The Fiction Podcast is Up

All right....

The fiction podcast is live -- though not yet listed in the iTunes store.  You CAN, however, subscribe to it through iTunes even before it is listed (instructions below.)

Here's the blog: Reading in the Attic

I've got a whole lot of "business" to do -- updating links and archive pages, etc.  Just the stuff that makes it easy for people to find things, without having to explain and link things in every post.  It's amazing how much time and work these "passive marketing" things take.

(UPDATE: both podcasts are now available in the iTunes store: Reading in the Attic, and The Daring Novelist Podcast.)

In the meantime...Damon Runyon

I've been discovering some cool things in old magazines.  I was browsing for things for my mother to read. She is very picky and easily turned off. (So browsing is a problem for her -- because if something turns her off, she turns away from a whole genre.)  She liked some Damon Runyon stories I had. But it's hard to find more these days.

So I was browsing the internet for similar things, books and authors I could at least find used, and discovered that A) Ring Lardner wasn't just a sports writer -- he wrote fiction.  And B) Damon Runyon, before he wrote his famous Broadway gang books, wrote some amazing poetry. And also was a sports writer.

I have discovered at least one early Runyon poem that doesn't seem to have been collected.  (Most of his collected poetry is about army life. Miscellaneous other subjects appear to have been neglected.)  That poem is really quite wonderful.  I will definitely be reading some of his poems (collected and uncollected) in Reading in the Attic.

And I'm even thinking of doing some special editions of some "lost" Ring Lardner work, and offering an audiobook of it.

Back to Audio....

For those of you already interested in audio, you can subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, even if it isn't in the iTunes store.  All you need is the feed address.  You just open iTunes, and look for "subscribe to podcast" under the File menu.  Paste in the feed address, and voila -- you're subscribed.  (Once it is in the iTunes store, of course, you can just go and click "subscribe.")

(And please note: The feed address is actually an RSS address.  If you subscribe to them through a regular RSS reader, you'll get the blog posts.  If though a podcast reader -- like iTunes or Stitcher, or a podcast app on your phone -- you'll get the audio.  But to do that, you have to copy and paste the link - which is why I didn't make them hot links.)

My two podcast feeds are:

Reading in the Attic: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReadingInTheAtticPodcast

The Daring Novelist Podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Daring-Novelist-Podcast

For those of you think you might be interested in listening -- either for authorial research or for pleasure -- I'm going to post something about how to listen and how to find podcasts that interest you, etc. later this week.  (Personally, just as I'd like to turn listeners into readers, I'd also like to turn non-listeners onto the joys of podcasts.)

See you in the funny papers.