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Posts Tagged ‘Ditch Diggers’

Ditch Diggers #45: LIVE from WorldCon!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:14 — 44.0MB)

A very tired Mur lands in Finland and is greeted by giant Morgan Freeman! Photo- Natalie Metzger — A very tired and disheveled Mur lands in Finland and is greeted by giant Morgan Freeman! Photo- Natalie Metzger

Ditch Diggers comes to you LIVE from Morgan Freeman’s International Airport (no, seriously, see photo!), a.k.a. WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, Finland!

- Mur’s special Ditch Diggers Live! guest co-host Alasdair Stuart is not Matt Wallace, and yet he has to be Matt Wallace. But no, for real, Matt can’t be in Helsinki so Alasdair and his adorably proper British accent are doing their best to sub in for him.
- Mur introduces The Hugo Games! It’s like the Hunger Games, but with/for Hugo Awards!
- Mur introduces willing tributes, super agent (because she’s Mur’s agent) Jennifer Udden, who represents multiple Hugo nominees, and Hugo nominated editor Navah Wolfe!
- Lacking a third combatant, Hugo Best Short Story finalist (spoiler- winner!) Amal El-Mohtar volunteers as tribute!
- The Hugo Games tributes choose their weapons (spoiler alert: Navah picks a throwing axe).

THE HUGO GAMES, WORLDCON 2017: (Back L-R) Jonathan Snipes, William Hutson, Alasdair Stuart, Jennifer Udden, Daveed Diggs, Navah Wolfe, Mur Lafferty. (Front) Amal El-Mohtar.

At some point the members of groundbreaking Hugo Award nominated hip hop group clipping. (Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes) join the panel, which is amazing!
In the course of preparing for Hugo combat (Amal’s longterm survival strategy is writing a novel), our tributes discuss topics including new authors breaking in and pseudonyms, transitioning from creating works independently to working with executives, and dealing with assholes in the industry and beyond.
We unfortunately run out of time before the blood sports can begin, but Mur promises the blood sports will happen tomorrow (they don’t).

Affiliate links to our books!

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:51 — 64.1MB)

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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!

Affiliate links to our books!

Podcasts, Projects

Ditch Diggers #43: Care and Feeding of your Author

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:25 — 18.0MB)

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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

Matt 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).

Affiliate links to our books!

Podcasts, Projects

Ditch Diggers #42: The Freelancer’s Rebuttal Guide

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:59 — 41.4MB)

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Foxes fight, quote from show, rebuttal guide It’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.

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 cloud Speaking 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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:24:34 — 58.4MB)

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What Are People Mad About Today?

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!

Podcasts, Projects

Ditch Diggers #40: Ditches for Writers and Parents

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:13:00 — 47.3MB)

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Show Notes for the Parents

(Note, we are having some problems with the official Ditch Diggers site, so please be patient with us.)

Mur and Matt welcome parents: author Adam Rakunas and author, games, transmedia, and screenwriter Andrea Phillips as guest co-hosts!
Andrea Phillips [Ditches for Writers and Parents]
Adam and Andrea are both full-time freelance writers and full-time primary caregivers to their (what seems to Matt to be, anyway) many children.
Recording this episode was delayed because Adam’s daughter vomited on literally everything in the world, which sets a perfect tone for the topic of the show.
Andrea and Adam share their backgrounds as writers, how and when they started, and where they are now.
Full-time caregiving while full-time writing, and how each affects the other.
Matt asks if having kids changes your professional goals as a writer (e.g. lights a larger fire under your ass to succeed).
Andrea talks how being a mother unduly influences others’ perception of her and her writing, the struggles of that, and about crowdfunding her Lucy Smokeheart series of fiction.
Mur asks about scheduling conflicts and other insightful things as the sole Ditch Digging parent among the regular hosts.
Our guest co-hosts tackle Q&A from Twitter!

Links

Adam Rakunas: Writers and Parents — Adam Rakunas [Ditches for Writers and Parents]

Podcasts, Projects

Ditch Diggers #39: Lexi Alexander and Punching Hollywood. Metaphorically.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:34:07 — 63.4MB)

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Lexi Alexander is Punching Hollywood — Lexi Alexander

Mur and Matt come to you live from Morgan Freeman’s Dojo (where we’re punching Hollywood) with special guest co-host writer, director, and martial artist Lexi Alexander!
Lexi is excited to talk about the writing side of her career as a director of films like Green Street Hooligans, Punisher: War Zone, the Oscar-nominated Johnny Flynton, and pretty much ALL of the TV series.
How we needlessly shake the confidence of English-as-a-second-language writers in America. How a chance encounter with Quentin Tarantino cured Lexi of that self-confidence issue.
Lexi recounts how she began her career as a writer and filmmaker. (It involves Chuck Norris. No, seriously).
It’s easier to be accepted as a woman in a martial arts/competitive combat sports environment than it is to be accepted as a female filmmaker in Hollywood.
Lexi talks about the many challenges women writers and directors face in the entertainment industry. She includes her own experiences.
Lexi tells the Ditch Diggers about her recently sold pilot script, the process of writing it, and what inspired/motivated both.
Lexi talks about what stopped her from writing for a long time, how she almost left the business to become a war correspondent, and what brought her back.
Mur asks about the difference between working on your own film projects and writing/adapting the work and ideas of others, and how you survive doing both.
Lexi takes questions from Twitter!
Mur and Matt attempt unsuccessfully to end the show several times, but Lexi is just too damn enthusiastic and complimentary about everyone. (New goal: Get both Cory Doctorow and Lexi on the show together.)

Lexi on Twitter: @Lexialex
Lexi’s website
Lexi on IMDb

Ditch Diggers theme music provided by Devo Spice

Buy the books! Support the Ditch Diggers! (affiliate)

Podcasts, Projects

Ditch Diggers #38: Tobias Buckell and The Power of No

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:15:20 — 49.7MB)

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Live from Morgan Freeman’s bear sanctuary, it’s the (Hugo Finalist!) Ditch Diggers with special guest co-host Tobias Buckell!
Mur recounts Toby blowing her mind this past January at ConFusion in Detroit, which prompted his appearance on the show.
Toby talks about accessing your inner asshole (the tactful version uses Toby’s description: “the power of no”) in negotiations as a freelancer.
What happened when Toby had to stop accepting con invitations on his own dollar, and how it took him to the next level as an author and speaker.
Toby on releasing his earlier work as a self-published book and educational tool for writers.
Toby talks about trying out Patreon as a partial income replacement for a year, what prompted it, and how it’s going.
Twitter and email Q&A! Many of Toby’s fans ask him questions ranging from professional advice to the inside scoop on characters from his Xenowealth universe.

Also mentioned by Toby in this episode…

Toby on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tobiasbuckell
Author Ramez Naam: http://rameznaam.com/
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss

Ditch Diggers theme music provided by Devo Spice

Buy the books! Support the Ditch Diggers! (affiliate)

News

Make that HUGO NOMINATED Ditch Diggers!

The news is out, it’s very exciting, so exciting we may vomit.

Ditch Diggers got nominated for BEST FANCAST Hugo Award!

I have been sitting on this news for two weeks, freaking out quietly. I didn’t really believe it, and since I’m writing this on Monday I am secretly* worrying that in the next 24 hours something will happen to take it away from us. It happens, after all.

Matt and I are very proud of what we’ve turned Ditch Diggers into, and we are so grateful for the nomination. I’ll be representing us in Finland at WorldCon 75, and we’ll be working hard to keep the awesome content coming in the meantime!

*I know, I’m blogging so it’s not so secret…