Here’s a post I wrote for Wired.com:

I’ve been alerted to the fact that the website Spreading Santorum has been knocked out of the top spot when you google the word Santorum. Glad I have a blog, so I can help make that right.

The March 2012 issue of Lightspeed includes my short story “Beauty,” a twisted, modern-day retelling of “Beauty and the Beast.”
 

WTF is wrong with Rhode Island? High school student Jessica Ahlquist shows incredible class and poise here while local students, parents, and even her state representative act like thugs and hooligans.
 

I recently took over managing the feed for my Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, and was able to rewrite the episode descriptions to make them more iTunes-friendly. iTunes is by far the most common way that people subscribe to podcasts, so it’s important to think about how your podcast is going to be displayed there. Each episode of my podcast features an interview, usually focused around the guest’s latest book, followed by a discussion between me and my co-host John Joseph Adams (and recently we’ve been having on a rotating cast of “guest geeks” to join us for the discussion). I tried to format our episode descriptions to make that information available at a glance:

Compare that to, say, the Suvudu On Air podcast:

Not that useful, right? You can actually find out who the guests are here by hovering your cursor over each episode, but I suspect that most listeners don’t have the time or patience for that.

Another thing I see a lot is that the podcast description will start out listing the names of the hosts, which means that more useful information such as the guest or topic is obscured in iTunes. Here’s an example from the Writing Excuses podcast:

Obviously I think it would be better to just put the guest or topic here, especially since the host names should already be listed at the top of the page, and in any event are somewhat redundant since they’re mostly the same from episode to episode.

Getting people to listen to any podcast in the first place is a huge hurdle, and I think descriptions that convey the relevant info as clearly and succinctly as possible can make a big difference in your number of listeners. Hope that helps.

I make another appearance as a science fiction expert in Episode 125 of the Read It And Weep podcast, in which we discuss Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

I now have an author page over on Facebook. “Like” it to receive updates about my fiction, interviews, etc.

Emily Mah Tippets interviews me about writing and podcasting for Black Gate magazine:

Just got word that my cat Hobbes has died. She was perfectly healthy up until two days ago, when she went into kidney failure. Her sister Kzin died back in August. Both times while I was away. In her youth Hobbes was the proverbial fraidy-cat, spooked by loud noises, and she spent a lot of time hiding in the farthest reaches of the basement, where a small gap afforded her vantage of a narrow stretch of backyard, but in recent years she’d become extremely friendly, following me from room to room and clambering up on my hip and purring constantly. I’ll miss her terribly. For basically the first time in my life I’m without a cat.