While I was in Utah, I had the opportunity to be on the Writing Excuses podcast with Eric Flint.   Howard Tayler and Dan Wells hosted us for a discussion of writing Alternate History. The three areas of Alternate History that we covered were:

• Our history, but with a key change occurring (the “branching point.”)
• Our history, but with a time-traveler going back and changing something (aka “duck, Mister President!”)
• Our history, but with magic (usually with said magic being the key change at our branching point)

Listen to the whole episode of Writing Excuses 5.21: Alternate History » Writing Excuses.

At Penguicon I had the good fortune to be on a panel with Daniel J. Hogan about Adapting Your Novel to Podcast. This something that Daniel has been doing with his own novel for at least a year and he’s turning them into audio theater, with sound effects and everything. What I do is something very different, which is to read the text exactly as it appears on the page.

The thing that made this fun is that we have such different approaches.  The thing that didn’t make it fun was that it was at 9am on Sunday morning, when we were all just a little bit fatigued.

BUT Daniel recorded it, so if you want to listen to our groggy words then head on over to The Magic of Eyri and give a listen.

The lovely men at Writing Excuses invited me to stick around and record another episode with them at World Con. They’ve just posted it the Writing Process Q & A. Brandon, Dan and Howard answer a wide range of questions and I tag along for the ride.

One of my favorite podcasts is Jon Armstrong’s If You’re Just Joining Us . This episode he interviews Deborah Duchon, a nutritional anthropologist and it is utterly fascinating stuff. I highly recommend this episode.

Deborah Duchon is a noted nutritional anthropologist, teacher, author and speaker, best known for her work on the hit TV show, Good Eats. She served as director of the Nutrition Education for New Americans Project at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. These days, she is studying the exotic origins of everyday foods, by investigating their un-domesticated beginnings and working forward to the present day.

Deborah and I talked about onions, Hmong refugees, black night-shade, potatoes, theater, and women in anthropology.