Podcasts, Projects

Ditch Diggers #55: Christopher Brown and Timely Subjects

by

Mur

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:49 — 39.4MB)

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ARGH I put this in the feed but somehow didn’t make the blog post live! Here is #55. #56 will be coming soon.

Notes of Show:

  • Matt and Mur come to you live from Morgan Freeman’s Border Crossing (it’s an inside reference) with special guest co-host Christopher Brown.
  • Morgan’s border crossing is a cerebral crossing into expanding your mind (Matt mostly comes here for the colors), because Morgan is an open-world kind of guy.
  • Mur apologizes to Christopher for inadvertently botching her recording of Christopher’s interview on her OTHER podcast, I Should Be Writing.
  • Christopher talks about his novel, Tropic of Kansas (Harper Voyager, 2017), a dystopian road trip about a walled-off America, and how the themes and events in the book came to life around him after he finished it.
  • The Ditch Diggers discuss with Chris how writing a novel that abruptly became so topical affected, for better or worse, the process of shopping his novel to publishes and selling the book to the public.
  • The folly of chasing headlines and current events in your fiction, and how it mimics attempting to write to the market and chase the next fiction “trend.”
  • Matt and Mur engage Christopher on the subject of award season, as his novel is on the long list for the Compton Crook Award, and the three discuss the do’s and don’t’s of campaigning for literary awards.
  • Christopher talks about how awards and the marketing of them can be used to spotlight underseen and unrecognized work from around the world, using an anthology of Mexican fiction he edited/translated that was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and how it affected and validated the authors, as a prime example.
  • The Ditch Diggers dive into the email question bag and take on the always popular topic of MFA’s.
  • The customary end of episode shilling (Ditch Diggers is once again eligible for Best Fancast Hugo!)

Twitter handles: Mur, Matt, Chris

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