LeVar Burton Reads "Open House on Haunted Hill"!

A dream came true this week, for both and author and for his haunted house.

You probably know my little story, "Open House on Haunted Hill." But you've never heard it like this. It is a thrill to present the newest episode of the LeVar Burton Reads podcast, in which he narrates the full story of 133 Poisonwood Avenue.

LeVar Burton is an iconic of literacy to me. He's one of the first adults I remember ever even talking about reading, much less showing excitement for it. Reading Rainbow was a big thing to me. It was later I learned what an incredible actor he was. Most of my friends have been gushing that Geordi from Next Gen likes my stories.

The tenderness and depth of appreciation for storytelling are traits that make him a perfect narrator for this story. I've been looking forward to hearing it for weeks.

You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts. Let me know what you think!

The episode is on Apple Podcasts here.

The episode is on Google Podcasts here.
 

The episode is on Stitcher here.

"The Lie Misses You" is live at Cast of Wonders!

I've got a Thanksgiving gift for everybody: my short story "The Lie Misses You" is up for free today at Cast of Wonders!

This is a story from the point of view of a lie. The lie wants to help her family; she doesn't remember why her family began telling her, or why they ignore her now. She lingers over the things they can't confront. I circled around this story idea for years before finally grabbing onto it and putting it to paper. It was a protagonist I couldn't leave alone.

You can have the story however you like. Cast of Wonders had posted the full text as well as producing a podcast of the story narrated by Athena Haq.

Want to read?

Want to listen?

They've got you covered. Simply click here.

This is my third story at the Escape Artists network. Previously they ran "Wet" at Podcastle and "Under the Rubble" at Pseudopod. I'm so happy for another of my stories to find its home with them.

"Under the Rubble" is live at Pseudopod!

I'm pleased to announce that "Under the Rubble" has been published over at Pseudopod! It's a Horror story about two people trapped under debris following an earthquake. Except one of them doesn't believe it was an earthquake at all.

They've given it a full podcast adaptation, with a soundtrack and narration by Marguerite Kenner. The proprietor of the podcast network, Alasdair Stuart, also gave me a generous introduction, and an insightful response to the story as an outro. I couldn't be more delighted.

I have to thank my beta readers who have looked at this story of the years since I first had the idea: Samari Smith, Jemma Mayer, Cassie Willaims, Nat Sylva, and Randall Nichols. This story would not be readable without them.

To hear "Under the Rubble," click here and stream or download it to your heart's content.

Short Story Publications, and a Bonus!

If only all my posts could have this much good news. The editors at Podcastle just produced their latest episode, which includes an audio version of my short story, "Wet." You can listen to it for free right here.

"Wet" follows the unusual friendship between an immortal and a ghost stranded in Arizona. This is a reprint of a 2014 story of mine, originally appearing in Urban Fantasy Magazine.

Daily Science Fiction has also posted its Table of Contents for October, and I have a brand new story appearing for them on October 27th. "The Terrible" is about a supervillain who takes his heroine for granted. It's my tribute to Wonder Woman.

And just before Halloween, SF Signal will be running a Mind Meld on children's movies that terrified us. I'll be contributing, but if you want to know what beloved classic scared the crap out of me for an entire decade, you'll have to click back over in two weeks.

Last but not least, I've also been invited to a panel at Saratoga's World Fantasy Convention. I'll be joining expert authors for an hour of Monsters as Devourers - figuring out what human-eating  monsters have always wanted out of us.

Let's celebrate by shipping Jason and Sadako, by artist Bryan Lee. 'tis the season.

 

Man of Steel Podcast and Woman of Steel Fundraiser

Today's offering is a twofer of links:

Firstly, the first-ever one-man Consumed Podcast. Because Nat is on set and Max is in California, I ventured alone to Man of Steel. It's a shorter episode than usual, where I have to go give it up for Snyder and Cavill outperforming my expectations. There's also a short Spoiled segment at the end, arguing against the film's one major misstep. I can't spoil what that is, though, unless you listen.

You can download Consumed: Man of Steel
right here.

This episode is dedicated to Vira Gunn, our second link. Vira is a wonderful young woman who I've had the privilege of knowing since I was in high school. She has struggled with serious health problems for much of her life and fought through every one of them. But recently her neurological disorder mounted and she suffered a catastrophic shunt failure, requiring three surgeries in three weeks. It's wiped out her savings, her family can't afford to visit her, and she is in far too much pain to deal with this.

Because I've known her for over a decade, I can vouch that this cause is very real. You should not have to stay up worrying about money when the nurses are demanding you sleep post-op. I have been stranded without financial help post-op and it bankrupted me. She does not deserve this. We can help her.

So if you can donate anything, it's welcome. She has a PayPal account set up right on her Tumblr. If you can't afford anything right now, you can tweet this, share this on Facebook or Google+ or Reddit or wherever the internet is found.

Thank you for reading, and listening. I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Consumed Podcast 17: Star Trek Into Darkness

The Consumed Podcast rose from the dead this weekend for a double-feature. Max Cantor and I gathered in New York for the opening of Star Trek Into Darkness and spent over half an hour hashing Bad Robot's franchise. We start off questioning if this is really a reboot, which leads to the many ways the company has changed the franchise.

But the big stuff lies in the Spoiled section, where we get to discuss the mystery villain, villainy in Star Trek, and most interesting of all, Into Darkness as an action movie that attempts to condemn revenge and violence. It's a conversation I'd love to expand on. You can join us in the Comments and download the MP3 of the podcast right here.

The second half of our double-feature, discussing Iron Man 3, ought to be out in the next week. With good luck the podcast may get up and running routinely afterward. We're deeply looking forward to some episodes about Naoki Urasawa's Monster, which you can watch for free on Hulu.

Consumed #16: Borderlands 2, Tig Notaro, Homestuck & More

Consumed #16 is live and up for free download this week, sporting our flashy new theme song by The Clark Powell Lounge Band.

This podcast is a crunchy sandwich of content, with a loaf of Borderlands 2 and Homestuck, discussing absurdist SciFi comedy and why even the juvenile still entertains. But the meat in the center are weirder topics, like the exquisite violence of Mark of the Ninja, and Tig Notaro's brave and staggering stand-up comedy about her battle with cancer.

It also includes at least sixty seconds of book talk as I try to explain Tom Holt's Blonde Bombshell.

You can download Consumed Episode # 16 right here.

Consumed Podcast #14 is Live: Locke Lamora, Jo Walton, Battlestar Galactica, more

For the second episode in a row we managed to get all three hosts together: Nathanael Sylva, Max Cantor, and myself. This time we had an insane jumble of topics, two thirds of which we cut right before air. Still, we managed to cover a lot of distance, including the most book talk the podcast has ever seen, covering Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, Jo Walton's Among Others, and Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House.

Eventually we shift to the television shows Max and Nat have been binging on, particularly Battlestar Galactica and Justice League Unlimited. Surprisingly, it's the superhero cartoon that gets more praise for its depth, while Max struggles to balance the narrative achievements in Battlestar against its racial and plotting issues.

We saved the weirdest part for last, discussing Frog Fractions, a free videogame that starts out parodying educational games and becomes a genre-bending work of art that I could only compare to Tristram Shandy. I'm not even sure how much Max left in of this conversation, because it goes to a lot of paces, including self-publishing, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, how pigeonholded Romance is, whether editors help or hinder creativity, and... well, you should really just hear it.

You can download the episode for free right here.

Consumed Podcast 14: The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey

It's a particularly polarizing episode of Consumed this week as all three of us congregate over The Hobbit. There's high praise and analysis for its visual style, Howard Shore's score and many points in the acting, but also heavy questions of pacing and how the surprising number of fight scenes are handled. I seem to have stunned Max with one claim about "amateurish" elements toward the middle of the podcast. We get deep into it, so if you want a fix for Peter Jackson's latest, then this is the podcast for you.

You can download Consumed #14: The Hobbit right here.

Consumed Podcast #13: Wreck It Ralph and Games Bonanza

It's been a long time since all three of us were in studio together, but that's our Thanksgiving gift to you! Nat, Max and I gathered to discuss a great range of topics. What stories exactly won't mainstream fiction tell? Is there a market for live-action short film? What drives an artist to compare his working conditions to the Holocaust?

And somehow this all revolved around videogames. We started with Wreck-It Ralph, which is adorable and quite appealing for audiences with any level of familiarity to old games. From there, we stretched into a documentary on videogames development and how nuts it drives programmers, then sampled the fruits of their labors with some of the incredibly unusual approaches to games available on Steam and XBLA. Nat winds up calling one of them "Portal as written by Douglas Adams." Which was it? Click through this link to find out!

Consumed Podcast: Horror Edition

Delayed by long travel times and Hurricane Sandy, John and Max finally got together in the wee hours of Halloween to discuss some great and accessible Horror. In particular, three unusual takes on staples of dark fiction: serial killers, vampires, and ever-loving zombies.

First was The Perfect Host, starring David Hyde Pierce as the world's most polite hostage (and possibly a terrifying murderer). If that movie was too cheeky, then they moved to John Ajvide Lindqvist's breathtaking vampire novel, Let the Right One In, and its bar-setting film adaptations. The podcast closed with discussion of the phenomenon around The Walking Dead - the little indie comic that turned into a blockbuster TV show, a novel, two videogames, and quite possibly a movie, all in shockingly short order. The Walking Dead is all about human morality tested by the zombie apocalypse, and the boys discussed how Telltale's videogame adaptation relishes in putting the hard choices into your hands.

So, feel like a little scary chat? Then you can get the latest Consumed right here.

Consumed Presents: Paranormal Activity 4

Consumed rises from the grave! I managed to browbeat Max Cantor into joining me for Paranormal Activity 4 this weekend, and we recorded a fresh podcast about it last night.

If you know, you know I love Found Footage flicks. They are my cinematic opium, and Paranormal Activity has been my favorite annual dealer until now. PA4 is nearly incoherent, and Max bravely joins me in diving into how it falls apart, from lack of innovation with their cinematography and scares, to just failing to deliver a plot even though it’s on fictional rails. If you like rants, you’ll enjoy Max swearing he’ll never pay to see the fifth movie. Me? I know I’m doomed to repeat it.

You can download this episode from Consumed’s officialwebsite right here.

If enough listeners enjoy it, we’ll do a bigger retrospective episode on the franchise. It seems only fair to give it some praise, especially with how many times I’ve re-watched the first film.

Dark Knight Rises Podcast

So back on July 21, Nat Sylva and I hit the premiere of Dark Knight Rises, rushed home and recorded the timeliest podcast for Dark Knight Rises imaginable. It was comprehensive, covering the scripting, acting, ties to the previous films, the score, the handling of new and old characters - we were pretty proud of ourselves.

Today, on September 15th, the episode finally went on-god-damned-line.

It's been funny watching the relevance of this episode languish, as the opening weekend passed, and then the movie slipped from first place, and then from the top ten movies in the country, and is now well on its way to DVD. I could almost record a podcast about how doomed this podcast was.

Now, I don't want to point fingers (lies, I really do), but this is finally out of the archives. Spoiler-heavy, an in-depth discussion of one of the summer's biggest movies and a retrospective on Nolan's revival of the Batman franchise. You can download the episode totally free right here.

Consumed: Walter Lewin, R. Scott Bakker, and Saint's Row The Third

Today the second and final of the "lost episodes" of the Consumed Podcast is up and available. It's our most eclectic mix of topics ever, and features one of my favorite pieces of media in years.

That media is Saint's Row the Third, a videogame from THQ and Volition. In many ways it is what ignorant people think Grand Theft Auto is: loud, crass, violent, anarchic and shameless. It pulls the rare trick of taking slews of potentially offensive material and turning them into something lovable; it's an open-world game so absurd that everyone I've shown it to has fallen in love with it. There's just no other game out there that has a giant purple stuffed bunny lashed to a whaling ship as a lure so a gang of drug-running luchadores can jump you. The podcast discussion gets particularly fun when we realize this game passes not only The Bechdel Test, but tests for representations of transgender characters.

On the more serious side, we also have two books to discuss. The first is R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before, a Fantasy novel that Max actually enjoyed for once. Bakker's philosophy and psychology makes us question recent trends in characters who know or manipulate too much to remain believable, and the tenuous relationship between skepticism and religion worlds with bizarre and inscrutable events.

Lastly Nat provided us a copy of Walter Lewin's gorgeous For the Love of Physics, which may be the best science-advocate book I've read. If you haven't seen Lewin's energetic lectures on Youtube, then you should check them out (just as soon as you give our podcast a listen). He begs comparisons to Hawking, Sagan and Tyson, and we ponder what the best ways are to teach Physics, the science that seems to turn the most number of people giddy, while still scaring off so many others.

They are about as different as three topics could possibly get, and yet it's one of our best podcasts. A big pat on the back to Max for digging this one out of the archives and polishing it up. You can get the episode for free right here.

Consumed 8: Skyrim, Dark Souls, Secret of Kells &

The latest episode of Consumed is up today. It's actually not the latest, but a behemoth "lost" episode from several months ago. It manages to transcend time by leading in with Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and discussing particular problems that game has that Dawnguard hasn't fixed. Is it just generic Fantasy? Why are blockbuster games so entrenched in world-building that was trite in prose decades ago? And when does filling out a giant world cause creativity to collapse and eat itself?

Nat Sylva and Max Cantor considerately waded through all these issues, and then into Dark Souls, Skyrim's big competition that's due to leap from console to PC soon. Max has some inspired ranting on why the two franchises are nothing alike, and why he can't stop playing it. Even though this is a lost episode from months ago, Max actually still hasn't stopped.

The most provocative topics came from our discussion of The Secret of Kells, a beautifully animated film with some serious trouble handling race. We debated token roles in media, as well as the popular theme of "HERO THINKS TRADITION IS BAD" and how ambitious such writing rarely gets.


We were also joined by educator Ross Dillon, since he had keys to the apartment and Max hasn't taken any self-defense classes. Ross begged us to discuss Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the show too smart for its own good that 30 Rock trampled to death a few years ago. It had a strong heart, and we discussed how the series had aged since its brief run, and the incredibly gutsy elements the cast managed to get onto network television. The stance on Cocaine V. Drunk Driving is still stunning to me.

You can download the podcast or shout feedback right here.

Consumed Episode 7: Legend of Korra, Diablo 3

Consumed Episode 7 is up today. It features the full crew of Nat Sylva, Max Cantor and myself, covering two primary topics and some new experiments in media.

The first big topic is a season round-up of Nickelodeon’s The Legend of Korra. We scratched our heads over the ending, but have to praise an excellent piece of animation. Or at least, two of us did. One of us may have ditched out in the first episode.

The second topic is Diablo 3 and its dreaded Battle.net. Having experienced so many ridiculous errors and played so many hours of a fun game, I have a lot to say on it. We got into my favorite underlying topic as well: if Diablo 3 is a great game, or just a competent execution on a genre that is always fun when done competently.

Korra and Diablo sandwich our experiments: each of the hosts brought something they deeply want our audience to watch, and each of us got sixty seconds to convince you. I won't spoil mine, but I will promise that it allowed me to discuss Goku Vs. The Terminator. Please vote in the Comments on which thing (or things) you were actually swayed to check out.

You can get Consumed Episode 7 for free right here.

Consumed Podcast: Prometheus

Max Cantor and I met up for the Prometheus premiere this weekend. I'm a tremendous admirer of Ridley Scott's Alien, and Max is a terribly nice guy, so naturally we held our breaths for about an hour of run-time before murmuring that something was wrong. Was it the screenplay, the pacing, the direction, the revelations...?

Sitting intimately around a single mic, we discussed the movie's many opportunities and failures. About halfway in we broke for an impromptu Spoiled, so if you're desperate to hear about the movie without discovering its deepest secrets, you can break there. I guarantee you'll want to stay for the naked Fassbender ramble.

Consumed 6 is available for free right here. It's got all the shallow characters and bloody butt cheeks you could ask for.

Consumed Episode 5: Cabin in the Woods, Fez and The Warded Man

Consumed Episode 5 is out today! It’s a free MP3 download with some of the farthest-reaching discussions on any of our podcasts yet.

For me, the most interesting conversation came from Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man. It's a rare Fantasy novel that hits the ground running, in its case opening with a nocturnal demon attack. It led me to ask my co-hosts why Speculative Fiction prose usually starts out so slow, low-action and thick with exposition. We considered George R.R. Martin, N.K. Jemisin, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling, and explored why films and videogames in the same genres usually start off much faster. We’d love your thoughts on this topic in the Comments over there.

We also discussed the mind-bending puzzle game, Fez, and why so many people either adore it or walk away from it (us podcasters were split on the love it/leave it). We wrapped up with Cabin in the Woods, the meta-Horror film which seems destined to be overlooked this year. While the conversation eventually devolves into self-censorship to avoid spoilers, I recommend listening just to hear me embarrass myself trying to describe Anna Hutchinson making out with a stuffed wolf head, and whether we can talk actor-host Nat Sylva into doing the same.

You can download the episode and leave feedback right through this link.

Mass Effect 3 Podcast

The new episode of Consumed is online, featuring myself, Nat Sylva and Max Cantor. This week's episode is explicitly and entirely devoted to discussing Mass Effect 3. There's a controversy around the ending, but we approach the game holistically, discussing:

-Squad choices and New Vs. Old characters
-Writing, and the game's problem with urgency in a crisis-plot
-Rushed development cycle and DLC
-The altered conversation system
-Multiplayer, and getting eaten alive in it
-The incredible ambition of the series overall
-And hey, that game has a beginning too.

Other topics beg not to be spoiled here. It's about as detailed a discussion of ME3 as you'll find on the internet. I don't think there was anything we all agreed upon.

You can download Spoiled: Mass Effect 3 here.

As a bonus, we included three editions of the podcast with three different endings. How different are they? That depends how different you thought Mass Effect's endings were.