Every Photo Tells… has just been featured on an ongoing web comic strip by Thomas Reed (@trreed). Click on the image below to see it in its full glory along with plenty more from Thomas:-
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Author Archives: Mick
Tryptophan Synthetase and other Songs
There is an album’s worth of songs that I have written for various Song Fu and SpinTunes challenges over the last few years, just kicking around the internet. As time passed, the quality of the songs improved, but they are all really just demo-quality tracks, so I’ve never really wanted to put them out in any sort of official format.
However, they do form a thematic album of some sort, so I’ve pulled them all together and stuck them into an album on last.fm. All the tracks are free to download, though you can only play short clips on the website itself. It’s not ideal, but if you want them they are all there.
The songs are presented in reverse chronological order, meaning that they get older and rougher as the playlist progresses. Highlights for me are ‘What is wrong?’, the song that features one of the longest words in the English language (the official chemical name for ‘Tryptophan Synthetase’) in a sort of mock-opera style, the ridiculously so-happy-I-could-punch-you fun of ‘Happy People’ and the rather silly charity song ‘Big Red Nose’
Some Other Podcast
Between Every Photo Tells…, Wiener Blut and numerous other activities, my attention to Some Other Scotland has been spread rather thin of late. Okay, very thin. I am in the process of sorting this out.
First of all, a new episode of the podcast series was posted yesterday and it features something that was set up back in episode 4. Admittedly, because of the nature of the podcast and its audience-influenced plot-lines, at that time I had no idea what it was set up for, but once I did, it was just a matter of sitting on it until an appropriate time. The pace will be stepping up a gear or two over the next few episodes, as a result of this event. I have already started writing the next episode, so keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook for updates.
Polls
There is a new poll, ready for you to vote on. In the past I had to rely on third party poll sites that were either awkward to work with or didn’t do what I want them to do. The new, integrated poll fits the design of the SOS site, lets me include links on each poll item so that you can visit the original news items before making your informed decision to vote for the three things you’d like me to inflict on the characters. The new system even lets me provide a poll archive, so clicking on the ‘Polls‘ menu item will show all the polls from the past. Unfortunately this ability will only be available from this week’s poll onwards, but I hope you find it useful.
Wiki
Over on the SOS Wiki page, there have been a number of additions to bring the wiki up to date with the plot, such as discovering the name of the ‘Sidhe‘, adding in new locations, characters and items of technology. There was a spam attack on the wiki a few weeks ago, which slipped past because of some settings that have now been changed. It is a really useful resource for listeners of the podcast and don’t forget that anyone can register as a user there and make their own additions to the information there.
Subscribe!
There are a number of existing spin-offs that I will be dropping into the feed as well, in between regular episodes. In the past these have been spread around all over the place, but I am keen to bring them all into the main feed. For a while there has also been the ability to choose a special feed, for example if you are a podiobooks.com listener, but would like to grab all the spin-offs to enjoy. It was never very clear how this works, though, so I have added a Subscribe page that lists the special feeds you can access along with a nice shiny iTunes button to press if all that sounds too complicated and you just want to listen to the whole podcast.
A Year of Stories
This weekend we hit two milestones over at Every Photo Tells….
First of all, we published our fiftieth short story on the podcast. That’s rather impressive, considering that we would have been happy to have been publishing our twentieth by this stage and that is due to the writers who have been inspired by our monthly photographs to write stories of their own.
Thank you to everyone who has submitted a story to us since we started. We have had some really positive feedback about how we are treating people’s stories and listener numbers continue to climb steadily, so we must be doing something right.
Secondly, February sees the start of our second year of production. Yes, it has been a whole year since we started the podcast! By the end of the month we will have included a total of 52 episodes in our feed, effectively one story per week.
We’re already looking forward to compiling ‘Book 2′ for release on podiobooks.com, as well as some other new ideas for the website.
A Share of the Golden Age
If you have been following Some Other Scotland and/or Every Photo Tells… and are looking for more podcast fiction, then I can recommend Nathan Lowell’s Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper. The ‘Share’ series of stories concluded yesterday, though there will be more stories in the future set in the same universe. I have heard it described as science fiction for people who don’t like SciFi, but like the best of the genre it is focused on the characters more than the science. You won’t find space battles, weird aliens or endless technobabble, but a gentle trip through the career of a newcomer to space travel, making his way up through the ranks from the equivalent of a deck scrubber to captain and beyond.
Mr Lowell reads the stories himself and has a very relaxed and clear delivery that is easy on the ears, but if you’re not a fan of podcast fiction, the series is also being released in book format.
Thanks to Nathan for providing such a great series for free download at podiobooks.com and I look forward to future explorations in the same world. He will also be appearing in later episodes of Wiener Blut, where he plays a major character who is important in the second half of the story.
More from Vienna
My micro spin-off from Wiener Blut has now appeared at 100 Word Stories. It is called ‘Kardinalschnitte’ (after the cake which goes so well with Viennese coffee) and links directly into the back-story of this week’s main Wiener Blut episode, telling a very brief story about the Meiers. There is a voting system in place at the 100 Word Story website, so once you’ve read or listened to this week’s stories, please take the time to vote for your favourites. You can even vote for one that’s not mine.
From Every Photo Tells… comes my other new story this week. It’s another Wiener Blut spin-off, longer this time, set in another character’s past in the midst of one very cold winter. It could be considered a bit of a spoiler for the main story, so you might want to leave it until that is complete, but it certainly won’t ruin anything major.
Every Photo Tells… has just been added to the Duotrope writers’ market listings, so we hope to be bringing some stories from a whole new group of authors to our listeners in the near future.
For the moment, it’s back to writing on Some Other Scotland and then I have a couple of other short story projects that I might consider, if time allows, before the end of this month.
Wiener Blut
My NaNoWriMo story broke the 42,000 word barrier, but fell short of the 50,000 required to ‘win’. This is not a bad thing, however, as the story is far from finished. The final result is likely to be somewhere in excess of 80,000 words, but before I embark on completing it there is some further planning required as the story took a number of unexpected, but interesting turns that need me to re-visit the original vague outline I had prepared. Next year I will ensure I come fully-equipped with a complete outline at the very least.
A more successful story from NaNo this year is Wiener Blut, a novel written by Katharina Maimer, who you should be familiar with from our ongoing Every Photo Tells… podcast. Wiener Blut (Viennese Blood) is a modern fantasy about two very different worlds, set in Vienna and steeped in the history and traditions of that city’s café culture. Katharina has made the first chapter available as a free PDF download, but is also in the process of releasing it in podcast form, with the first three episodes and a stand-alone short story already released. Here is the short introduction, for a taster of the story:
My own input into the podcasting process has been the editing of the episodes as well as recording all the music. The theme tune is ‘Es wird scho glei dumpa’, a traditional Austrian Christmas song. I have mixed several versions with different instrumentation, though the one appearing in the podcast is a simple classical guitar arrangement. Katharina has also released it in song form, with her singing the lyrics (in German, of course) alongside a slightly different arrangement. You can find this at the Music page of the official website.
I have also been invited to delve into the world of Wiener Blut in my own writing, so expect to see my next EPT story being set in Vienna, as well as a very short story for the 100 Word Stories podcast in the not too distant future.
We walked in the cold air…
Progress on the NaNo novel is going well, having hit over 12,000 words today.
My rate slipped a little on Friday as I was en route to the wonderful city of Vienna to visit Katharina, who you may be familiar with from her work on the Every Photo Tells… podcast. She is blazing ahead with her own NaNo story, which is coming together very nicely. We have worked well together at pushing ideas around about our respective stories.
The plot of my story is not yet fully formed, but I know enough to get me through the next week or so.
Tonight we ventured out into the city centre to our first NaNo write-in, hosted by ‘damole’ and ’01′ above a fantastic little bookshop. The large room was fairly dark, lit only by two small lamps and the screens from almost twenty laptops. There was coffee, chocolate, crisps, NaNo stickers and well-read rubber ducks.
Topics for the evening included kilts, the difference between evaporated and condensed milk, tribbles, word counts (of course) and the ongoing battle against Germany and Switzerland for best average daily word count. We had a twenty minute word sprint that gave me an extra 600 words, though that was far from the best score in the group – some people can type really fast!
A great day of writing and indulging, being productive and having fun. I’m here for another week and hoping to return to Scotland with a much enhanced word count.
Introducing “Rubbing Pennies”
Day 2 of NaNoWriMo and I have as many chapters of my story complete. The work-in-progress title I have given it is “Rubbing Pennies”, being the tale of a billionaire who is reduced to poverty and has a journey to make back to prosperity. The outline is still pretty vague around some of the details about what exactly is going to happen to whom and when, but I have written a chapter for each of my two main characters and am reasonably pleased with where they are heading.
- He is something of a stereotypical big-business type, very much old school, somewhere between Simon Cowell, Victor Meldrew and Gordon Gecko, with an insatiable appetite for money and young flesh and very little else.
- She is an experimental clarinettist, making a comfortable living by giving her music away online for free and performing around the world to a growing and loyal following. She’s still young, but has been around for long enough to know what works, what doesn’t and how to jump over some of the common pitfalls of the music biz.
Click here to see my NaNo profile, where you can read an excerpt from the start of the story.
NaNo Begins
NaNoWriMo has started and, at just twenty minutes in, I have 213 words written. It’s a long way to go, but it is a start.
I have two main characters worked out and a pretty good idea of the first three or four scenes. Beyond that is where there be dragons: uncharted and unplanned territory. Now that I’ve made this small start, I’ll go back to the planning and fill out a bit more, in preparation for further writing after sleep and work. Until then it feels good to have got this off the ground and I’m looking forward to drinking far too much coffee, suffering finger cramps and doubtless the odd time or two questioning my sanity for starting this endeavour. It was worth it by the end of NaNo 2008; I have no doubt the same will apply this time around to.
I have stuck my word count and progress meter on the site – it’s over on the right hand side above the NaNo logo. With luck and grim determination, each one of those little boxes will be green by the end of the month and I will have a new novel of at least 50,000 words.
Back to the story!