A Failing Business. Your business is a sinking ship and your bailing water, what you can do to fix it right now. For more information vist www.girlgeniusinventors.com

Do you have your your goggles fastened? Are your firmly seated on your velocipede or dirigible? Tune in over the wireless as we talk about Steampunks! What is Steampunk (and is it over)? Who are they and what makes them... tick? Stay tuned (as we stoke the coals)! Everyone's a fan! Find more like this: [fanthropological.com](http://fanthropological.com) Find us on social media Twitter: [@thenickscast](http://twitter.com/thenickscast) Instagram: [@thenickscast](http://instagram.com/thenickscast) Facebook: [fb.com/thenickscast](http://fb.com/thenickscast) Youtube: [youtube.com/thenickscast](http://youtube.com/thenickscast) Email us about fandoms you want to hear about: [nick@thenickscast.com](mailto:nick@thenickscast.com) Play-by-play 00:00 - Cold Open 00:05 - Theme Song 00:25 - Introduction 01:10 - Who are Steampunks? What is Steampunk? 03:31 - Trivia 09:42 - Why Steampunk? 1:03:38 - Spotlight: [Soulless](http://yenpress.com/soulless/) and [Girl Genius](http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) 1:06:17 - Goodbye! 1:07:40 - Outtakes Citations "Steampunk = Mad Scientist Inventor [invention(steam x airship or metal man/baroque stylings) x (pseudo) Victorian setting] + progressive or reactionary politics x adventure plot" -Jeff Vandermeer, The Steampunk Bible ["Steampunk - Fanlore"](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Steampunk) ["Beyond Victoriana | A Multicultural Perspective on Steampunk"](https://beyondvictoriana.com/) ["Airship Ambassador »"](http://www.airshipambassador.com/) ["What is Steampunk, and is it over?"](http://www.themarysue.com/what-is-steampunk-and-is-it-over/) ["What the hell is Steampunk?"](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/william-higham/steampunk-what-the-hell-is-it_b_1015192.html) ["An Anthropological Perspective of the Steampunk Culture"](https://www.academia.edu/6727453/Steam_Culture_An_Anthropological_Perspective_of_the_Steampunk_Subculture) ["Steampunk: Reimagining Trash and Technology"](http://blog.castac.org/2013/08/steampunk-reimagining-trash-and-technology/) ["Does Steampunk have an ideology?"](http://drupagliassotti.com/2009/02/13/does-steampunk-have-an-ideology/) ["Does Steampunk have politics?"](http://drupagliassotti.com/2009/02/11/does-steampunk-have-politics/) ["Glue some gears on it (and call it Steampunk)"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA) ["Wikipedia - Steampunk"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk) ["Oxford Dictionaries - Steampunk"](http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/steampunk) ["Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds"](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/fashion/08PUNK.html) ["K.W. Jeter's Letter to Locus"](http://i.imgur.com/M7ema1o.png) ["Crafting Yesterday's Tomorrows: RetroFuturism, Steampunk, and the Problem of Making in the Twenty-First Century"](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2752/174967714X14111311182767) ["Steam Dream"](http://thephoenix.com//Boston/Life/61571-Steam-dream/) ["Steampunk Preppers.."](https://www.gunandgame.com/threads/steampunk-preppers.146495/) Vintage Tomorrows, Dir. Byrd McDonald (Netflix), 2015 Steampunk'd (Documentary), 2015, Game Show Network Credits Music: All music this week is courtesy of our very own, Nick G! Logo: ["Glasses"](https://thenounproject.com/term/glasses/132894) by [Anton Anuchin](https://thenounproject.com/antonwebium) used under [CC BY 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/) ["Steampunk"](https://thenounproject.com/term/steampunk/203055) by[Imangalieva Luiza](https://thenounproject.com/mangoluiza) used under [CC BY 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/) ["Gears"](https://thenounproject.com/term/gears/661364) by[David](https://thenounproject.com/kaxgyatso) used under [CC BY 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/)

Learn about who really is a genius!

In this discussion episode, Emma, Adam, Jimbles and Canberra Fan-Favourite Mark Bruckard discuss planning your games. How much is too much? What are the benefits of going with the flow compared to meticulous planning? Trigger Warning: Brief mention of Kidnapping. Mark's current LARP is Taverns and Temples. Learn more here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/770015596462969/?fref=ts We mention the webcomic Girl Genius, and it's excellent:www.girlgeniusonline.com

Jason Crawford from Fieldbook was interviewed by Shira Abel from Hunter & Bard on today's show. Jason gave some great insights on how Fieldbook did usability testing - resulting in a lot of unexpected changes before launching on Product Hunt. He also talks about the value of influencer marketing. Jason Crawford is the co-founder and CEO of Fieldbook. Interesting things he's done in the past include co-founding co-founding Kima Labs (sold to Groupon in 2012) and running Landing Page Optimization at Amazon. In a previous life, he built supercomputers for biochemistry applications at D. E. Shaw Research. To relax, he reads books about industrial history, and the webcomic Girl Genius. Shira Abel is the founder and CEO of Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com) a SaaS marketing and branding agency working with fast growing companies.

Lisa Yee is a popular writer of Young Adult fiction (including Millicent Min, Girl Genius. The Kidney Hypothetical: Or How to Ruin Your Life in Seven Days and many others) as well as the American Girl, 2016 Girl of the Year books. Lisa's admitted geekiness has served her well with the release this week of the first DC Super Hero Girls novel, Wonder Woman at Super Hero High. An early love for Batman (specifically a childhood crush on Robin) made her well-suited to enter the world of super heroes - but the path there is a circuitous one, including an early inclination to study law. And even once the decision was made to become a writer, it took years of writing copy, commercials, slogans and even Red Lobster menus (not kidding) before a touch of luck (and wizardry) set Lisa on her creative way... You can learn more about Lisa on her website LisaYee.com and follow her on Twitter @LisaYee1 Learn more about the DC Super Hero Girls here and the American Girl 2016 Girl of the Year books here.

Lisa Yee is a popular writer of Young Adult fiction (including Millicent Min, Girl Genius. The Kidney Hypothetical: Or How to Ruin Your Life in Seven Days and many others) as well as the American Girl, 2016 Girl of the Year books. Lisa's admitted geekiness has served her well with the release this week of the first DC Super Hero Girls novel, Wonder Woman at Super Hero High. An early love for Batman (specifically a childhood crush on Robin) made her well-suited to enter the world of super heroes - but the path there is a circuitous one, including an early inclination to study law. And even once the decision was made to become a writer, it took years of writing copy, commercials, slogans and even Red Lobster menus (not kidding) before a touch of luck (and wizardry) set Lisa on her creative way... You can learn more about Lisa on her website LisaYee.com and follow her on Twitter @LisaYee1 Learn more about the DC Super Hero Girls here and the American Girl 2016 Girl of the Year books here.

This week, on the Major Spoilers Podcast: It's the one before the big one, and two before the one after that! Celebrate the goofiness, with Girl Genius, Mars Attacks, Geek Girl, Orchid, and a bunch of other things, we know you'll find interesting. NEWS Jimmy Oslen is Jenny Olsen? LINK REVIEWS STEPHEN Mars Attacks Zombies vs. Robots Writer: Chris Ryall Artist: John Rouch Publisher: IDW Publishing Cover Price: $3.99 The only thing worse than Earth having an inter-dimensional stargate that led to the Zombies vs Robots catastrophe are Martians using one of their own to lead a sneak attack on Earth. But what will happen when zombies get a scent of those big, exposed Martian brains…? Zombie-Robot-Martian chaos from the co-creator of ZvR, Chris Ryall, and TMNT artist Andy Kuhn! [rating:3.5/5] MATTHEW GEEK-GIRL #0
Writer: Sam Johnson
Artist; Sally Stone-Thompson When ‘Little Miss Popular’ Ruby Kaye lands a pair of super-tech glasses (invented by brainiac college geek Trevor Goldstein) in a game of Strip Poker, she’s granted flight, super-strength, and – due to a flaw in the glasses’ programming – super-klutziness! And this is just the beginning of the changes the glasses will wreak on Ruby… Geek-Girl #0, is published by Actuality Press is available now in $2.50 Regular and Variant Editions and $1.00 Digital/Kindle Editions – along with Mr. Mash-Up #0 – at www.geekgirlcomics.com [rating:3.5/5] RODRIGO ORCHID #12 The fight for freedom ends here! Will the downtrodden Bridge People find the strength to succeed in their uprising against the oppressive elite? Will Orchid rally her vicious Valks to victory over the fascist dictator Tomo Wolfe? Answers to these questions and more in the stunning conclusion to Tom Morello’s fantastical science-fiction class-war epic! [rating:3.5/5] ZACH MIND MGMT #7
Writer: Matt Kindt
Artist: Matt Kindt We’ve learned some of the secrets of Henry Lyme; now get ready to meet the rest of MIND MGMT, beginning with the Ad Man! With the remains of MIND MGMT on Lyme’s tail, the former spy is forced to seek help from other defectors. [rating:3/5] Major Spoilers Poll of the Week Today, while driving through my sleepy little down, I spotted one of those “inspirational” window stickers proclaiming the three things you need in life. Do we really need three? Isn’t there more to life than that? And if there are more, is there one that is more important than the other? [poll id="270"] LINK Discussion: Girl Genius volume 01 Meet Agatha Clay, Transylvania Polygnostic University student with the drive to create... and the worst luck in the world! This collection reprints the first volume of the Hugo Award-winning series, now in full-color to match the rest of the collections! Contact us at podcast@majorspoilers.com Call the Major Spoilers Hotline at (785) 727-1939. A big Thank You goes out to everyone who downloads, subscribes, listens, and supports this show. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen to our ramblings each week. Tell your friends about the podcast, get them to subscribe and, be sure to visit the Major Spoilers site and forums.

This week, on the Major Spoilers Podcast: It's the one before the big one, and two before the one after that! Celebrate the goofiness, with Girl Genius, Mars Attacks, Geek Girl, Orchid, and a bunch of other things, we know you'll find interesting. NEWS Jimmy Oslen is Jenny Olsen? LINK REVIEWS STEPHEN Mars Attacks Zombies vs. Robots Writer: Chris Ryall Artist: John Rouch Publisher: IDW Publishing Cover Price: $3.99 The only thing worse than Earth having an inter-dimensional stargate that led to the Zombies vs Robots catastrophe are Martians using one of their own to lead a sneak attack on Earth. But what will happen when zombies get a scent of those big, exposed Martian brains…? Zombie-Robot-Martian chaos from the co-creator of ZvR, Chris Ryall, and TMNT artist Andy Kuhn! [rating:3.5/5] MATTHEW GEEK-GIRL #0
 Writer: Sam Johnson
 Artist; Sally Stone-Thompson When ‘Little Miss Popular’ Ruby Kaye lands a pair of super-tech glasses (invented by brainiac college geek Trevor Goldstein) in a game of Strip Poker, she’s granted flight, super-strength, and – due to a flaw in the glasses’ programming – super-klutziness! And this is just the beginning of the changes the glasses will wreak on Ruby… Geek-Girl #0, is published by Actuality Press is available now in $2.50 Regular and Variant Editions and $1.00 Digital/Kindle Editions – along with Mr. Mash-Up #0 – at www.geekgirlcomics.com [rating:3.5/5] RODRIGO ORCHID #12 The fight for freedom ends here! Will the downtrodden Bridge People find the strength to succeed in their uprising against the oppressive elite? Will Orchid rally her vicious Valks to victory over the fascist dictator Tomo Wolfe? Answers to these questions and more in the stunning conclusion to Tom Morello’s fantastical science-fiction class-war epic! [rating:3.5/5] ZACH MIND MGMT #7
 Writer: Matt Kindt
 Artist: Matt Kindt We’ve learned some of the secrets of Henry Lyme; now get ready to meet the rest of MIND MGMT, beginning with the Ad Man! With the remains of MIND MGMT on Lyme’s tail, the former spy is forced to seek help from other defectors. [rating:3/5] Major Spoilers Poll of the Week Today, while driving through my sleepy little down, I spotted one of those “inspirational” window stickers proclaiming the three things you need in life. Do we really need three? Isn’t there more to life than that? And if there are more, is there one that is more important than the other? [poll id="270"] LINK Discussion: Girl Genius volume 01 Meet Agatha Clay, Transylvania Polygnostic University student with the drive to create... and the worst luck in the world! This collection reprints the first volume of the Hugo Award-winning series, now in full-color to match the rest of the collections! Contact us at podcast@majorspoilers.com Call the Major Spoilers Hotline at (785) 727-1939. A big Thank You goes out to everyone who downloads, subscribes, listens, and supports this show. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen to our ramblings each week. Tell your friends about the podcast, get them to subscribe and, be sure to visit the Major Spoilers site and forums.

Again we hit the road for another weekend of adventure. This time, we saw cool costumes, listened to interesting people, and paid sales tax for everything we bought.Steam Con - http://www.steamcon.orgGirl Genius - http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.phpAbney Park - http://www.abneypark.com/Rasputina - http://www.rasputina.com/Unwoman - http://unwoman.com/Veronique Chevalier (Weird Val) - http://weirdval.com/Professor Elemental - http://www.professorelemental.comDishonored - http://www.dishonored.com/Amnesia: The Dark Decent - http://www.amnesiagame.com/Cogs - http://www.cogsgame.com/Machinarium - http://machinarium.netSpiral Knights - http://www.spiralknights.com/Hosts:Devin Hunter - http://goo.gl/btHDLKathryn MarvinMusic Credits:Opening: "The Dice are Thrown" by My Free Mickey - http://ccmixter.org/people/myfreemickeyClosing: "Behold the Machine" by Vernian Process - http://www.vernianprocess.comDownload: http://archive.org/download/NeatStuffPodcast-Episode15/Neat-EP15.mp3

In which John and I talk about webcomics and I go on at length about one of the best -- which is also one of the most frustrating.

From early work in Dragon Magazine to First Comics, DC to Girl Genius, we have the pleasure of speaking with cartoonist Phil Foglio in anticipation of his appearance at this weekend's Stumptown Comics Fest! (55:53)

In our second NYCC 2009 special podcast, Phil Foglio joins us to discuss Girl Genius, his transition from print to web comics, and his long career as a cartoonist; and illustrator Nathan Fox joins us to talk about Fluorescent Black and the abundance of comics creators in Kansas City.

This is the first of five episodes recorded on location at WorldCon 66 in the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Brandon, Dan, and Howard are joined by Phil and Kaja Foglio, and we discuss writing for webcomics... no, wait... writing for "sequential picture-assisted storytelling." Phil and Kaja are the creators of Girl Genius, the web's foremost hunk' o' steampunk -- and we here at Writing Excuses are big fans. During our short time together they help us understand the nuances of creating Girl Genius pages, writing to the outline of the story, and crafting their dialog. The Foglios (and Howard) have a little bit of advice for folks looking to start their own webcomic, too. (Mmmmm.... Grizzly Bear Soup!)

This is the first of five episodes recorded on location at WorldCon 66 in the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Brandon, Dan, and Howard are joined by Phil and Kaja Foglio, and we discuss writing for webcomics… no, wait… writing for “sequential picture-assisted storytelling.” Phil and Kaja are the creators of Girl Genius, the web’s … Continue reading Writing Excuses Episode 28: Writing for Webcomics with Phil and Kaja Foglio →

Do you have your your goggles fastened? Are your firmly seated on your velocipede or dirigible? Tune in over the wireless as we talk about Steampunks! What is Steampunk (and is it over)? Who are they and what makes them... tick? Stay tuned (as we stoke the coals)! Everyone's a fan! Find more like this: [fanthropological.com](http://fanthropological.com) Find us on social media Twitter: [@thenickscast](http://twitter.com/thenickscast) Instagram: [@thenickscast](http://instagram.com/thenickscast) Facebook: [fb.com/thenickscast](http://fb.com/thenickscast) Youtube: [youtube.com/thenickscast](http://youtube.com/thenickscast) Email us about fandoms you want to hear about: [nick@thenickscast.com](mailto:nick@thenickscast.com) Play-by-play 00:00 - Cold Open 00:05 - Theme Song 00:25 - Introduction 01:10 - Who are Steampunks? What is Steampunk? 03:31 - Trivia 09:42 - Why Steampunk? 1:03:38 - Spotlight: [Soulless](http://yenpress.com/soulless/) and [Girl Genius](http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) 1:06:17 - Goodbye! 1:07:40 - Outtakes Citations "Steampunk = Mad Scientist Inventor [invention(steam x airship or metal man/baroque stylings) x (pseudo) Victorian setting] + progressive or reactionary politics x adventure plot" -Jeff Vandermeer, The Steampunk Bible ["Steampunk - Fanlore"](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Steampunk) ["Beyond Victoriana | A Multicultural Perspective on Steampunk"](https://beyondvictoriana.com/) ["Airship Ambassador »"](http://www.airshipambassador.com/) ["What is Steampunk, and is it over?"](http://www.themarysue.com/what-is-steampunk-and-is-it-over/) ["What the hell is Steampunk?"](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/william-higham/steampunk-what-the-hell-is-it_b_1015192.html) ["An Anthropological Perspective of the Steampunk Culture"](https://www.academia.edu/6727453/Steam_Culture_An_Anthropological_Perspective_of_the_Steampunk_Subculture) ["Steampunk: Reimagining Trash and Technology"](http://blog.castac.org/2013/08/steampunk-reimagining-trash-and-technology/) ["Does Steampunk have an ideology?"](http://drupagliassotti.com/2009/02/13/does-steampunk-have-an-ideology/) ["Does Steampunk have politics?"](http://drupagliassotti.com/2009/02/11/does-steampunk-have-politics/) ["Glue some gears on it (and call it Steampunk)"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA) ["Wikipedia - Steampunk"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk) ["Oxford Dictionaries - Steampunk"](http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/steampunk) ["Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds"](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/fashion/08PUNK.html) ["K.W. Jeter's Letter to Locus"](http://i.imgur.com/M7ema1o.png) ["Crafting Yesterday's Tomorrows: RetroFuturism, Steampunk, and the Problem of Making in the Twenty-First Century"](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2752/174967714X14111311182767) ["Steam Dream"](http://thephoenix.com//Boston/Life/61571-Steam-dream/) ["Steampunk Preppers.."](https://www.gunandgame.com/threads/steampunk-preppers.146495/) Vintage Tomorrows, Dir. Byrd McDonald (Netflix), 2015 Steampunk'd (Documentary), 2015, Game Show Network Credits Music: All music this week is courtesy of our very own, Nick G! Logo: ["Glasses"](https://thenounproject.com/term/glasses/132894) by [Anton Anuchin](https://thenounproject.com/antonwebium) used under [CC BY 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/) ["Steampunk"](https://thenounproject.com/term/steampunk/203055) by[Imangalieva Luiza](https://thenounproject.com/mangoluiza) used under [CC BY 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/) ["Gears"](https://thenounproject.com/term/gears/661364) by[David](https://thenounproject.com/kaxgyatso) used under [CC BY 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/)