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ISBW #380: Coming up for air // Every book is your first

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I recover from the latest depression cloud and enter into pre-vacation frenzy. This one is late, and the next one will be two weeks from this one. (August 14)

Ditch Diggers will be on hiatus for most of August, as I’m traveling and Matt is moving, and we’re both super frantic busy.

But here I recover from my latest short depressive period, and talk about why writing my new book is hard. Every book is your first, according to Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman.

If you’re going to WorldCon, let me know! And come to the live Ditch Diggers show on Thursday!

And HEY preorder my book cause it’s awesome!

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Ditch Diggers #44: Gavia Baker-Whitelaw and Freelance Ditches

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How to dig freelance ditches

And what are freelance ditches anyway?
Digging Freelance Ditches: Sniper with doberman

  • Mur and Matt come to you live from Morgan Freeman’s Pop Culture Popcorn Boutique, and Mur actually lets Matt do the intros.
  • The Ditch Diggers welcome special guest co-host, staff writer for The Daily Dot and pop culture analyst extraordinaire, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw!
  • Everyone immediately agrees that Gavia’s mom would make the best agent ever, and that would also be her pro-wrestling gimmick.
  • Gavia talks about being a full-time writer for The Daily Dot and her areas of expertise.
  • Matt asks Gavia what makes a good cultural criticism writer, and Gavia does her best to answer such a broad question.
  • Gavia talks about how livejournal fanfiction led to her current career, how she selects topics to cover, and the life of a piece at The Daily Dot.
  • Gavia talks about her side project The Rec Center and being steeped in fandom as a writer.
  • The validity of liquids in sandwiches, and the validity of fanfiction as a writing medium.
  • Twitter Q&A, including how a book, movie, etc. gets the attention of a market like The Daily Dot.

Links of interest:

Note: Mur will be appearing at WorldCon in Helsinki in a few weeks and doing a LIVE Ditch Diggers with writer and publisher Alasdair Stuart standing in for Matt (with Matt’s approval, naturally. We’re not staging a coup to replace Matt even though Al does have a better accent.) See my program here!

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Podcasts, Projects

ISBW #379: Those Down Days

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The bad thing about being on a regular recording schedule again is I have to podcast even when I don’t feel like it. So sometimes it’s just about the mental health. This is a short, low energy podcast, but I’m really fine, trust me. Just had a bad start to the week with migraine and super low energy. I’m doing much better now, but figured I should post this because I try to be honest with the look inside a writer’s life, and sometimes there are days like this.

Mentioned: The War of Art.

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Ditch Diggers #43: Care and Feeding of your Author

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We are together again talking about care and feeding of the author inside you! Sadly, with technical difficulties.

Care and Feeding Show Notes

  • Fuck hemingway. And a pierMatt and Mur come to you live, actually in-person (well, the two of them are, anyway) from Morgan Freeman’s Outside OBGYN Clinic.
  • Matt’s fictional uterus and a brief history of why we’re talking about it on this episode.
  • Actually, Matt and Mur are at their yearly retreat in the backwoods of Ohio with friends and family, several of whom are in the audience during the recording of this episode.
  • Matt and Mur introduce the topic of this episode, “the care and feeding of your author” (a topic suggested by Matt’s fiancée, Nikki).
  • How writers and the writing industry/community emphasize doing the work over taking care of yourself, physically.
  • Mur talks about how we romanticize the Hemingway-esque and Poe-esque stereotypes of the alcohol-soaked, depressed author and why that is obviously wrong and harmful.
  • Self-care, how alcohol and writing don’t mix, and Matt’s unabashed love for Mott’s for Tots apple juice and how it can replace the former habit.
  • Mur and Matt talk about smoking and drug abuse, citing writers like Joe Ezsterhaus and Stephen King as examples of how both invariably go disastrously wrong when you mix them with your career.
  • The episode is cut abruptly short, and Mur explains why (and offers apologies, although we did the best we could).

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Podcasts, Projects

ISBW #377: Brain Weasels

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I know I know I know I always say these supportive things but sometimes it’s hard to listen to myself. Recently – without realizing it! – I’ve been suffering from “first draft must be perfect” syndrome, and had to step back and actually look at myself and what I was doing.

First drafts don’t have to be perfect. Write it 100x on the board.

bart-simpson-writes-first-drafts
Created at http://www.addletters.com/bart-simpson-generator.htm#.WUgG2tgzpQM

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Ditch Diggers #42: The Freelancer’s Rebuttal Guide

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Foxes fight, quote from show, rebuttal guideIt’s time for some role playing and rebuttal action as Matt and Mur bring you some FINE acting shit.

Rebuttal Guide Show Notes

  • Matt and Mur come to you live from Morgan Freeman’s Debate Club practice room, and Mur remembers to say the show’s tagline for once.
  • The Ditch Diggers try to decide whether this episode takes place two weeks or five minutes after the last episode.
  • Matt asks Mur what she’s been up to, and the answer somehow involves John Without Garfield (edit- it’s actually Garfield Minus Garfield.)
  • Mur talks about being in the oft recurring “proposal period” of a writer’s career, sending pitches out for multiple projects including novels and interactive media, hating outlining, and learning new skills.
  • Matt talks about finally finishing his first (anti) epic fantasy novel, working on the final Sin du Jour novella, reaching the end of his current book contract, and what comes next (including a middle grade novel).
  • Mur unintentionally segues into the topic of today’s show, which is The Freelance Writer’s Rebuttal Guide, a Matt Wallace Technology (Mur makes fun of Matt for this last part, and rightfully so).
  • Matt and Mur role-play The Freelance Writer’s Rebuttal Guide, with Mur’s snarky and insightful annotations throughout.
  • Matt encourages freelancers to submit new scenarios to the Guide, which is different from emailing Ditch Diggers questions (Mur explains).
  • Email questions! Topics include freelance writers and social media, publishing rights, and how to best keep track of pending submissions.

Other links of note:

Garfield Minus Garfield, October 2016
Garfield Minus Garfield, a particularly creepy one.

As always, Matt and Mur shill their books, GREEDY PIGS and RENCOR and SIX WAKES respectively, and remind Hugo voting listeners Ditch Diggers is up for best fancast, so vote for us!

Affiliate links to our books!

Books, Meta, News, Podcasts, Projects

Site Housekeeping

I was on vacation last week and missed posting the latest ISBW. So there will be a new Ditch Diggers later today, ISBW later this week, and ISBW next Monday to make sure we’re caught up. Then a live DD the following Monday cause I’m seeing Matt in person soon.

And I’m cooking up something cool for the live DD at WorldCon! And I will NOT mess up the recording this time! Cross my heart and all that.

I am working on a redesign to my site (OK, Pablo Defendini is working on the redesign, I’m just watching) and in cleaning some things up, I have broken others (mainly the Ditch Diggers site). This will be fixed when the new site launches.

Simpsons- old man yells at cloudSpeaking of things that I broke: many of you have told me that the Ditch Diggers feed isn’t updating, and I’m sorry about that. I have gone into iTunes and put a new feed for ITunes to grab, and it should be fixed within 24 hours or so.

<— Aside- BACK IN MY DAY fixing your feed within iTunes was nigh-impossible. Once you told iTunes what your feed was, you were stuck. I wasn’t too optimistic about this fix, but then found out iTunes has changed in the past 10 years. Who would have thought?

So the Ditch Diggers feed should be fixed shortly. Crossing fingers.

HEY did you know that you can win a copy of Bookburners from Goodreads? It’s true! Enter the giveaway here to win the glorious doorstop of a book with stories by me, Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, and Brian Francis Slattery.

I hate to toot my own horn, but who’s gonna toot it if I don’t? Last week Six Wakes got awesome coverage in Popular Mechanics! They listed Six Wakes as one of the best SF books of 2017 (so far). Seriously.

Podcasts, Projects

Ditch Diggers #41: HOT BUTTON TOPICS

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What Are People Mad About Today?
Ditch Diggers 41: Hot Button Topics

  • Matt and Mur come to you live from Morgan Freeman’s 24-hour news network control room where we are discussing the latest hot button topics on the news! (Mur has a new applause machine, but it’s not working right now, so you’ll have to infer the applause.)
  • Sound f/x as the new vernacular, and addiction to sound f/x machines.
  • Mur and Matt are tackling ISSUES on this HOT BUTTON EPISODE of Ditch Diggers. AKA heatedly discussed topics recently on writer social media.
  • Matt explains (poorly and too meta, according to Mur) what hot button issues are and how they come into being.
  • Mur explains (far more eloquently) the nature of click-bait and how it drives/poisons discourse on the internet.
  • Hot Button #1: The infamous “if you don’t write every day you’re not a real writer” article and the larger “real writer” myth.
  • Hot Button #2: The “don’t you dare smack talk your copy editor on social media” debate, and the larger issue of how important discourse gets derailed by pretense and false premises. We also discuss the difference between discussing issues and discussing individuals, and authors criticizing other authors.
  • Hot Button #3: “Literary” magazines publishing genre fiction, and also not paying authors.
  • Matt and Mur go on a tangent about the detriment of labeling fiction and how the market has shrunk.
  • Returning to the hot button, Matt and Mur talk about the difference between the business of “literary” and SFF magazines.
  • Twitter Q&A! Questions include outlining book series, “bonehead” things aspiring writers do again and again, and knives.

Matt and Mur shill their books, GREEDY PIGS and RENCOR and SIX WAKES respectively, and remind Hugo voting listeners Ditch Diggers is up for best fancast, so vote for us!

Affiliate links to our books!

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