The latest (and slightly delayed) edition of the Ubuntu UK Podcast is out, containing an interview with yours truly, alongside Matt "mdz" Zimmerman, Matthew "mpt" Thomas, Rob "lifeless" Collins and Stuart "aquarius" Langridge. So, basically, one dumb northerner yakking about Launchpad amongst a sea of scary geniuses, then. Link

Mur Lafferty, podcasting goddess, has created a site for her new free podcasted novel Playing For Keeps, the first instalment of which is set to go live on November 1st.

Based on the quality of her previous work it's sure to be a blinder, so I suggest that you all go and subscribe and wait, breath baited, for pearls of auditory goodness to rain from your speakers. 

Mur Lafferty, writer, podcaster and tiara-wearing queen of wannabe writers is putting Geek Fu Action Grip on indefinite hiatus for reasons which I have no business repeating here (go there, use ears, understand).

I first came across Mur and her work when, Googling for writing resources, I found I Should Be Writing. I subscribed to Geek Fu some time after that. Mur's great gift is in making one feel like an equal, no matter the subject matter. Geek Fu will be missed, though I'm glad that ISBW will continue since it gives me a great deal of motivation (and also acts as an archive of those bits of advice that I need to have repeated to me constantly).

For more of Mur's work, such as the highly acclaimed Heaven and Hell podiobooks and their successor, Earth, take a look at geekfuactiongrip.com and ishouldbewriting.com.

I was going to write a post about what I hate about professional sports. But when I got most of the way through it I realised that I had written a self-defeating argument so I'll just have to save it for later when I can think up something coherent to say.

I'm very, very tired right now, having not slept well for several nights. Tonight's trip to the gym seems to have worked wonders, though. Instead of feeling mentally tired but physically wide awake I'm now in a position where everything is just about hanging on to consciousness.

But I've been very productive for a tired man. Besides work on Das Projekt I've managed to do some (though not a whole lot) of editing, and best of all I've started on a new story, the first in some time, plucked from the pages of my fast-filling ideas notebook.

But the point of this otherwise pointless post is this: I still have a libsyn account and figured that I might as well use it. If I were to podcast some of my shorter fiction, would you good, kind people want to listen to it?

And I genuinely want to know the answer, by the way. Comments or emails (binnsblog at googlemail dot com) are welcome. Let me know.

You can tell I'm working hard when my procrastination involves, variously, installing Fedora Core 5 on a VMWare virtual machine, just for the sake of having a play, taking photos of my currently bearded self and listening to the umpteen editions of the Celtic Music News Podcast that have slowly accumulated in my CastPodder downloads folder like a drift of mp3-compressed snowflakes.

As you can see from the sidebar the work-in-progress is going not-too badly. My work rate has been decreased a little by the fact that it's currently all handwritten. The lack of a laptop hasn't impacted on me over-much other than to make me learn to write a little more readably on my spiral-bound pads, but it has slowed me down a bit because I can't manage more than three or four sides of A4 (about 1,000 words) a time without getting cramp. I had thought that the story was only going to be about 5,000 words long, but at the moment it's looking like it's going to be nearer the 7,000 mark. As long as it works that's fine with me. Most of the work I've done so far has been done in Lancaster's Caffé Nero, which has made it a somewhat expensive 4,000 words as words go. There's no better place to write than in cafés. It's easy to get lost in the susurrus and there's nothing to distract you, but it is prohibitively costly to do it for any length of time. I don't know how Rowling managed to afford to write Harry Potter in cafés, though I suppose she wasn't going into one where a single cup of coffee costs you a quarter of the money you'd usually spend on lunch in a week. Perhaps I should find a slightly cheaper drink to drink whilst I'm writing (Starbucks, though we don't have one in Lancaster, do serve ridiculously cheap but ludicrously big cups of tea). Maybe I need to find a cheaper place to write, too.

I'm wondering how to get back round to podcasting again. I still have the libsyn account, which seems a bit silly if I'm not producing anything. I'm loathe to ask whether anyone wants me to start podcasting again, partly because you can count the readers of this blog without ripping off anyone else's limbs, and partly because of the stubborn person in my head saying 'It's not up to them, it's up to you, fool.' At the moment I'm thinking of restarting the podcast when I start the hard copy edits on the novel, and podcasting that experience. We shall see.