Since I started serious writing and blogging I’ve become hooked on podcasts. I love podcasts because they help me to multitask. I can listen to podcasts while cleaning, cooking, doing laundry (ok pretty much any household chore). I can listen to them while playing with my son. I can load them onto my iPhone and listen while shopping, walking to work or during breaks at work. So yeah – multitasking. I started my love affair with podcasts with news and politics shows. I’m a big politics junkie. The Rachel Maddow show and the various Sunday morning news talk shows are my preferred hits.
Soon though I discovered Mur Lafferty’s (@mightymur) “I Should Be Writing” (previously blogged about here) and that led me to discover other interesting shows. I’d like to highlight 3 of them for you.
1) SF Signal Twitter: @sfsignal
SF Signal is a blog and a podcast. If you’re interested in speculative fiction you’re probably going to want to toss them into your RSS reader, if you haven’t already. The blog is a very busy one and full of info, but it’s the podcast I particularly like. They’re up to episode 138 so there’s lots of content to comb through. Its current format (and perhaps this is the way it’s always been) alternates between interviews with authors (and sometimes editors) and panel discussion episodes. Looking in my itunes feed for the show I see panel discussion topics such as: “Book Reviews”, “Book Spoilers”, “Books That Changed Our Lives”, “Female Superheros”, “NASA vs. Star Trek”, “Ebook Pricing” and more. Oh, and did I mention the blog and podcast are both 2012 Hugo Nominees? Go check them out!
Another podcast with plenty of back ‘casts to look over – their most recent episode was #112. The show is co-hosted by singer/songwriter John Anealio (@JohnAnealio) and blogger/writer/podcaster Patrick Hester (@atfmb) (who also hosts the SF Signal). For most of their existence the show seems to have been an author interview podcast, but very recently they’ve decided to change the format a bit and add things like news and picks-of-the-week to the mix. It’s very enjoyable and the author interviews often include talk about being a writer so are quite interesting to people like me.
3) The Roundtable Podcast Twitter: @WritersPodcast
This one is really unique. At least, I don’t know of anything like it. This show is relatively new, having begun back in January, but it still has plenty of episodes to sink your teeth into already. Like the SF signal it uses an alternating format. First they have “20 minutes with…” spotlight shows that are interviews of writers and, at least in one case, editors. Then a few days later they put out one of their signature workshop episodes. These are flat-out awesome. The guest from the spotlight episode returns as a guest host and an author with a story to workshop comes in as well. The writer bringing the story lays out the outline in about 5-8 minutes and then they workshop it. The hosts ask questions, give feedback and toss out “what-if” scenarios. The workshop episodes tend to run about an hour and I find them really fascinating. Listening to other peoples ideas get hashed out helps me think about my own in new ways. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re a writer.
So there you go – three podcasts I highly recommend checking out.